Gifts are something wonderful and at this point I would like to thank the young lady who gave her first novel to an adolescent in Mainfranken – because it had become known that the boy only ever reads newspapers and finds fiction somehow stupid.
That must have been in the 1980s and the good intentions of the donors were there, no question about it. However, it shouldn’t be concealed that it could have been a bit more fictional for the taste of the recipient.
The novel was called “The Cloud”, that sounded good, so light and airy. But then it wasn’t pure fun. Students are surprised by the disaster alarm triggered by a serious accident at a nuclear reactor. Panic breaks out, so in the book. On the other hand, there was this evening view out of your own bottom hung window, in summer, with the sun shining brightly. Sometimes a little cloud would appear over the beautiful Franconian soil.
This was kindly contributed to the idyll by an electricity producer based in the superbly restored town of Grafenrheinfeld. Which in turn was known as the seat of the power plant in which the incident in the book in question takes place that then causes chaos, murder and manslaughter in the country. Pretty, so as a bedtime reading and bedtime view.
For years you only heard what a fabulous young adult book it was, enlightening, courageous, great, great, great. And a little bit traumatizing, one always quietly added.
How nice it is there when it seems that there is a tendency for others to do the same. The new British Prime Minister Liz Truss, for example. In the early 1990s, as a 17-year-old, she was visiting her German pen pal Achim Winkelmann, who is now a BR journalist at the Mainfranken studio. And Winkelmann recently told how they celebrated together at the wine festival in Frankenwinheim, how young Liz enthusiastically tasted the strawberry cake from her Volkach hosts and was extremely impressed by Franconian culture on the Mainschleife.
Not exclusively though. He also reports “how impressed and also a little shocked” his visitor was “when she saw the cooling towers of the Grafenrheinfeld nuclear power plant steaming just a few kilometers away”. Shortly before, she had read Gudrun Pausewang’s “Die Wolke” as a school reading in German.
So reading together and sharing, well, a little shock. With the difference that young Liz was soon allowed to go home again.