Last stop, a small park with a view of Nuremberg Central Station, early meeting place for dealers and other shady characters. The participants, eight scholarship holders from a study foundation, are spread out on benches. So far, the tour, during which Nuremberg’s old town was primarily the backdrop for Klaus Billmeyer’s own life story, has been rather cheerful.
But now the friendly voice of the 60-year-old is getting sharper. “If you wear jeans with holes, they were expensive,” he says, “but if we have holes in our clothes, we’re assistants.” Embarrassed looks of the listeners. When students stagger through the city, they are young people partying. “But if we bang our heads off because we can’t stand the shitty life anymore, we’re assistants,” he calls out louder and raises his index finger menacingly.
Since 2008, the Nuremberg social magazine road cruiser City tours that are about those who are at the bottom. Even people affected by poverty, drug addiction or homelessness present support organizations and tell their life stories. Around 27,000 interested people have taken part in the tours so far, including schoolchildren and managers on company outings. There are similar offers in other major cities such as Hamburg, Berlin, Vienna, Frankfurt and Düsseldorf.
“I could now claim that the alcohol was to blame, but it was my own fault!”
Klaus Billmeyer lived on the streets of Nuremberg for ten years, and he immediately offered the familiar form. “There is no such thing as a you on the street,” says the trained paver, and sets off past burger joints and sex shops. He stops in front of the Sleep-In, an emergency shelter for young people between the ages of 14 and 21, and shows photos of bare mattresses in front of bare walls.
In all the years Billmeyer himself has only spent two nights in an emergency shelter and one in a homeless boarding house. He found the street cleaner and safer. “Why did you become unemployed, uh, homeless?” asks one participant, and Billmeyer tells how he smacked his drunk boss. “I could now claim that the alcohol was to blame, but it was my own fault!”
He likes such personal questions. Talking about his life over and over again helps him process it, he says. Instead of applying for unemployment benefits, he preferred to drink the last of his money back then. And because at some point he stopped paying his rent, he ended up on the street at the age of 46. “I Depperla,” he says when he talks about his descent. He didn’t know that there was an office for subsistence security that took over rent arrears in order to avert eviction after all. Billmeyer demands that the school should be better informed about offers of help. He himself recommends the station mission as the first point of contact for people in need.
In summer he slept in the park, in winter in front of a workshop
As the group moves on, he talks about his “Record”: In the summer he slept in the park, in the winter in front of a workshop. Always with an iron bar next to you. And after he was attacked for the first time, he didn’t close his sleeping bag even when it was minus 19 degrees. “You stay fresh there,” says Billmeyer, who hasn’t lost his sense of humor. Working in wind and weather on the construction site has hardened him, so that, unlike many others, he has survived the years on the road in good health.
One student wants to know if there is a tactic to prepare for the cold nights. For the right equipment you have to go to clothing stores, i.e. shops that sell used items very cheaply. Because she is constantly exposed to the weather, the clothes wear out faster than with “normal people”. Camping stoves and canned food are also recommended. “Students eat canned ravioli, so do we,” says Billmeyer. Everyone laughs, “that’s right,” says one, as if he felt caught. For a moment, both sides are close, no matter how different their realities of life may be.
The next stop is a backyard near the city walls. A dozen tin boxes are stuck to the wall like wasp nests, only in colorful and square shapes. Unlike in Asian cities, however, these boxes are just an art project that nobody is allowed to live in. While participants take photos, Billmeyer explains that he himself lived in a “little home” for a year and a half: in a tiny tin container that had been set up for him on the premises of a cultural center. He enjoyed turning his own key in the lock and being able to safely stow his “junk”, his 35-kilo backpack.
Things went up in 2018, really
Not having a place of safety is a problem all homeless people face. It is difficult and impractical to carry all of your belongings around with you all the time. At Billmeyer’s suggestion, politicians had actually set up lockers, but not particularly centrally, somewhere in the north of Nuremberg. He would like lockers downtown. In other cities, helpers are calling for more drinking water wells so that the homeless don’t get thirsty in the heat.
At some point he lacked a meaningful occupation on the street. He missed normal conversations that didn’t revolve around who still had a “Seidla” or a “turn” left, i.e. a beer or a cigarette. And so he started collecting returnable bottles. His goal was a deposit of at least five euros a day, and he soon increased it to ten euros. Before there was no beer.
It was above all the friendships that carried Klaus Billmeyer through the most difficult years of his life. “A lot can happen when you start interacting with people again,” he says. That’s how he met a woman who offered him an apartment in 2018. In the same year he met his girlfriend. By then he had already started selling the homeless magazine and giving tours of the city. Things were looking up. Soon he was involved in the deposit collection project of the road cruiser permanently employed. He makes sure that the full collection bins, which are located at the airport, among other places, are emptied, and divides the other employees into shifts. Billmeyer has arrived back at the normalos.