Food connects, especially when you are spoiled with the best that France has to offer in Dinard, Starnberg’s sister city in Brittany. When the German guest is served oysters, lobster or sea spiders there, he inevitably thinks that the inventor of the saying “Living like God in France” had the town on the Emerald Coast in mind. Conversely, the spoiled Breton palate does not despise the Bavarian cuisine either. When the former “Undosa” host Siegfried Hirt, together with restaurateurs, butchers and bakers from the district town, brought up a 60-metre-long Bavarian buffet in the Dinard casino in 1981, even the Breton gastronomy pope at the time, M. Tirel, was full of praise . But even more than good food and tireless commitment of the two clubs “Amis de Starnberg” and “Freunde von Dinard”, it is the personal friendships that have kept the town twinning alive for 45 years now.
And these are the result of mutual delegation visits, student exchanges, cooperation between the fire brigades or art, culture and sports clubs. There were not only the cyclists who covered the nearly 1300-kilometer route on their bikes, a choir project was also extremely successful and the French Week on the Starnberg church square has been a cult for decades. The twelfth volume of Starnberg’s history entitled “Long live our mutual friendship! Vive notre amitié” was presented on Friday, just in time for the visit of the delegation from Dinard on the occasion of the 45th anniversary of the town twinning. In the presence of the guests from Dinard, the mayor of Starnberg Patrick Janik and his predecessors Heribert Thallmair and Ferdinand Pfaffinger and numerous club members, the truly weighty, 453-page work was toasted with sparkling wine in the Hotel Vier Jahreszeiten Starnberg.
“Without our citizens, our town twinning would not be what it is today,” said the co-founder of the town twinning, Heribert Thallmair, who signed the twinning document in 1977 as the then Starnberg town hall chief together with Dinard’s mayor Yvon Bourges. “Long live Starnberg – Dinard, long live Franco-German friendship, but also long live a united Europe.” Just like his predecessors, Mayor Janik is also very attached to the town twinning, after all he took part in the student exchange in 1991. “Strangers became friends,” explained Janick in his speech, which he also gave in French.
The friendship at the beginning of the partnership was not a matter of course. When Dinard City Council named a street after its sister city, Rue de Starnberg, at the official naming ceremony, black flags could be seen above the closed shutters on every second house, Thallmair writes in the book. But that animosity and resentment is long gone. During the Starnbergers’ visit to Dinard in 2009, two members of the delegation proved that they would even defend their friendship with the French with their fists if necessary. At that time, the bus was attacked by two young people during a stopover in Paris. The fact that the crooks not only wanted to steal the bus driver’s cash register, but also the presents for the French, caused such outrage among the two club members in their prime that they courageously opposed the thieves. They were so intimidated by the Bavarian fists that they fled as quickly as possible.
The book was created under the leadership of Angelika Galata, chairwoman of the “Friends of Dinard” association, and of the Starnberg City Archives. Galata and her Dinard colleague Margit Perrier, as well as many former teachers and friends, collected texts, looked for photos, read corrections and suggested improvements. The result is a painstakingly detailed, elaborately made book full of expertise that gives an overview of all activities over the past 45 years. Now Galata wishes that there will be a lot of material in the future to maybe write a sequel.
The book was published by the Kulturverlag der Stadt Starnberg and is available in bookstores for EUR 29.90.