Many people collect something, psychologically it is a remnant of times long past: Those who stocked up had better chances of survival. The motivation is different today, although not always so easy to see through, the passion for cacti, beer mats or stamps would first have to be explained conclusively. On the other hand, sometimes you can’t defend yourself at all, then it just happens. Robert Habeck is such a case, the Green Economics Minister has been collecting Markus Söder letters since taking office. He gets mail from the State Chancellery almost every week, about gas, nuclear power, wind power, what should he do. From Söder’s point of view, the pen pal to Berlin is something of a political survival strategy.
Things are different for René Mayer from Syrgenstein in Swabia. It looks as if he wasn’t able to defend himself either, but in his case it was more against early childhood imprinting, not against the Bavarian Prime Minister. Even as a child, the garbage truck picked him up from kindergarten and took him home, and when he was in elementary school he was allowed to climb on the back for the first time. “It was an absolute mega dream,” Mayer told Bayerischer Rundfunk.
Today, the man works in the garbage disposal and delights his neighbors with an impressive collection of garbage cans in his garden: according to research by the BR, he has placed more than 4,600 garbage cans on about a thousand square meters. Yellow, brown, green, blue, turquoise, white, orange garbage cans can be seen, large, small, medium, thick and even a multi-chamber bin with two chambers for different types of waste, which can only be emptied by special garbage trucks.
The bin collector apparently dreams of a museum for bins. The enthusiasm for this in Syrgenstein is probably about as great as in the Federal Ministry of Economics when mail arrives from Munich again. But René Mayer thinks even further, if others think he’s crazy, he wants to “bet that…?”. Live on TV, he is sure, he can recognize each of his barrels by the sound they make when they are closed. If he manages to do that, they still won’t put him in a museum. An entry in the golden book of Syrgenstein should already be there.