Of course there are several district home nurses in Bavaria, just as there are several districts. Celebrating every milestone birthday extensively in the media would be asking a lot. But with the district home nurse it’s the same as with the Bavarian Minister for Europe: It always depends on who is holding the office at the moment. When a certain Markus Söder was downgraded to Minister for Europe by the Secretary General in Stoiber’s grace in 2007, both Söder and the broadcasters largely ignored this de facto degradation: in the future he simply sat on the talk shows as “Bavaria’s Foreign Minister” – holder of a post which hardly anyone had noticed before that it even existed. (Since Söder is no longer that, it’s back to how it was before.)
It’s also not entirely common for district home nurses to be given a solid brick commemorative for their 60th birthday. But there are well-founded exceptions: “Und in Deutschlands Mitte Franken” is the name of the work named after a verse by Friedrich Rückert, which Günter Dippold was dedicated to on the occasion of his 60th birthday by the Historical Association for Upper Franconia and in which, among other things, luminaries of their field such as the historians Werner K. Blessing, Martin Ott and Dieter J. Weiß made contributions. Of course, that suits someone like Dippold, to whom Henry Schramm, President of the Upper Franconia District Council, attests that one can justifiably claim that someone like him has written more “than most people read in their lives.”
But that’s not the real point of the Upper Franconian district home caretaker Dippold – nor that he took over this Bayreuth office at the tender age of 33. Dippold can be regarded as a kind of parade from Upper Franconia, as someone whose tongue-in-cheek doesn’t even try to hide his origin from a district of Lichtenfels in Upper Franconia, who of course – a fine observation of Wilhelm Wenning – rejects the “last remnants of an Upper Bavarian centralism” as well as a “Franconian Munich and Bavaria bashing”. False Franconian modesty is also not Dippold’s thing, nor is the widespread “tendency to glorify the region,” confirms Wenning, chairman of the Historical Association for Upper Franconia. What is anything but little: Dippold actually embodies the type of scholar who knows how to combine a connection to his homeland with encyclopedic knowledge, folklore with intellectual depth, scientific precision with mother wit, dialect with self-confidence. A rare combination.
Anyone who visits him in Lichtenberg (not to be confused with his hometown of Lichtenfels, which is 60 kilometers away), in an underground concert hall that opened six months ago, will first be given an introductory course in Franconian history with the casual help of obligatory cross-references to the Thematic complexes of architecture, geology, musicology, library and everyday life, and more if desired. And he says sentences like: No, the music meeting place in the Marteau house, where this chamber music hall has now been dug into the ground, does not fear “competition in Europe”. Self-confidence in Upper Franconian, very beneficial. The district home caretaker is, so to speak, the superordinate house boss there, one can assume that the hall would not exist at all without Günter Dippold.
Of course, setting up spectacular concert halls in cities of manageable size is not Dippold’s actual core business. but words. This is perhaps best reflected in his book “Kleine Geschichte Oberfrankens” (Verlag Friedrich Pustet, Regensburg 2020), a standard work. It ends like this: “The appeal of the Upper Franconia region does not lie in its uniformity, but in its diversity. Diversity is not a disadvantage, but a value.”