The world is full of conspiracy myths. But this has to be the case: there is apparently a conspiracy against the trampoline. And that’s where the fun ends. The trampoline is not just a verifiable, i.e., in contrast to some academic spring dynamics, a sufficiently real moment in the biography of the new Foreign Minister. It is also something like the German national game machine.
In any case, the trampoline, whether it is called “Jump Power” or “Trick Air”, plays in a garden league with a kettle grill, Buddha statue and box hedge. The German garden is not a garden without a trampoline. It is therefore noticeable how perfidious the trampoline is vilified again and again. Even in this newspaper, where in 2017 the German Society for Orthopedics and Trauma Surgery was allowed to put the trampoline in an increasingly satanic light full of broken legs, elbow fractures and concussions with the help of accident statistics. (In fact, you have to say: There is something to it.)
“Hop until the doctor comes”: This is how the attack on Jump Power read at the time. That didn’t catch on. The trend is now towards the second and third trampoline. Here is a personal speculation from architectural criticism, without empirical evidence: There are possibly more trampolines in Germany – than there have ever been garden gnomes worldwide. Because that is not welcomed everywhere, although you could also think of the Unesco cultural property protection status, the Düsseldorf city administration has been making the jumping devices loud these days mirrors “In urban allotments” declared inadmissible. At first, anyway.
Specifically, it is about the case of a 34-year-old father whose four children like to play on the trampoline. The trampoline is located in a leased allotment garden.
Is the trampoline to blame for climate change?
An allotment garden, on the other hand, consists of many allotment gardeners, great moments of longing and, as can be read in Wladimir Kaminer (“My Life in the Allotment Garden”), large overgrowths of allotment garden regulations and allotment garden prohibitions. And in this very special case also from four underage incriminals who can be imagined as dangerous as the Daltons. Just hopping.
According to the garden association and the notice on the notice board, the trampoline in question was the cause of, here it comes, the “surface sealing”. If you consistently take this approach of the Düsseldorf city administration further, you have to say: The trampoline may be to blame for climate change, the pandemic and the extinction of the polar bears. The city administration should be thanked for its visionary willingness to take on responsibility. Such a thing is rare in a bureaucracy that is often unjustifiably considered to be bureaucratic.
The trampoline owner sees that mirrors According to almost unruly different: “The rain is dripping through the jumping mat, the surface is not sealed.” In the meantime, as reported by the German press agency, the Düsseldorf city administration has moved away from a “general ban on trampolines in the city’s allotment gardens”. The alderman in the environmental department Helga Stulgies announced that after further legal examination, they saw no reason for the ban.
Historic victory over allotment gardening
If you read this, you imagine some Düsseldorf administrative officials, surface sealing experts, landscape architects, geologists, product manufacturers, network size testers from TÜV, all sorts of lawyers and possibly the new heart’s health minister, Karl Lauterbach, hopping on a trampoline in a Düsseldorf allotment garden. Conscientious at work. The clearing up view: the trampoline is not the biggest problem a country in lockdown has right now.
So the four Daltons can breathe a sigh of relief. You are rehabilitated. The trampoline doesn’t have to be on the shaming list of dangerous ecological sins. To aircraft, diesel engines, meat and your own home. Basically, you shouldn’t seriously look for reasons to ban the Germans’ current favorite gaming device. From an aesthetic point of view … okay … maybe you should let the box hedges grow around it very quickly and very opaque; that is also good against particulate matter and for the microclimate.
Germany from above: Not complete without a trampoline. Here gardens in Dortmund.
(Photo: Hans Blossey / Imago)
From all other perspectives, however, one can congratulate the trampoline on its historic victory over allotment gardening. One should be happy about children who – in definitely child-hostile times of the lockdown again – have fun in the fresh air, unheard of enough, and also have something else that has been forgotten exercise. The air above the Düsseldorf allotment garden is at least not as toxic as what the brains of the Düsseldorf city administration may have clouded when you came up with the really remarkably absurd idea of trying to make an ecological example on a trampoline.
It is true that Germany has a huge problem with land sealing. 52 hectares of greenery are lost every day. We are consuming twice as much of a finite resource – the land on and on which we live – as intended. Daily. But more responsible for this are commercial areas, streets, parking lots and cars (Düsseldorf, greetings to the city administration, is the traffic jam capital in North Rhine-Westphalia!). For example, the trampoline should not be responsible in the measurable range. So peace be with the hop. Just maybe not in the neighboring garden.