»I know a place not far from here, where life’s sweet perfume fills the air« – so goes the first line of Paul Weller’s hymn to the rural provinces, »Country«. And, as a matter of fact, this place is not so far away, just a half hour’s drive. Leave the city and you are already there. »Province« comes from the Latin word for an administrative district in the territories outside Italy, thus meaning something that is remote. Today, however, the word no longer describes an actually existing place, comparable with settlement forms like village or city, but instead a construct for which there is no uniform definition. How the concept of »provincial« is defined depends on the standpoint of the observer. On the one hand, the term »provincial« is associated with narrowness. Emotional, intellectual, and cultural. Province means barrenness, tristesse. It is a »static topographical place where everything looks the same, and what’s worse, is endlessly peaceful«1. This derogatory appraisal is brought to a fine point by the title of a book published in 1981: »Was ist schon los bei euch!« (»What ever happens around here, anyway?«) 2 The imperatively framed question implies that the inevitable answer is »nothing«. At the same time, one still expects to find idyllic, untouched nature in the provinces. In our imaginations, this is the place where the organic milk beloved by cityfolk comes from: healthy and green. But no matter from which perspective we envision the provincial countryside, our terms always express a certain void. The countryside is either a place to go to escape OUT of the city or from whence to return INTO the city. Rarely is the provincial perceived or accepted according to Fried’s formula: »It is what it is.«

Between developing country and future lab
Surprisingly, this discourse of the void can also be found in German-language pop literature. Here, where the heirs of Bret Easton Ellis are busy bewailing our consumption- and media-dominated world, the provincial is also a favored theme. But what is the background behind this confrontation with the provincial? How is it viewed?
We can distinguish between two camps concerned with coming to terms with the provincial. Some authors journey »inward«, into their own past, in order to reconstruct the countryside of their youth. And then there are the »tourists« who travel through the hinterlands to see it through the eyes of a foreigner. One example of the inward view is Kolja Mensing’s »Wie komme ich hier raus? Aufwachsen in der Provinz« (»How Do I Get Out of Here? Growing Up in the Country«) 3, while the opposite pole is represented by Wladimir Kaminer’s »Mein deutsches Dschungelbuch« (»My German Junglebook«) 4.

Mensing, a journalist, writer, and important voice in the current provincial discourse, himself grew up in the West German countryside during the eighties. In his essay-like ironic stories he observes the rural provinces from a perspective that is both historicizing and personal. He sketches a picture of a new, modern countryside, which has nothing to do any more with Heidegger’s refuge from progress. The »new provinces« with their »endless stretches of new developments, satellite dishes, and mobile telephone masts have long since become a cosmopolitan place«5 – but not an attractive one. The provincial is the measure of modernity: from cable TV to Internet, from multiplex to tanning studio – the provinces have everything the city has. They function as the testing ground for globalization.

Kaminer, who grew up in the Russian metropolis of Moscow and has been living in Berlin since the nineties, took numerous reading tours through the German provinces with his bestseller »Russendisko«6, and used his travels as an opportunity to investigate the German character. He published the results in book form: »Mein deutsches Dschungelbuch« - harking back to Rudyard Kipling. Like Kipling, Kaminer generates a picture of the curious and the whimsical – the Other. He defines the provincial as that which lies outside, a strange and exotic jungle made up of garden dwarves, deserted railway stations, and loopy female booksellers. The picture Kaminer paints is of course a very reactionary one: the countryside is the seat of narrow-mindedness and above all backwardness.

Mensing’s book expresses clearly that the new »provincials« do not find the »city« they are looking for when they come to the metropolises: here are the same tanning studios and shopping arcades and the same faces they could find back home in the country. Mensing’s conclusion: There is no outside, the provincial is everywhere. Kaminer’s provincial however – to be found wherever the city stops – is the inner »Orient«. And this topos always stood for something that one either didn’t want to have or didn’t want to be, as Edward Said demonstrated in his classic, »Orientalism«.

Project: Provinces
Kaminer and Mensing have now taken the step from theory to practice. By means of various projects, they are trying to make a social space again out of the countryside, giving people from the provinces a chance to say their piece. Borrowing an idea from »Deutschland sucht den Superstar« (a TV show similar to »Star Search« – trans.), Wladimir Kaminer has launched the competition »Kaminer sucht den Superautor«7 to search out the »jungliest story in Germany«. Pupils aged fourteen to nineteen can enter the contest by contributing their own personal provincial tale. The »jungliest story« must not necessarily come from the provinces; it could also just as well be an urban tale – what counts is the special, fresh take on one’s own stomping grounds. Kaminer’s concept of provincial is obviously widened here.

Kolja Mensing and video artist Florian Thalhofer spent this summer on the 13th floor of a huge apartment complex north of Bremen shooting an interactive documentary film with a non-linear storyline.8 The apartment complex Grohner Düne, built in the seventies, was once one of the showpieces of socialized housing. Today it has a reputation as a hotspot of social unrest: vacant apartments, a high crime rate, drugs, a large share of foreigners – the average German family doesn’t live here anymore. Although there is talk now and again of tearing the whole thing down, nothing has been undertaken to date. People have found ways to deal with the situation – a private security service and 24-hour video surveillance increase the feeling of safety. These days it’s not such a bad place to live, as Mensing and Thalhofer found out from their conversations with the people there.

Working Holiday

The project »[13. Stock]« not only documents the fact that »change begins at the edges«; the artists have also tried to »inscribe« themselves in these changes – something like exiles out in the sticks who, employed in the future lab that is urban society, absolve their obligatory stint of social work during their summer vacation. Their objective might be described by the slogan of the inforiot initiative9 from Brandenburg: »The provinces are alive!«. An effort is being made to network our knowledge about the provinces, to create a forum for alternative approaches to living in and thinking about the provinces. Social structures10 are to be shored up so that the countryside is not only the setting for nostalgic childhood memories and tourist fantasies, but instead an actually habitable and livable place.

 

Translated by Jennifer Taylor-Gaida

 

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