An Hessen führt kein Weg vorbei!

Hessen: There’s no way around us! The slogan at Frankfurt airport, translated into the languages of the world and painted across the outside of the main terminal building, is defiant. This has consistently been one of Germany’s wealthiest and most productive regions. Aware that everybody would like to pass through, around or over without pausing or even looking, it tells the world, we may not be pretty, you may not like us, but you can’t ignore us. Invest in Hessen, we get things done, we make you richer. And yet there’s a note of sadness. This corner of the world is indeed ignored and unloved. Frankfurt may be a node on the international flow of money, but Hessen is eminently ignorable and unlovely and unloved. When you go to Kassel you get some idea why this is.

A huge windswept concrete circle sits at the heart of Kassel. Koenigsplatz (picture from here) is maybe 80m in diameter, bisected by a road and tramline, walled by shops and the ubiquitous german-style italian and asian restaurants, and facing into the circle a ring of fountains shaped like faucets or old-style car door handles pour arcs of water directly down into their own individual drains. The water is not thrown in the air, briefly weightless. Just straight down into the drain, as if to say ‘that’s where it all ends up anyway, why dress it up?’

Before the war it was said to have been one of Germany’s prettiest towns, though I would take that with a pinch of salt – that’s what all the ugly towns say. It’s true enough, though, that Kassel was one of Germany’s earliest industrial centres. The university was built recently from an old locomotive works (one of the reasons, I suppose, for bombing it during the war), and it is most certainly not beautiful.

Away from the centre, Kassel has the stolid, stately apartment buildings common to northern German towns, broad boulevards lined with trees and cafes. You can enjoy a very pleasant evening sitting at a pavement table, drinking superb beer at less than 3 euro a litre, filling up on meaty, creamy spiceless pastas, pizzas, schnitzel and cevapcici, accompanied by salads of grated carrot, olives, thick chunks of cucumber and quartered tomatoes.

Perfectly respectable, but definitely unlovely.