Heidelberg, Germany, summer 2005

The cover of this week’s Heidelberger Rundschau shows a photograph of the Hauptstraße in 1933.  In the hundred yards or so which are in focus, there are twenty-eight swastikas hanging from the buildings on either side of the street.  (Two tramlines run down the middle of the street, which is now a pedestrian zone.  There are two or three cyclists, a single car.)  This photograph was taken fifty years ago – when Frau Scheckenbach was a young woman.  In all its essentials the Hauptstraße has not changed since then.  The picture has an idyllic quality but for the swastikas which catch one’s eye at every point.  Any picture of the Hauptstraße would have an idyllic quality:  put those flags up today, and it would look just the same. 

Journal, Thursday 27th January 1983

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