Cowboys sind echt geil, ja!

I was round at my neighbour Deric’s place for dinner the other night. After chatting and drinking a few beers in his porch he suggested heading to the town’s annual Country & Western party. I’d heard that Germans had a weird fascination with the whole cowboy thing, so I could hardly turn down a chance to witness it at first hand. So Deric got into his finest Western togs, he lent me a cowboy hat (he has several) and a friend gave us a lift into town.

These are not cowboy hats

This one's for Alex - an original WWII Afrika Korps pith helmet!!!

The word ‘lift’ doesn’t quite describe the experience. The friend was apparently a bit tipsy, judging from the way she weaved across the road on the way to Zierenberg, her tatooed arms wrestling with the steering wheel like the horns of a stubborn bull. She reluctantly pulled on her seat belt at Deric’s command. In town, ignoring the signs for building works, she plunged down a street that was blocked at the other end, screeching to a halt when she saw the barriers across the torn-up tarmac. “Scheiße!” she spat, as though this was the last thing she’d expected. But, undeterred, she mounted the pavement and squeezed the car roughly through. We were almost there, thank heavens. By this point I was praying that we’d make it there alive. Of all the ways I might choose to die, being killed in a car accident on the way to a Country & Western party is not one of them. The roads near the party were chockablock with parked cars already, so she pulled into what looked like a private car park. “Can you do that?” asked Deric. “I can do anything I want,” she said. Anyway, having survived the journey I could now experience whatever awaited me at the other end.

Odd. That’s all I can say. A line dancing evening at an open air swimming pool in the middle of rural Germany. The band were actually incredibly good, but it was disconcerting to hear them getting the audience pumped in German one moment, and launching into a flawlessly accented imitation of John Denver or Lynyrd Skynyrd the next. To my ear, when they started singing they could’ve just stepped off a plane from Texas. It was incongruous.

No, I didn’t dance. I was too busy being impressed by all the people who were. Being German, they take their line dancing very seriously in Zierenberg: everyone knew the moves, and there were thirty or forty people up there dancing at a time. The best part was how relaxed everything was. It’s a small town, so everyone knew everyone else, beer flowed at £1.50 a pint (more or less), adults drank and danced while kids ran about jumping in and out of the pool. It felt like a big family party. But with cowboy hats.

Deric

I first met Deric at Herr K's BBQ. He's in his late sixties, tall, ruddy-faced, with a cheerful and open manner that becomes more cheerful and open the drunker he gets. The first thing I noticed about him was his hat, an Afrika Korps-style tan field cap. During the raccoon discussion he told us about his gun, which he claimed was illegal, then corrected himself that the gun itself wasn't illegal, just the ammunition he had for it. At this point Herr K told me that he himself was the community representative, a kind of mini-mayor of Friedrichsaue, and another of the guests present was the local policeman. The policeman looked over and just shrugged. Clearly they are used to Deric's eccentric, vaguely militaristic inclinations.

They also seem used to his open racism. Now, I rarely meet racists, especially such amiable racists as Deric. My conversation with him slipped into racism so gently that I didn't even realise I was in a particularly racist pit until Herr K lifted me out.

This is how it happened. Deric asked me where I'd excavated outside the UK. I said Ireland and Mexico. He said how he wanted to visit Yucatan, and went on to describe his favourite holiday places, which included various places in South America and also Victoria Falls in Rhodesia, "or Zimbabwe as it's called now". We agreed that Zimbabwe was in a poor state thanks to Mugabe. Nothing racist so far, note: even The Guardian would concur there. Then he started talking about his relatives in South Africa, and how funny Afrikaans sounded to his Niederdeutsch ear. Then he mentioned his surprise that 'the blacks' in South Africa also spoke Afrikaans. Still not necessarily racist. But then he said that South Africa was also in a poor state, and that this always happened when the blacks took over.

This is the point where Herr K stepped in. He said, "Just so you know, these are just Deric's opinions, not mine. He's rather racist. I have nothing to do with these opinions."

Deric laughed and, unperturbed, cheerfully went on to talk about the deficiencies of die Schwartzen the same way he had half-joked about shooting the raccoons that broke into his yard.

"Really, how many blacks have you met?" demanded Herr K.

"I've met lots," said Deric. His mouth sank for a moment, and he shook his head. "But I must say I was disappointed."

Deric, like most unrepentant racists, has decided to dig his heels deeper into the sand against the social tide. He holds on to his racism in all its stubborn inconsistency. At times it blurred into simple xenophobia, the kind of casual distrust of foreigners and immigrants that has more to do with culture and language than race. When Herr K accused him of hating Turks, for instance, Deric vehemently denied it, saying that he loved visiting Turkey.

"But you don't like it when Turks come over here," Herr K said.

Well, of course; that was another matter entirely. Deric then brought up the problems Italy has with illegal immigration from North Africa. "You don't like them just because they're black," said Herr K.

"No, they're Arabs."

"They come from Niger too."

There followed a surreal exchange whereby Deric tried to prove that his was a particularly democratic form of xenophobia, in that he hated all non-Europeans equally, not just blacks. Yet the blacks were the object of his true racism. I've met bigots, anti-Semites and xenophobes before; but before Deric I'd never bodily encountered this peculiar, old-school colonial attitude towards race - not angry, flag-waving, skinhead BNP-style racism, but a kind of pedestrian belief that Apartheid was the most natural and logical form of social organisation in South Africa, that white rule was the best thing ever to happen to the black and brown races, and that sub-Saharan peoples never have, and never will, achieve anything of note in human history.

This was the very same attitude I'd seen portrayed in the novels of J. M. Coetzee and Doris Lessing. It is unthinking, seductive, rooted more in a perverse form of embattled paternalism than in fear or hatred, though it verges readily towards open frustration when permitted - the frustration, perhaps, of a father who has finally disowned his errant child. It is not a political ideology, but a world-view; an amoral acknowledgement of the 'natural' order of things which happened to put the white man at the top. It is, in short, the mentality that ruled the age of European colonialism, and has still not died out.

I'm suprised I didn't realise even sooner that Deric, who lives a quiet rural life with his Afrika Korps field cap, illegal rifle and collection of pith helmets, is basically a Boer frontiersman lost in space and time, as though he fell asleep in the veld fifty years ago and woke up here. And yet he was open-minded and progressive when we spoke about religion, saying that he was agnostic and always respected the beliefs of others. What's more, he was genuinely funny, charming and affable, and I'm sure that, were I black, he would have behaved just the same - he just wouldn't want me marrying his daughter...

Friedrichsaue

Last week I finished with the excavation in York, leaving my undergraduate team, the house and the cat in the incapable hands of Alex. I'm not worried about Cleo, as she knows how to keep Alex in his place.

I cn red latin plz LOL

I left York on Thursday evening and reached Hull without a hitch, except when my GPS tried to send me into a field, which was technically my fault. The ferry was full of Yorkshire scooter nuts, bikers returning from the Manx TT and lots of people determined to get very drunk. We arrived next morning in a blue-skied Rotterdam and the top decks were crowded with people feasting their eyes on its beauty.

Rotterdam cathedral

There followed 250 miles of driving into central Germany. Once I got used to driving on the right hand side and reached the German border I put the famed awesomeness of the Autobahn to the test. It turns out that the Autobahn is indeed awesome. In fact it should be renamed the AWESOMEBAHN.

Even in my dinky little Peugeot 106, which has a 50cc engine or something, it was great fun cruising at 90 mph in the slow lane with BMWs and Mercs still screaming past like Valkyries. Thanks to the Awesomebahn I reached my destination two hours ahead of schedule.

The place I'm staying is the ground floor flat of a house owned by a certain Herr and Frau K in the 10-house metropolis of Friedrichsaue. They have a huge garden, a pond, two dogs and lots of bees.

Herr K said I'd brought the fine weather with me from England (ho ho). It was a bright, breezy day, with a sky full of light and shadow. Once my hosts had showed me around the place, I took my camera and went for a wander along farm tracks towards Zierenberg, the nearest town.

On the Saturday, Herr and Frau K and their neighbour took me on a tour of Zierenberg and its environs. It's a local type of place where everyone seems to know everyone else - especially so in the case of Herr K, who's a teacher at the local primary school.

Anyway, this is the real reason I've come here. Friedrichsaue lies at the foot of these twin peaks, called Großer and Kleiner Gudenberg - Great and Small Wodan's Hill. The names suggest that they were somehow connected to the Germanic god Wodan before St Boniface came and stirred up a hornets' nest in the eighth century by telling everyone to become Christian.

I climbed up the Gudenbergs on Sunday, wandering from the paths and spending about four hours getting happily lost and found again in the dense woodland. At the very peak of Großer Gudenberg, which is never visited except by deer, are the ruins of an old medieval fortress - a huge double rampart surrounding what looked like the remains of a motte built on a natural outcrop, all of it smothered by trees and fern. No path, no signs, nothing at all to suggest that any human has ventured to the summit for centuries - at any rate, I didn't see another living soul the whole time I was up there.

There are lots of similar sites scattered around Hessia. Some of them are linked to old folk tales that root them deep in a half-imagined pagan past; many survive in name only and are virtually forgotten. Over the next three months I'll be writing a book about them, and giving regular status updates here...