Postcard from Heidelberg: Cambridge auf Deutsch
J.M.W. Turner, Heidelberg (Creative Commons)
Trübner and Turner through the paintbrush, Eichendorff and Jean Paul in their poetry – Heidelberg has long enthralled the travelling artist. So prolific are artistic representations of the city on the Neckar that visiting it has perhaps been rendered unnecessary. Heidelberg has even achieved attention in Schlager and hip hop.
The beauty these poets and painters saw in Heidelberg is no less present today. The magic of the city in late summer, as I discovered, rivals any other. In the evening, the quintessentially-German half-timbered houses bathe in the orange glow of a setting sun. The river Neckar flows through the city and into the Rhine. Not far from its banks, the land on both sides rises steeply out of the plain, into the hills from which Heidelberg Castle keeps vigil over the town below. The scene invokes some Brüder Grimm-inspired Disney film come to life.
But Heidelberg’s allure comes not just from its cosy, old-world charm. The city enchants not just the self-styled neoromantic nor the budding Cambridge Germanist, but all those students, tourists and others who come for the modern European city that Heidelberg has become, just as forward-looking as it is steeped in memories of the past.
Heidelberg today is largely defined by the university and its vast student population - Schwäbische Spätzle and a Weißbier in the Marstall Mensa before an evening on the Untere Straße, bikes everywhere, whole districts of the city built for and by the university, and a healthy dose of progressive politics. Heidelberg the student city resembles little of Turner and Eichendorff’s Romantic idyll. It’s historic, but modern and welcoming, even to an international DAAD scholar with a less-than-ideal command of German.
One cannot help but compare it to Cambridge. Of course, one is unmistakably German where the other is English, but these two cities and their universities are remarkably similar. In both, the university has a presence such that the city feels like a huge campus. Students (and, in the summer, tourists) are everywhere. In the city centre, you’re never more than a few metres from some historic university building. This link is what struck me most – Heidelberg is Cambridge, but auf Deutsch.
In these times, when EU visa applications are a reality, when the UK feels ever further removed from its European counterparts, Heidelberg was a welcome reminder that students resemble each other more than we differ. Wherever we come from – Heidelberg, Cambridge or elsewhere – students share in many things, the common denominator perhaps to be found at the bottom of a beer glass.