Appropriate Weather

I commented recently on weather perceptions at funerals, and the way many films seem to portray the moment when the remains of a loved, or unloved, person are laid in their final resting place. Here, over the last three days, I have not been disappointed. Aside from a brief period of relative warmth under clouded skies, rainwater has increased the flow of the river, cleaned the streets, soaked those coming out of the train station and walking through town. A fortnight earlier, I am told, the area was covered in snow.

From my vantage point, on the fourth floor of a hotel overlooking the main railway station in Würzburg, I watched the steady stream of commuters coming into town at the start of the day. Wrapped up, some with umbrellas, others with just a hood, there is a strange sense of desolation despite the stream of humanity. This is helped by the memorial alongside the main concourse, running from the edge of the tramlines through to the taxi park. Stone suitcases and sleeping bags, the last and lost possessions of those who, possibly still unaware of what fate had in store, were being packed away from their formerly safe communities, and sent off to what some thought an uncertain future, but we now know to have been certain death.

Elsewhere in the city there are memorials to religious figures, to warriors and kings, to poets and entrepreneurs whose lived lives span centuries of local history. Perhaps, from all, these memorials to the past, only the poets can be said not to have taken part on the countless killings, bloodbaths, eradication of people over hundreds of years, if not longer. At least, not physically, as literature, a few lines well wrought, can be an incentive to murder just as much as the battle cry of a warrior king.

And among all these monuments and remembrances, the simple line of suitcases, of former possessions, of notebooks and teddy-bears, coats and sticks is the most poignant, the most relevant to our modern times. We seem to have learned nothing from the past at all.

Image © Urban Camera.