Fanny Morweiser on Heidelberg

The ambitious, well-off lawyer Ewald Korwan’s first brief is to evict the tenants of a run-down old building.
However for Ewald, who ‘falls in love’ with both the Art Nouveau house and its eccentrically loveable residents, this meeting causes him to change as a person, for their world, until then unknown and strange to him, immediately casts a spell on him.

And while Ewald was still holding the stone up, turning it round and wondering which beach it came from, he was already toying with the idea of having a break for lunch first, eating a ham sandwich instead of a curried sausage, during which he could consult the street map, before then finding the house. He passed the Palatine Bridge, entered the Luise Ring Road and followed it, until the streets began to branch off into the Jungbusch district behind the Mosque and the Church of our Lady. For a while he drove aimlessly around, until he finally found a free space to park on a sandy strip overgrown with weeds next to a harbour basin. The rain had stopped as suddenly as it had started. The sun had pushed through from behind the clouds and caused the tarmac and roofs to steam, it had the warmth and intensity that it was entitled to at the end of April.

Once he had got out, Ewald took a deep breath and found the taste of chocolate on his tongue. It really seemed to be in the air, and whether it was that, or the sudden explosion of life in the squares and among the houses, as if all the people had just been waiting for this break – he felt he had been whisked to a magical place, thrown into a colourful mix of peoples who immediately welcomed him and added him to their pattern like a new dab of colour. Of course he knew Mannheim, but he didn’t know this Mannheim.

What’s more, today was the day everyone could leave out bulky refuse for collection. There were beds, mattresses, wardrobes, tables and chests of drawers out on the pavements. They were used one last time, by children who were jumping around on the wet mattresses until little fountains of water spurted out, and by old men, who shoved discarded chairs and stools together, dried them off and sat down to chat. The salvagers appeared, opening every cupboard door, peering into bags and cardboard boxes and taking things with them for a stretch before throwing them away after all, unrolling carpets, checking lampshades for holes and shooing away the odd tramp who had settled down on a sofa, so they could try it out themselves. Ewald passed Turkish bakers and greengrocers and, reaching a playground between two houses that had a kiosk at the front by the road, he remembered Herr Stein had said that the secret tattoo-artist’s wife had just such a kiosk on just such a playground, so he leaned into the kiosk, between the jars of sweets and the magazines on display, and called out, ‘Hello’.