One has to leaf through tourist and ethnological books for a long time to distinguish where the Allgäu begins between the Danube and Lake Constance. Although I lived here for two years, in the extreme south of Germany, I myself could not exactly show a sign of demarcation from the environment. One part administratively belongs to the province of Baden-Württemberg, and the other to Bavaria. The content of the term and the scope of the territory have changed historically. But experts say - as far as the wheat fields go, it's still Upper Swabia, and when the pastures and meadows turn green, it's Algoj.
Thanks to low-cost airlines, Algoj is also accessible to the inhabitants of the Balkans. When passengers from Belgrade, Niš, Pristina, Sofia, Skopje or Tuzla land at the airport in Memmingen, according to the tourist maps, passengers are already in Allgäu, since Allgäu has become a brand. Instead of turning northeast toward Munich, they should go southwest once, in the direction of the bluish Alpine mountain wall and Lake Constance. After only half an hour's drive, in the city of Kempten at the latest, you will find yourself in the middle of the real Allgäu. And Kempten is, according to preserved sources from the Greek ancient writer Strabo, the oldest German city. A Greek mentioned it eighteen years before Christ.
At that time, the Illyrians from Pannonia and the Celts from the West had already mixed in this area.
Hilly areas with pastures, scattered farmsteads and forests immediately captivate with a pseudo-idyllic call that city people clearly hear: that call for a lost simple life, a good neighborhood and healthy food is, of course, a projection of urban longing on the pre-Alpine hilly greenery. But this urge, as always, is a great basis for the development of rural tourism. Allgäu is one of the favorite tourist destinations of Germans. Driven like a wedge between Lake Constance and the limestone teeth of the Apple, it is something special.
Although the dialect belongs to a subspecies of the Swabian dialect, its unrefined mountain strength and color make it almost a foreign language to all Germans who grew up a little further north. Tradition is clearly stronger than change, because German refugees from Silesia and the Czech Republic increased the population by a third after the war, but did not leave an audible mark on the language.
Vangen - a town from a picture book
In the extreme southwest of this historical area, only twenty kilometers from the northern shore of Lake Constance, is the town of Vangen. There are not even thirty thousand souls in the area. You descend into the town itself from the hill you climbed on the way from the neighboring towns. The valley through which Gornji Argen flows, a poisonous green mountain stream, which is normally tame, but knows how to go wild in the spring, is surrounded by a coast that rises to the alpine mountain range in the north.
The very center of the town is surrounded by the remains of walls that end in gates with towers. St. Martin's Gate from the first half of the 1960th century, through which the road to Lindau led, the Women's Gate in the direction of Ravensburg and finally the Powder Tower. Inside that city core, an unprepared visitor can feel like he's in a picture book that represents the world of the Brothers Grimm in Disney style. The buildings on their facades are reminiscent of historically significant periods with murals - saints and powerful popes or the entry of Napoleon into the city are represented. Many buildings were restored during the XNUMXs, so the murals tell us more about the passion of local restorers for history than about history itself. What is not beautifully painted are the periods of the plague and the thirty-year Catholic-Protestant religious war. The city remained Catholic. Protestants of the same local dialect are the majority population twenty kilometers to the west, in Ravensburg. Armies passed through Vangen. Arsons and plagues are recorded in the local memory. Once, before the Swedes, the entire population fled to Bregenz on Lake Constance, the Germanic part of Austria.
The wall painting on the facade, by which you will immediately understand that you are in the pre-alpine German south, emphasizes the already complete charm of the place. Along with that, there are facades with crossed beams, which architects call "German swordsman" in jargon.
If you sit in one of the gardens in the center and watch the world around you with a drink, you will realize that the whole town is actually a museum with the sounds, colors and smells of a time that we think is irretrievably gone. One mill still turns its wheel. The smell of fried onions wafts from an inn boasting a centuries-old tradition. In the window of the city's best bakery, you will be tempted by a pastry whose name means "Warm soul" in German. If you take it and take a bite, you will know why. A mahogany colored local beer.
Some of the local restaurants will spoil you with Swabian-Allgäu dishes: krupnik, a resistant type of wheat, is used to make flour for sparrows (Spätzle). Rubbing the dough, it passes through the grater and falls into the hot water in the form of lumps the size of an uncle. It seems that lumps of dough, which find their final form only in hot water, reminded the ancestors of the Swabians and Allogians - the Alemanni - of the Djivdzhans. The lumps of cooked dough prepared in this way are baked in the oven with mountain cheese. Whether it's an unforgettable side dish or, with a salad, an independent dish. What about "cabbage doughnuts"? It is in vain to describe the harmony between finely chopped bacon, fried cabbage and the dough in which it is rolled. Must try.
Swabian cuisine in general and Algao cuisine in its specific rustic form are certainly among the most interesting regional varieties of German gastronomic skills. If you ask me, the Algao welder works better than even the excellent Bavarian one.
Slowing down as therapy
Besides feeding you well, Vangen will slow you down. Saleswomen have time. Waiters have time. The people at the market stalls have time. If you spend more than one day here, you will realize that - you have time too. I don't know if the German author Stan Nadolni before publishing his bestseller The discovery of slowness resided in Wangen, but his title seems to strike at the core of the Algoian soul.
In addition to slowness, the saying "when you say nothing, you have praised enough" applies even more to this mountain variant of the Swabian people than to the Swabians from Stuttgart. Some view this stinginess of words as part of a wider mental phenomenon called "tightness".
On the monument, or rather the fountain, which is located on a narrow passage between the two main squares, you can see six human figures piled up, and below it is a notice in the local dialect that the one who is all the way up and the one who everyone rushed to are in Algoj - squeeze equally. That saying was turned into a sculpture by Jozef Mihael Neustifter in 1990.
If an innocent tourist steps near this monument, one of the figures will spit some water. It's like a hidden camera, only without the camera. This slapping of passers-by betrays a local sense of humor which, as in all mountain cultures, is sometimes cruel, sometimes insidious. And not too refined. The mischievous laughter of those who remained dry belongs to the performative intention of this plastic.
I prefer the funny monument with the saint and shepherd Anthony the Great, the sow and the piglets. I guess because my son used to ride a bronze pig when he was little. The square is - logically - called the Sow's Market, because pigs have been traded there for hundreds of years. The one who has soiled himself playing with the piglets can jump to the next unusual fountain by the city walls - a female figure washing the head of a male over a basin. There used to be a city bath.
The Algoian Yin and Yang
At the approach to the library, which is located in the former city barn, a bronze man is leaning against a pillar of books. "Truth Seeker". Under his elbow are piled titles from Socrates to Humboldt, from Homer to Dante and Goethe, and Jewish, Christian and Muslim scriptures. The "Seeker" is currently trying to solve the mystery of the "Magic Square" of Pompeii. Looks like it's going to take a while.
I came to my truths in Wangen through an experiential-sensual path.
I lived in the city for two years. When I walk these streets again, I can't just look at what gives me a beautiful day - and here it knows well that it's raining - but I also remember. In the main square, the symphony orchestra performed one of my favorite works under the summer stars Karma's storm. I was part of that glorious evening.
There were mornings when I would watch Albert over the rim of my coffee cup. He was a local lunatic who embodied the principle of narrow-mindedness to the point of paroxysm. He went around collecting papers and cigarettes from the street, cursing out loud the messy world. If Alfons then appeared, looking like a bearded Alibaba who had just run out of a cave, the show could begin. Shaggy and big, Alphonse laughed uproariously, throwing crumpled beer cans around. An argument between the crazy anarchist Alfonso and the tight-lipped lunatic Albert would be loud and - judging by the reactions of the citizens in the gardens - extremely entertaining. Both figures remained in me as two caricatured sides of the Algoic, and to some extent, German mental code: anarchism against rigid order, individual carelessness against collective discipline, Nietzsche against Hegel, Dionysius against Apollo. What is stronger, truer? Both. Behind the famous German meticulousness hides a giant cultural struggle with Alfonso. Fear of him inside.
Convoluted identity
In Wangen, I experienced that local identity is a kind of spasm that intensifies in contact with the foreign. So how are all these people nice to tourists? They learned that in the long school of poverty. Smile at the one who brings you money. A foreigner is not one who comes and goes, but one who comes and stays, said a smart sociologist.
When they realized that I was not passing by at the bakery or the butcher, the willingness of otherwise simple-minded and cheerful people to speak literary German, or something that at least resembled German, suddenly decreased. At the end they were speaking in pure archaic language and I was nodding my head. Even to a Bavarian woman who came to the city when I did, after a few drinks, they said in a friendly manner: "If your grandfather is not buried in the nearby cemetery, then you will never be ours!"
I think about all this, recognizing places, streets, alleys. The smell of the best mountain cheese in the world wafts from one shop. It's a pity that I didn't come back on the market day so that the fireworks of abundance from the fertile hills would explode just for me in the square. Peasants who, in their rough working clothes, go down to the valley to market as if they were part of someone's costume show. All the towns that are surrounded by mountain villages are blessed with good food.
Here, the peasants, with the help of the state, realized in time that the production of biologically controlled food is the future. The unimaginably good taste of their food rests on the simple act of returning to the pre-industrial way of production with the application of all modern knowledge.
I remembered that when I was leaving Vangen at the end of the 90s, I ordered several workers through the agency to help me move heavy pieces of furniture from the apartment to the truck. Four Kosovo Albanians appeared at my door. The youngest spoke without hesitation in Serbian: "We have to tell the boss that you didn't want to for political reasons. You know, the one, we're fighting downstairs. We arrive in an hour, you don't pay the agency, you pay us. And it will be cheaper".
But this is where the story about us begins, and the story about Vangen ends.
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