Doors Become Windows

On By StevenIn Life In Germany

On most of my trips into the Altstadt, I walk past this wall.

It’s an old wall, older than the buildings around it.  It’s covered in graffiti. (I especially like the script along the top, which says, “Bunny, I love you!”)

Set in the wall is a door.  An old, wooden door with metal doorknobs.  The door is covered in old stickers and concert posters and still more graffiti.  I always imagined that behind the door was something like a broom closet, or the entrance to a tiny dungeon.

One day this weekend, I noticed some people had stopped at the door, and were peering inside.   They closed the door again before I got to it, and I didn’t look further.

When I came back later in the weekend, though, I pushed the door open gently, and this is what I saw on the other side.

In the middle of the old city, between churches and clothing stores, surrounded by cobblestone, is a lush green overgrown glade.  There’s even a very large tree inside.

If this were True Blood, there would be faeries.  I’m just sayin’.

Freude am Fahren

On By StevenIn Life In Germany

Every week-day, I ride a bus from my home near the Altstadt of Regensburg to a bus stop a short walk from my office in nearby Neutraubling.  That bus rides past BMW’s Regensburg factory.

I have always known that BMW is a Bavarian company, but I forgot about it until I got here. BMW stands for Bayerische Motoren Werke, which roughly translates in English to Bavarian Motor Works.  The blue and white in the logo roundel match the blue and white of the Bavarian flag.  The logo is also stylized to evoke a spinning propeller.   The company goes back about a hundred years, but they started out as two different companies.  Bayerische Flugzeugwerke made airplane engines, and Rapp Motorenwerke was a motor company.  When they merged, the BMW name was born.  The first BMW branded vehicle is a motorcycle; the cars actually came a little bit later.

As you can see from the overhead view, it’s an enormous sprawling facility with a test track.

Up until the week before last, I’d only ever seen the gates and the high fences that surround the compound.   There’s a tour available to the public, however.  You just have to schedule it.   Here’s some of the interesting things I learned on the tour:

  • This facility produces several models of BMW, but ALL of the BMW Z4 line cars are made here.
  • The facility is a complete production line including enormous (and very loud) metal presses that convert huge rolls of steel into car doors, hoods, trunks, and bodies.
  • The seats are manufactured in a nearby town, and are driven to this facility less than an hour before they’re installed into new cars- this means that a traffic snarl on the Autobahn can back up production quite easily.
  • The factory produces one car every minute.  They make 1100 cars a day.
  • Much of the transport of cars from one end of the factory to the other is completely automated-  lots of robots and sparks and giant tracks.   There are forklifts, but there are also automatic robot cargo things that would look right at home in any Weyland-Yutani cargo deck.
  • Robots handle welding and bolting and all kinds of other precision work.
  • There are four layers in the painting process: a base primer, a protective layer, the color paint, and clear coat.  The paint work is all done by robots, and the paint is electrostatically charged during the painting process so that the paint will adhere more easily.
  • While the seats and engines are installed by robots,  a lot of fine installation work is done by humans- the Regensburg facility employs nine thousand people.
  • Ten percent of the finished cars are sent out to the test track for quality control.  I suspect that would probably be a fun job.

The video is a little bit older, but you can get a sense of the Regensburg facility in this Youtube clip.

This next video was taken in the Munich factory, but it clearly shows the metal press machinery, the paint robots, and more.  I’m quite fond of how the robot arms open and close the car doors during the painting process.

Winnetou, Apache Knight

On By StevenIn Life In Germany5 Comments

A while back, Jenny and I saw Winnetou on the train.

Jenny was fascinated and amused by this live-action version of Winnetou.

I, on the other hand, had no idea what she was talking about.

J: That man looks like Winnetou
S: Like who?
J: Winnetou
S: Spell it?
J: WINNETOU
S: Spell it again?
J: W I N N E T O U!!!!
S: Never heard of him.

Winnetou is a fictional Native American hero who is well known in Germany.  He was created by Karl May, one of the bestselling German authors of all time.  Winnetou is the fictional chief of the Mescalero tribe of the Apache.    There have been books and children’s stories, all written between 1875 and 1910.  There was a series of eleven films between 1962 and 1968, filmed in what is now Croatia.  There are even two television miniseries, from 1980 and 1998 respectively.

I bought an English translation of the first novel and read it on my Kindle.  I am utterly fascinated by a Native American hero created by a German author.  I am even more fascinated by the fact that Karl May never actually visited the places he wrote about until late in his life, long after he wrote these stories of the old West.  The Winnetou stories are immensely popular here.

In subsequent conversations about Winnetou, I have come to realize that while most Americans have never heard of Winnetou and Old Shatterhand, most Germans have never heard of the Lone Ranger and Tonto.

That seems fair, I guess.