The time of cars is over. Cars use too much fuel, make us dependent on Putin, park in the wrong place, honk loudly, get in the way. I live in a city where you don’t need a car and I love bikes. More people do that than you think. When I asked my followers on Twitter what their bike means to my followers for this column, among the many tokens of love was a photo of a bike in a human bed. lovingly covered.
It’s not that hard for me, but as the daughter of a working-class family where the gifts were rather small, a bicycle was of course the biggest thing. I adored it like the richer girls their horse. I could ride hands-free for miles on that first bike, and since then there’s nothing more important when buying a bike than: Can it ride hands-free? That may sound strange, but it’s not the sportiness of the rider that decides, but the anatomy of the bike. Saddle and handlebars must be in a special relationship to each other. I rode all my bikes hands-free whenever possible, at least until I saw Meg Ryan ride hands-free and get run over in the US version of the movie City of Angels. However, she also closed her eyes while driving, I never did.
Last week I wanted to exchange a recently purchased bike because it got stuck on the tram tracks and it has reminded me of the fall ever since. In the shop I immediately fell in love with a Dutch bike. I’ve always envied people on Dutch bikes. “All women love this bike!” the dealer yelled, but on test ride it felt like a poor man’s Harley-Davidson. “Thanks, that’s nice, but you can’t shoot around corners with it.” Seized with ambition, the dealer pushed over a slender racing bike, one of those things that you can sling over your shoulder like a bag when climbing stairs. When I rode the road bike around the block as a test, I almost threw up. Why was the handlebar hanging so low? Nothing was there with the hands-free! I didn’t buy anything, so I went home and got my oldest bike from the basement, a sporty Hercules model. Not particularly pretty, but you can drive it hands-free almost indefinitely. I had already pushed Hercules next to me during my studies, so much together that my favorite doner kebab seller at one point said that the wheel and I were like Saint Anthony and his lily. This is this saint holding the white flower on the left and the baby Jesus on the right.
For a child, the bike is often the first freedom, getting out of the streets where everyone and everything is known. Almost everyone I spoke to remembers who took their training wheels. There are people today who don’t leave their expensive bikes in front of the door, but rather carry them to the office or home. There is the great e-bike happiness of seniors who proudly overtake you as if they could do anything about it. When I saw the first old people in the fast lane, I still thought: when will I finally retire so that I have time to be so fit again? Until I got it: imposter! I find the aggressively helmeted eternalists unbearable, who even scream at mosquitoes on the route: Faahr-raaad-weeg! In the cool coffee shops, hip bikes now hang on the wall like paintings. Embarrassing, I thought at first. I like it now.
The writer and political scientist Jagoda Marini? (“Made in Germany. What is German in Germany?”, “Sheroes. The country needs new heroes”) writes every two weeks – alternating with Micky Beisenherz – in the Stern.
I think the bicycle is far too seldom loved loud enough, at least given what it means to us. In my Twitter poll, one even wrote that he would buy a racing bike to go into the resistance against Putin – by saving fuel!