What is really important? What touches us today – and will not go away tomorrow? It’s the things that have moved us since human existence: happiness, love, family, partnership, time, stress, loneliness, farewell, grief.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen*, coming from a German-Jewish family, sought answers to the eternal questions of mankind from poets, thinkers and researchers. And found a few answers that are amazingly simple – and yet can enrich our lives.
★★★
The world is full of sounds, but we often don’t notice them consciously. We don’t realize it until they’re gone. Like the lottery balls on TV that you won’t hear clicking anymore ( BILD reported). A little something? Sounds change our lives.
Let’s take the dial. Do you still hear the sound after you’ve rolled a number? Then the good old telephone rang on the other side. “Ring, Ring” – as in Hitchcock’s thriller “Murder on the Call”. The landline is still around, but fewer and fewer people are using it. Billions of thoughts were exchanged over the phone, great loves were made and broken.
BILD columnist Louis Hagen
Other sounds that were an integral part of our everyday life: the video recorder when you fast forward or rewind it, beeping fax machines (still exist), the rattling of typewriters, screeching dot matrix printers (can still be heard in doctors’ surgeries).
There are sounds that catapult us into another time. Ringing bells, for example. In cities, too, they usually rang four times an hour. They warned that time never stands still (even if the bell was annoying at times). The good old two-stroke engine: Trabi or motor scooter and moped, the sound of the boxer engine in the VW Beetle – so typical for decades of our lives. The years of departure and the first adventures. Sounds that defined an epoch.
In the first years after the war, there was a regular sound that I can remember well – and certainly millions of people of my generation with me: the sound of horses’ hooves in the cities. Coal traders, milk drivers who had filled fresh milk into silver cans, keg beer transports – most of the wagons were pulled by horses. If a child in the city today heard horses pounding, they would probably call out to their parents: “Come quickly to the window, there’s a cowboy movie being made there!”
Times are changing.
* Louis Hagen (75) was a member of the BILD editor-in-chief for 13 years and is now a consultant at the communications agency WMP. His texts are available as a book at koehler-mittel-shop.de.