{"id":54871,"date":"2025-10-04T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-04T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/?p=54871"},"modified":"2025-10-16T15:57:15","modified_gmt":"2025-10-16T14:57:15","slug":"the-child-the-kite-and-the-colossus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/?p=54871","title":{"rendered":"The Child, The Kite, And The Colossus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"A<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Have you ever sat on the ground outside? Not on the grass in a park but on a paving stone or kerb? It\u2019s very hard and sometimes rather chilly. Everything around you grows quite tall. You\u2019re the height of a child and sometimes, it feels to me, just as vulnerable. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s not the done thing, of course, unless it\u2019s a hot summer day and you\u2019re a cool young person. The waged don\u2019t flirt with the footpaths, their clothing is too nice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Or it just doesn\u2019t occur to them. It seldom occurs to me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Summer\u2019s well and truly gone, the gusts from its dramatic door-slam lingering round the trees. But hark! Is that laughter in the air? Out on the wasteland I see small children watch in awe as kites their parents hold bank and flutter in the breeze. There are little squawks of glee when a puff makes the plastic flutter over the frame. Tiny gloved hands reach for the kite lines. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Farther in the distance, the Monument to the Battle of Nations (V\u00f6lkerschlachtdenkmal) looms. It catches the sun as it seeps from the clouds. \u201cNearby lie the souls of 100,000 men in quiet repose,\u201d it says, though it\u2019s drowned out by, \u201cMama, I want a turn.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

With the sudden change in temperature comes the hard-to-resist urge to hibernate. The nights are drawing in, the days are often gloomy. I warm myself by light of a glowing laptop.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Friday, The Mathematician and I go out to a jazz concert at Horns Erben: Shuteen Erdenebaatar & Nils Kugelmann are debuting their new album Under the Same Stars<\/i>. I came across the gig by chance earlier in the week and was impressed by the demo tracks they posted online. But come Friday evening, wow: dark, cold, and wet. I\u2019ve an almost overwhelming urge to stay indoors and carry on working. I\u2019m well aware, however, that such feelings are signposts saying shift your arse<\/i>, so I do. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The concert is amazing. A kite moment for us both. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Several days later, I go for a long walk around the south of the city to gather eggs and Pok\u00e9mon. (The latter\u2019s a new joy \u2014 the vibrant colours and cute art are a balm for newsreel nightmares. The former are yummy.) I walk the path in front of the high-rise on Semmelweisstra\u00dfe, past the crude metal piping used to hang washing, past two benches set beneath trees. There\u2019s a thick green sleeping bag on one of them. It has the shape of a body. A few personal belongings are scattered on the ground nearby.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m reminded of the person (sometimes people) I see outside of Netto on Berhand-G\u00f6ring. Not begging, just sitting and greeting passers-by, a few of whom stop to chat. A little farther north of the shop is Albrech-D\u00fcrer Platz. They found a homeless man there a few winters back, dead on a bench beneath the linden. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I arrive at N\u00fcrnbergerstra\u00dfe. I don\u2019t walk this road often as it\u2019s loud and busy, but there\u2019s a comic shop near the top and I \u201cGotta catch \u2018em all!\u201d (I don\u2019t gotta, actually. One or two Pok\u00e9mon are fine. Kawaii<\/i>!). There are many more high-rises in this neighbourhood, and a few adjacent to this road are built in the old Soviet style, with the ground floor given over to shops. I hear music playing as I pass and see a group of homeless men and women gathered together in the small communal area between the kerb and the multi-storey concrete(+). One walks to a bike nearby and checks a bag brimming with empties.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I catch a glimpse of a beautiful red brick building down Seeburgstra\u00dfe and make a mental note to come back. I do, via the magic of Apple\u2019s Look Around, and discover it\u2019s the former home of Heinrich von Herzogenberg, an Austrian composer who took up residence here and founded the Leipzig Bach Club in 1875(*). Still gonna go back and see it for reals.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One pack of Pok\u00e9mon later (and a nice conversation with a customer about the merits of double sleeving), I head west through the Lenn\u00e9 Park (aka Schiller Park). I feel instantly at ease. Even though the traffic still roars down the multi-laned Ro\u00dfplatz, the green is calming. I see a crow tending the grass by the Koch monument(**). I watch a student walk past the Gellert memorial, engrossed in her phone. (But who pays attention to poets and philosophers nowadays?) I see a homeless man resting against the trunk of a tree. I see the tarpaulin-tented bench is still there (I mentioned it in this post<\/a>). On the bench next door, a man talks on his phone in Chinese. Across from them sits a man with a thousand-yard stare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I head south past the St. Trinitatis Catholic parish church, something of a Marmite building designed by Schulz & Schulz<\/a> and built from regional red Rochlitz porphyry. Across the road from there, in Wilhelm-Leuschner Platz, is where I saw a Slavic man sleeping rough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I go buy my eggs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/div>\n\n\n\n

Six kilometres of city, more or less. The joy of the young looking up, the weight of the past looking down, the lives of the lost underfoot. <\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2014<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(+) The Leipzig Oasis is here, a day care facility for homeless people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(*) With a few others: Franz von Holstein, Philipp Spitta, and Alfred Volkland.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(**) Carl Wilhelm Otto Koch (a mayor), not the father of microbiology(***)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(***) Along with Louis Pasteur<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I take the long, long way round to the shops and pass sights small, tall, and awful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":54870,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[213],"tags":[214,279,209,281,280],"class_list":{"0":"post-54871","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-cf","8":"tag-city-fables","9":"tag-homelessness","10":"tag-leipzig","11":"tag-parks","12":"tag-pokemon"},"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54871","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54871"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54871\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54882,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54871\/revisions\/54882"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/54870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54871"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54871"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54871"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}