Bavaria, the navel of Europe?

JUDITH SCHNAUBELT and I interviewed about 20 people, a church choir, a male choral society, a rock band, the parish priest, the mayor, the breeder of Scottish Highland cattle, a quarry worker, a gardener at the concentration camp memorial (supplemented by our own reports), not only to produce a portrait of a community of 2000 inhabitants in the Upper Palatinate, but also to metaculturally confirm the results of the land survey with the help of a self-proclaimed KYBERNETIC GEMATRIKER on the basis of linguistic material given to him: Flossenbürg is the center of the cultural continent Europe, in Flossenbürg lives the super-European. A satire on the European BlaBla, which takes the inhabitants of a small village very seriously and into the heart. And above it blows a cold wind. (Knowledge of Bavarian is not absolutely necessary!)

First broadcast: December 31, 1990

Let's just assume that in certain magical places a secret message is hidden behind every spoken word. You can get to the bottom of it by assigning a number to each letter - to the A the 1, to the B the 2, to the C the 3 and so on. In this way, one obtains series of numbers which in turn must be interpreted - and which can perhaps be connected with the coordinates of certain places, their longitudes and latitudes, or the positions of celestial bodies. Judith Schnaubelt and Uli Aumüller wanted to take a chance and went to Flossenbürg, a small community in the Upper Palatinate near which the geographical center of Europe is located, at least halfway between the harbor mole of Lübek and that of Trieste. Does this cartographic peculiarity already conceal enough magic to come to a meaningful conclusion when analyzing a possible double meaning of the rather randomly collected encounters in this place? - This feature was produced as part of the series "Europe of the Regions - Bavaria and the World".