The Postcard Files: Löbau

Haus Schminke

Alexandra Merten and Kolja Harms, two of my favourite people in the world, sent this card to me recently. It seems while I was in the United States, they were also on the road again, this time to Löbau, a city near Dresden. They'd spent two days staying at the Schminke house, completed in 1933 by architect Hans Scharoun for noodle manufacturer Hans Schminke and his family. Alexandra appears to regard this place as a German counterpart to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Farnsworth house in Plano, Illinois-- but one that offers a more intimate experience for the visitor. For a modest investment, you can stay a night or two. 

Well, I've never been to Plano, but if I were given the opportunity to visit one house or the other, I'd opt for the flight to Löbau. A big reason for that has to do with the joy of travelling with Alexandra and Kolja, with whom I've had many unconventional adventures, foreign and domestic. They have an extraordinary talent for finding interesting, often vaguely melancholy, places off the beaten path-- which is where the three of us like to be. I learned early in our friendship to trust their instincts, and let them guide me. I just wish I could do it more often.

The Postcard Files: Dessau

I nearly broke my ankle performing this. (Photos by Kolja Harms)

This one has been on the refrigerator for months because I like it so much. I was in Hamburg, Germany in April of 2010, visiting my friends Kolja Harms, Alexandra Merten and Gerald Kappelmann. All three are architects. When I'm in town, it's our habit to make a field trip together to some place of architectural significance. In 2007, it had been Prora, the Nazi holiday resort on the island of Rügen. This time, it was the Bauhaus in Dessau, a Mecca for devotees of Walter Gropius and modern design.

Alexandra had made arrangements for all of us to spend two nights in the dormitory tower, giving us ample time (or so we thought) to explore the campus and surrounding town. On our first morning, after breakfast, Kolja and I circled the main building. A handsome but sinister railing bounds the grass here; it runs low to the ground, nearly invisible, like a series of staples holding the turf in place. It's perfectly engineered to trip and wrench the ankles of careless visitors. So Kolja took pictures while I demonstrated how not to approach the Bauhaus. He sent the series of photos to me months later on this homemade postcard, which got wet in my leaky mailbox before I could retrieve it.

The Postcard Files: Aussie Tourism and Portarlington

This one is a reproduction of a tourism poster, but I still think it's cool. It's a much better image for Australia than Paul Hogan or any of the frantic, bogan dreck Steve Irwin was responsible for.

Ahh, an honest, straightforward postcard made in the good old days before town councils became convinced that if they didn't pay a consultant to come up with a logo and tagline, they wouldn't be taken seriously by anyone. Good for you, Portarlington!

This is the only other postcard available for Portarlington, and I can see why. If this is the best they had for card #2, clearly they were way too short of material for #3. I'm not sure what's going on here. Is this mass transit for old people? If this was a stop on the bus tour, then judging from the fact that the three old ladies on the left are staring at their shoes, it's time to leave. Or maybe they've just finished the train ride and are trying to figure out what happened to the person who was sitting in the chair.

The Postcard Files: Shepparton

I like to get postcards in the mail, but not many folks send them these days. Text messages and mobile phone snapshots are instant but spiritless, and a postcard, no matter how dorky, carries a faint whiff of the place from which they were posted. For the last few months, I've begun buying them to send to members of my family in the United States, and to good friends in Germany and Belgium. At the start, I bought only postcards that "looked nice" but that got boring fast. So now I gravitate to the ugly ducklings, which is more fun and makes the task easier. Here are a few I found this weekend while I was in Shepparton and Wunghnu, in the farm country of northern Victoria.

I found these first two at the news agency in downtown Shepparton. "Shep", as it's called by most people, has a few interesting elements but, for the most part, it's kind of a dump. Outlet stores and fast food joints are the connective tissue holding the town together. The sales clerk seemed a bit puzzled as to why I'd want to send a postcard from this place, but my American accent probably explained enough. These are the most expensive postcards I've ever bought, at AU$2 each. Ouch.

Lesser Shepparton didn't warrant their own postcard.

This one is just weird. Had I not read the caption, I might have guessed this was, in fact, Lesser Shepparton. But it appears to be a museum diorama. I have no idea who Bangerang is. I assume it's the fellow (?) on the right touching a wooden pole to a rock, and that this is what constituted housekeeping in days of yore. I'll have to look for it the next time I'm in Shep.

This is Wunghnu's only postcard. It depicts an instructive graffito scrawled on the north side of the water tower, across the street from the town store where I bought it.