As I walked out this morning I inhaled the refreshing, recognizable air of home. There’s something about being home that makes you always long for vacation, but there’s something about vacation that always makes you long for home. By the end of the week in Hamburg, I couldn’t wait to get back home to my own bed and my own messy apartment. This morning's scent of home persuaded me to re-walk a familiar route instead of charting one anew.
This morning was not as silent as usual. Spring weather has reintroduced the medley of avian arias as countless birds flutter about their morning business. Their songs transformed the mysterious darkness, which is also beginning to brighten with each new day, into a more cheery mood.
I passed the familiar cigarette butts, the trusting house with open shudders—each window now has a crack or a hole from some non-neighborly passerby shielded by the other homes' upgraded, roll-down shutters. I continued past the burned out garage. The scent of burning has vanished. The garage now stands as a ruin. I strode down to Main Street, turned left towards the bakery to see the middle-aged woman tirelessly kneading the dough for the neighborhood’s breakfast. Everything was just as I had left it.
One object on my well-trodden trail, however, stood out to me: a flagless flagpole.
It is curious how new experiences make you more aware of things you have otherwise overlooked. It's like learning a new word that you were sure you had never heard before. Once you have learned the word it seems to pop up everywhere. While in Hamburg, I asked my old friend why Germans seldom fly their national flag? Unlike in the United States, in Germany you can search all day to no avail for a business flying the German flag. And it is almost impossible to discover a private residence with such outward patriotism. He told me the answer is simple; before and during WWII, Germans were forced to fly their flag. Germans could be punished for not flying a flag. My friend told me of his grandfather, who did not support the regime and thus did not raise its fabric symbol of servitude. One day a knock came on the door and the police scolded the old man for having a flagless flagpole. My friend’s grandfather simply replied, rather than announcing his death-sentence disdain for their practices, that he did not have the money to purchase a flag. The police disappeared back into their patrol vehicle and returned a moment later with a flag. They attached it to the pole and raised it themselves, announcing “Now you have no excuse!”
As a result of coerced patriotism, this and millions of flagless flagpoles throughout Germany stand as a defiant symbol of their freedom to not fly a flag.
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