He’d rather be back home on his Gameboy but the little boy will look back on it all in future years when he becomes one of Der top brass of Chemnitz.
Well what child wants to dress like their dad?
Or worse still when he is in ceremonial dress.
But then we’ve all been there and where once I hated being decked in a kilt…
Now I don’t skirt any opportunity to flash a leg.
The Chemnitz miners share with our own Britons, who worked in the bowels of the earth, a love for brass music.
And costume and a drape to tell us of their mine’s proud tradition.
Blowing our own trumpets
As well as the birthright of Germans, a natural affinity with oompah music.
Which I have loved from the moment I first heard it.
As a 19-year-old at the Oktoberfest in Munich.
And decided to climb up on the bandstand, take the mic and belt out ‘My bonnie lies over the ocean’.
Before my body lay outside the Lowenbrauhaus, ejected by two bucksome Berthas.
Modern kraftverk
It’s taken a while to learn my lesson but here I am willing to let others take their deserved spotlight.
And so I let the miners’ brass band, the young orchestra, the street ballet dancers, Peace Ride cyclists and a mine host from Haddington take centre stage.
It’s kraftverk for the modern Saxony.
And it is all on show this week, a showcase for next year’s European Capital of Culture experience.
The miners’ story can be explored in the communes in the Oral Mountains above Chemnitz, 162 miles north of the Czechia border.
And here at the Kraftverkehr Chemnitz.
Captains of Industrie
Chemnitz, or Karl Marx Stadt as you might have known it back in Communist days, has reinvented itself as a post-industrial travel destination.
By putting the art into artisan as evidenced by the Industriemuseum which chronicles Chemnitz’s relationship with tools, motors and automobiles.
And to think that the burghers had drilled holes in the walls for dynamite to blow it up before it was salvaged.
The Industriemuseum boasts an array of artefacts automobiles.
And explores Chemnitz’s relationship with the Enigma code, Bauhaus and even a mummified body preserved appropriately by tar.
My own shell is similarly pickled these past three days by Marx and Gluck Auf beer.
And threatens to be further bolstered at the German Travel Mart closing event.
At the August Horch Museum Zwickau where we’ll tinker around classic Audis and East German Brabants.
All in the company of Der top brass of Chemnitz.
