Begegnungen und Bewegungen im ‚Transitraum‘ Wirtschaftswunder: Heinrich Bölls Der Bahnhof von Zimpren

[Machine translation] According to H. Lefebvre, the production of space reflects and solidifies existing power relations. In the case of H. Böll's story Der Bahnhof von Zimpren (1958), the station appears as the result of economic processes that mark space and society, and which Böll portrays with critical irony. , The small town's train station is a polyfunctional transit area, a hub in the transport and economic network, which spatial the transition to aggressive capitalism and the subsequent social transformations. Existing identity concepts are being called into question by successful oil drilling and rapid population growth in Zimpren, so that the new station turns out to be both a cathedral of progress and a “non-place,” i.e. as a “measure of our time” and as a negation of identity, relation and history (Augé). The transitory encounters of anonymous, exchangeable and de-individualized workers are the symbol of a society that is not focused on people but on money. Two outsiders — the widow Klipp and her servant Goswin — are regarded as non-integrable “places of remembrance” (Augé), who prove to be representatives of a rural countermodel based on tradition, identity and spatial continuity., As the petroleum jet thins, Zimpren becomes desolate. The station is empty and reduced to a penal station for rebellious officials. It is therefore moving from the social and economic center to the periphery: a transit space without transit and opportunities for encounter, which has characteristics of a “deviation heterotopy” (Foucault) and can no longer be regarded as a “space” in De Certeau's sense. Mrs. Klipp, who, thanks to low land prices, buys up almost all of Zimpren and gets agriculture back on track. She keeps her farming tools in the train station: The degrading warehouse function of the station is now regarded as a spatialized revenge of a more solid and traditional (although not entirely innocent) model of life on the economic miracle, which in this story shows two faces and is described metaphorically as both a dynamic and as a dilapidated and static transit space.