France and Germany by train

Editors' blog

Sunday October 12th 2008

Guardian Weekly editor Natalie Bennnett has been visiting Paris, Nuremberg and Hamburg, speaking to students, academics and doing her bit for Anglo-German relations

Sunday October 12th 2008

Sailing boats on an autumn day in Hamburg. Photograph: Natalie Bennett

I've been an editor on the move for the past few days, running on the one day, one city, one talk/meeting schedule that has left me blessing the reliability of continental trains. You'd hardly be game to plan a schedule with British trains that got you into a city two hours before a meeting, but across France and Germany, from Paris, to Nuremberg to Hamburg, it has been a breeze.

I began in Paris with meetings with our sister paper Le Monde – in their state of the art offices (and I did work out the lift eventually). In the evening I took the chance to catch up with the Guardian's Paris staff, who share an office with the BBC just off the Champs-Elysées.

Then it was on to Nuremberg, fulfilling a long-standing invitation from the German-English friendship association there. It was a chance to revisit the history of the Weekly, which was founded in 1919 in an attempt to build links and understanding between Britain and Germany.

The topic set for my evening talk was migration and identity, and I tried to set that in a broad historical context. In doing so I was reminded of a story from my own past. My first journalism job, in Australia, covered the small town of Holbrook – so named after a British first world war submariner.

But before that it was called Germanton ("Germantown") because it was founded by an emigrant shepherd, Johann Pabst, who had left Germany for Australia in 1825 to work with John Macarthur's merino sheep, and set up a grog shop at what was then known as Ten Mile Creek, with his wife and two daughters.

We had a big turnout for the evening – including a local grammar school English class – and I tried, particularly for them, to create a picture of what it must have been like for Johann – no internet, no phones, no real hope of ever going "home"; a very different experience to that of people today. Issues of identity seem to have been little discussed in the 19th and early 20th century, probably because there was really no alternative but to fit in as best you could – and unless you were very lucky survival was anyway always the top priority.

But the discussion inevitably turned to the current financial situation. There was a distinct feeling that Germany had been more sensible, and would not be suffering as much as Britain. There were gasps when I explained the then just unfolding situation around the Icelandic banks and the large funds that councils, charities and other British institutions had held in them (a situation also affecting individual savers, as we've charted here on guardianweekly.co.uk).

The evening concluded with a meal in a traditional local restaurant – I would never have thought that "boiled beef" could taste so good and be so tender. But I'm not being selfish – I also have some local delicacies, including chocolate-coated gingerbread, to bring back to the office to share around.

Then it was a long sweeping train ride north through Germany to Hamburg (with a short stop in Frankfurt where I was puzzled to find a stall selling surgical implements in the station), admiring the brilliant autumn colours along the way.

I was visiting the Hamburg Media School to speak to the journalism and MBA media management students about the Guardian Weekly and the British newspaper scene generally, and we strayed into an area of particular interest to me: the future relations between the new media and the "old" print media. I find particularly interesting models, such as we have here on guardianweekly.co.uk, that try to give voice to those who previously had no access to the mainstream media (I cited my favourite example here of the life story of a Chilean transsexual) while editing and shaping the narrative in ways that make them accessible to readers. I think what you might call "mediated citizen journalism" has an important place in the future world.

My "takeaways" here weren't edibles, but some interesting DVDs of films made by students of previous graduating classes at the school. (But on local recommendation I did finish the evening at the vegetarian Koppel-Cafe, situated in a complex of artists' studios, which I'd definitely recommend to anyone visiting Hamburg.)

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