Stuttgart, Mercedes, Porsche and some Solitude

(From 2011)

If all goes well then it takes a few hours to drive from Munich to Stuttgart on the autobahn. If there is an enormous traffic jam on the autobahn then it might take a little bit longer. Stuttgart would be our final big city stop before returning to Strasbourg to complete the trip. The hold up on the motorway had cost quite a bit of the afternoon and it was getting on for three pm by the time we got to the hotel. The hotel was near the airport, quite a distance from the centre, but the local railway station was a few minutes away by foot. As it turned out the train wasn't quite the effortlessly fast magic carpet to the centre that we had imagined. It was quiet, clean and not-crowded but there were many stops between the airport and the stop at the city's zoo - the destination we had chosen because it was a sunny afternoon and we could take or leave how much of the zoo we could look around before it closed. The clock was pushing past four-fifteen when we reached the entrance gates to 'Wilhelma' - the curious semi-official nickname for Stuttgart's zoo. 'Wilhelma' is named after a elephant that was once kept there, but might as well be named after the thousands of other individuals called Wilhelma since it's a normal human name too.

The zoo's website had said that although the ticket windows closed at three, tickets could still be bought at machines until five. All that was missing was to mention that the ticket machines were by the car park and not the ticket windows. So the staff at the gate taking tickets were spending all their time pointing the way to the ticket machines to just about everybody who showed up. If only somebody could invent the written language so signs saying '<--- Buy Tickets at Machines This Way' could be created. One day.

This being Germany one might expect the gates to slam shut promptly as the clock strikes the hour. This wasn't quite what happened. We were still walking around at six, and most of the buildings didn't close until six-thirty. None of the building's occupants looked bothered by the lateness of the hour. We walked around the handsome glasshouse, up the terrace past large bird cages, through a grove of giant sequoia trees - familiar from California but a strange sight in urban Germany - past the bears (polar and black), up to the very top of the hill where there was a small farm setup. The zoo was part of a larger park and at this end the only separation between the two was a modest wire fence. There were still plenty of people around, in fact there were more in the zoo than in the park.

The donkeys, camels, cows and bison in the 'farm' area lived a more al-fresco lifestyle than the rest of the zoo, (at least at the later hour). The giraffes, elephants and the leopard were all inside eating, either by choice or because the keepers needed to clean the enclosures. Despite the signs asking visitors not to use flashes on cameras there was at least one person enthusiastically talking flash pictures of the giraffes. The largest one promptly lumbered as far away as possible and turned it's back, in much the same way that cats beat an escape from shrieking four-year olds. People like this fascinate me sometimes. How can one possibly be that oblivious to the prominently posted signs? Language barriers aren't an excuse as the signs are all pictographs  The most satisfying explanation is that these same people are responsible for all the other little inconsiderate actions; not indicating in cars; proferring hugely large bank notes for tiny purchases; talking in cinema; standing stock still at the top of escalators. It would be nice to know that everyone else is a thoroughly decent person who isn't the bane of the poor zoo giraffes day.

As usual the most fascinating yet inert animals at the zoo were the big cats. The sole visible tiger was laying on it's back on a wooden platform in an uncomfortable position. Inside the cat house things were a bit more lively - the leopard was eating from it's bowl, looking like a giant house cat. There was a Serval, the African desert cat, sitting calmly watching anybody who walked past. In the front of it's cage was a large rock. Peering into it's cage at it's eye level I walked from side to side behind the large rock and every time the serval's gaze would be waiting for me. It moved it's head but I never saw it's head move. A ninja cat in other words. It was nearing seven pm and the zoo still wasn't closed. We walked through the still-open aquarium and reptile house to the front gate. Not bad considering there had been no reason not to believe the place would only be open for forty five minutes when we paid at four twenty. We took the tram back to the central Hauptbahnhof , and walked up the main pedestrian street into town, the process passing by the Steingenberger Graf Zeppelin hotel opposite the station where three of us had stayed for a few nights in 1999. The hotel restaurant where we had enjoyed some of the slowest service in Germany was still there on the ground floor on a side street.

We found our way through the surprisingly large crowds of late-evening shoppers to a Turkish bistro that was one of the better restaurants we found on the trip. For such a deceptively large establishment (there was a large outdoor terrace on the other side of the building) the service was relatively speedy by European standards. They provided separate German and English menus that didn't quite match each other but still allowed the satisfaction of being able to order in German from a German menu with full knowledge of precisely what one was asking for.

Both Porsche and Mercedes Benz are based in Stuttgart and extraordinary fact when thought about. Firstly in a world with only a few premium large volume car companies here are two in the same city. Secondly Stuttgart isn't a really big city, the population is 600,000, about the same as Glasgow, and way fewer than Munich's 1,300,000. Thirdly they have somehow never trodden on each others toes too much; Porsche makes sports cars, Mercedes makes everything including sports cars but the giant has never put the minnow out of business. Coming from a country where all the car companies are now merely 'brands' in a foreign ownership, and all the car factories are now empty spaces in the suburbs of Birmingham and Coventry  I might also add that it is also extraordinary that Porsche and Mercedes are still in their original locations, more or less. The original Daimler Motorwagen works began in Bad Cannstatt, Unterturkheim in 1890 and is still there today. This was our last full day on the road before returning to our respective homes and we made the most of it by seeing both museums. As we had done in 1999 in fact, but those had been the old museums, and both had been replaced by shiny new ones.

Both museums were huge improvements, but the contrast was greater at Porsche. The Porsche museum used to be a small dingy showroom by the main gates. Now it was an intergalactic building across the road from the factory gates. A big silver geometric lump sat over a glass atrium and supported by the pillars containing the escalators. Looked up a directly from above the reflective lower surface sent back distance reflections of us peering up at it, taking photos. At Mercedes the big improvement was moving the museum out of the factory grounds. Before we'd got on a bus and been driven down a back road behind large industrial-looking sheds to the museum, hidden amongst the sea of walls and windows. Now the whole shebang had been moved to a building that looked something like a giant submarine conning tower, clad in satin-finish silver panels with 'Mercedes-Benz' emblazoned on the top level. Once again this was a museum that began at the top level; only Mercedes had topped everyone else with a vertiginous atrium with pod-like lifts climbing up the inner walls like something out of a Star Trek set.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Back to the Porsche Platz, containing many of the holy relics. After riding up the entrance escalator we entered the main space. It was clinical white and immaculately kept, but far from being sterile and cold. This is because everything was organised together well; here the oldest cars in chronological order, there the earliest production road cars, here the many Le Mans cars, there the concept cars. Most pleasingly nothing seemed to take priority over anything else. The only special plinth belonged to the first streamlined Porsche prototype - only an empty shell, but setting the design direction for nearly everything that followed. Many of the cars had small computer monitors next to them with information, pictures and videos. They were mounted on swiveling posts and worked by pushing the side of the monitor in the direction you wanted to navigate; an interesting idea in theory but a handful in practice. What would happen would be that to move along to the next picture I would push the monitor right, at which the screen would roll over three pictures. So I pushed it back left but slightly up too, at which the pictures rolled left and up a level. So I gave up and looked at this picture instead. Designers sometimes forget that some things (in this case monitors with touch screens) are so very good at what they do that there is no need to do anything differently. And museum designers seem to be especially prone to this. The museum cafe provided another example of needless rethinking; absolutely everybody who came in had to have the system of picking up a small swipe card which then was placed on little slot machine at the counter to order and carried to the cashier on exit. In theory it had advantages; the counter staff didn't need to listen for orders in broken German from hundreds of foreign visitors, and cashier only had to take payments once when people left. In practice the counter staff and cashier had to spent their entire time explaining the system to people so completely used the usual cafeteria system that it is probably burned into their motor-cortex somewhere next to the brushing of teeth and using bank machines.

Porsche is relative small-fry compared to the enormousness of Mercedes but that gave their museum the feel of an small art gallery or cathedral, rather than the grand "everything-and-the-kitchen-sink" approach of their neighbour across the city. That feeling that everything contained within must be in some way important and storied. Most of Porsche Le Mans winners were inside, as was their sole Formula One winner, their Dakar rally winner, and other road-car prototypes and notable cars, including the one millionth Porsche 911 that was given to the German police as a patrol car. Not that these cars were too holy to touch; there was a well-mannered young guide showing round a bunch of Australians, stopping at many cars and deftly opening the engine covers and doors, thus attracting the attention of more camera-toting gawkers such as myself. It was clear from the big service bay on the ground floor and the general condition of the working parts that most of these cars were kept in working order and could be wheeled out tomorrow and driven at the Goodwood Festival in a moments notice.

At Mercedes-Benz things were on a slightly bigger scale; whole floors were given over to specific decades. It took a whole gallery just to reach the formation of the modern company, from the separate Benz and Daimler companies and incorporating the Mercedes moniker from one of Daimler's sporty models - named in turn after the daughter of one of Daimler's best customers. As well as the chronological display of cars were large side rooms given over to buses, trucks, earth movers and everything else with a three-pointed star on the nose. It was an eclectic selection; an Edwardian London bus, a sinister looking 1930s German ambulance, the Formula One medical car, the 1974 German World Cup team bus (or a replica since the original is missing presumed lost), Princess Diana's 300SL (she had to swap it for a Jaguar after government pressure to be more patriotic), and Hirohito's Daimler (he didn't have to swap because Japan didn't have Lexus at the time). Down in the ground floor was yet another display of racing cars in starting-grid formation along the edge of the room, so the display could only be seen from one side. It is clearly either the fashion or convenient way of keeping visitors grubby fingers a safe distance from the most precious metal. For that reason I think my favourite car in the place was the 1955 'Uhlenhaut Coupe' (named after the chief engineer). It was racing car in disguise; meant to be used in 1956 but when Mercedes withdrew from racing after the Le Mans disaster it got turned into the chief designers personal runabout which he used to commute between Munich and Stuttgart regularly at speeds over 150mph. In 1956. Since it was technically a 'road car' it wasn;t in the racing hall grid but perched on a plinth a few floors above, where I paced around it taking pictures of its rather wonderful profile and exquisite details.

It was getting on for four pm when we finished in the Mercedes museum and time to proceed back to Strasbourg. On the outskirts of Stuttgart I took us on a brief detour round an old road racing circuit called Solitude-ring. It was only in the Porsche museum that I had learnt that the track that was once a prominent non-Championship Formula One venue in the 1950s and 1960s was even in Stuttgart. And it was only while leaving Mercedes that I spotted where it was on the map. It was so obvious I had looked right past it several times - a red triangle of roads right next to the motorway. This had demanded a unilateral decision; I wasn't driving right past a famous old racetrack eight hundred miles from home without taking a lap. So we did, and miraculously didn't get lost and were back on the way to Strasbourg within a quarter of an hour. This made me quietly very pleased with my tour-guide instincts.