Yes, one shouldn't complain.
And sure, it's a luxury problem.
But the fact that a virus has shrunk the world through which one moves into a provincial nest for more than a year is really annoying.
No weekend trip to Paris, no sunburn on a Mediterranean beach, no flight over the ocean: our surroundings have become terribly small.
Alexander Juergs
Editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
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But what does it do with someone whose art depends on traveling through distant lands when he can no longer go out into the world?
Where do you go when you, as a writer and travel journalist, talk about these sometimes more, sometimes less distant worlds when travel is next to impossible?
Where does he satisfy his wanderlust?
Eckhart Nickel suggests the Nice Garden on Frankfurt's bank of the Main as a meeting place for a conversation and a walk.
And he also sends a digital illustration, a painting by Max Beckmann, who captured this place in rich oil paints and with angular lines: “The Nice in Frankfurt am Main”, painted in 1921, by the Städtische Galerie in the following year Bought in Frankfurt, defamed as "degenerate art" by the Nazis, in the collection of the Kunstmuseum Basel since 1939, inventory number 1737.
A lot in this picture, says Nickel, expresses his longing for the world outside.
The strange little airplane in the sky, the overgrown plants, the train tracks in the foreground of the picture, the sound of this word: Nice.
“Art,” says Nickel, “is an invitation to see the world”.
He wrote his first travel story as a schoolboy.
He wrote about the graduation trip of his class to Rome.
He called his report “summary of a group trip”.
It was not printed.
But the writer says he still has the manuscript.
Keeps like many other notes, poems, drawings and pictures that he has accumulated over the years.
Later, the editorial offices tear themselves up after his stories from distant countries.
Nickel, born in 1966, writes for magazines such as Tempo, Architectural Digest and the Süddeutsche Zeitung, and his travel reports are still published in the FAZ to this day.
Together with the author Christian Kracht, he brings out the volume “Ferien für immer”, a collection of special places all over the world.
For a while he lived in Nepal's capital Kathmandu, where he ran the literary magazine Der Freund for Springer Verlag, and later in California and France.
Today he is back at home where he grew up: in the Frankfurt district of Bergen-Enkheim.
Style and clothing mean a lot to him
White jeans, beige jacket, fine shirt and silk scarf, the legendary Clarks Desert Boots on his feet: this is how the writer appears in the park on the banks of the Main, a little dandy, a little adventurer. Anyone who has read even a small selection of his stories will have noticed that style and clothing mean a lot to him, that he loves to worry about it.
Nickel says that he first became aware of the Nice Garden through Beckmann's painting, that he was not familiar with the park, in which palm trees and banana plants had already grown at the beginning of the 20th century, before he discovered Beckmann's work in an exhibition in the Städel in the winter of 1983 . At that time he was often out and about with school friends in the Frankfurt museums and sometimes dreamed of becoming a painter and draftsman himself. He loved to debate and argue about art. "We had Beckmann's followers and Picasso's followers," he recalls. "It was a question of faith like whether you listen to the Beatles or the Rolling Stones."
It was never difficult for him to make up his mind. Nickel's heart was clearly beating for the Fab Four from Liverpool - and for the painter Beckmann, who lived in Frankfurt from 1915 to 1933. Fascinated by his works, he went in search of the places that Beckmann had captured in the city and discovered, among other things, the Nice on the Main, the enchanting, peculiar park, which is still home to many Frankfurters today, so Nickels Guess, not really know. And that is why it is a perfect travel destination when you can no longer get into the big wide world.