He who pays the piper calls the tune

I've long been intriegued by the German mania for orderliness, and my visit to the Hanseatic city of Lübeck gave me some further affirmation of my growing conviction that what I believe is called Gründlichkeit is deeply ingrained in the German psyche. It's a characteristic that at the same time both horrifies and humbles me. I'm glad to be humbled, but my own more comfortable relationship with chaos makes me take a sharp intake of breathe.

My attention was first aroused while driving through Schleswig-Holstein. At first awestruck by the sheer volume of windturbines; I passed more neatly aligned rows of them in half an hour here than a day's travel across Anglesey yields. I sat (in my outstandingly dirty Jeep) in an immaculately groomed and purposefully engineered layby wondering how many English Public Enquiries one would have to battle through in the UK to achieve this? Humbled. All a tribute to planners and the local construction industry. I doff my cap in reverence.

There's a certain ad hoc-ness about British builders that's well known. "It looked like a building site" is an English phrase used to describe a mess. The phrase may not travel so well here. I got a reminder of that later in the day, in St Mary's, where a chunk of building stone dropped by a careless mason a few centuries ago is now labelled the Teufelstein (Devil's Stone), a historic reminder to later generations of the trowel-trades that tidying up at the end of a job is virtuous.

The Hospital of the Holy Spirit, too, must have been setting privacy standards in health care for the elderly since the Middle Ages. The rows of sickbeds each in their own enclosure makes an interesting contrast with contemporary English geriatric wards. Apparently these were last used up until 1969, and how the aroma of pee and lavender was dealt with remains undocumented. Not so good for social interaction, but everything clearly in its place for the last few centuries.

The merchants of this city, too, knew something about sorting things out. The shipping merchants met in a city-centre pub and wheeled and dealed over their shipping arrangements around this part of the globe, and for many traded commodities it was the Hanseatic League that pretty much had an iron grip on pricing and shipping since its first appearance in the 12th century. The situation got a bit flaky in the late 1500s but the League survived until 1892. Even then the tenacity of the "free" Hanseatic cities continued. Indeed, the Senate of Lübeck did not permit Adolf Hitler to speak in Lübeck during his election campaign. Powerful chaps, these.

The power of being organised didn't escape the notice of the craftsmen of Lubeck, either. In the middle ages their formation into guilds allowed them to take on the Church and various civil authorities. Craftsmen built personalised marks of authentication of origin into their work, known as Kennzeichen, (and this word has to this day crept into the amazingly ordered system of German car numberplate registration)

Organisation is something that has to be practiced and perfected, too, if one is to overcome the adversity that humanity, society and Mother Nature sometimes throws at you. Later on in Travemunde, the seaport and seaside neighbour of Lubeck, the THW (Technische Hilfswerk) had turned up for a practice at dealing with an oilspill. Every piece of shiny new equipment seemed like something in the same league as those in my childhood's Thunderbirds TV show. The beach was fenced off. The sand was carefully levelled. Temporary roadways were laid. The manuals were to hand. The catering was laid on. Not a detail was missed. Only the orchestra for the theme music was missing... only I expect they were timed to arrive later on.