Oh, god, what an artsy-fartsy place, says Robert when he learns that my hometown is Shelburne Falls. German has no word for the English homesickness. Closest is the phrase heimat sehnsucht: longing for, or literally, searching for the sight of, one’s homeland. I see Shelburne in the farm land outside Freiburg but not within the the city itself. If Shelburne Falls were bigger, it might, like Freiburg, be described as idyllic, and that would make it unbearable to me. Wim Wenders notes a problem with cities that “do not permit neglect”: they have the quality of a museum. Eighty percent of Freiburg was burned to the ground during the second world war; so much of it was rebuilt in the same style, though, that I can’t help feeling they would do well to raze it all over again, excepting, perhaps, the city’s greatest attraction, the Münster, which is made out of sandstone: so it’s constantly crumbling.