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Sprechen Sie Trash?

Diamonds in the Rubbish

A few times a year, Germans put unwanted stuff on the sidewalk for pickup. Other Germans pick through the piles for that carelessly discarded gem. It's the country's unofficial national sport.

I remember finding him lying in a garbage bin in the alley next to my house. How could someone sink so low, I thought to myself while contemplating his head resting on an empty can of soup? What could drive a person to throw away a perfectly good G.I. Joe action figure? The joy in my six-year-old heart on finding this treasure knew no bounds. Beyond the excitement was the almost diabolical thrill of discovering something valuable that some witless clod had thrown away. It combined the adrenaline rush of stealing without the danger or feelings of guilt. This I decided was a lesson worth remembering.

Since those days, I am happy to report, I am still able to conjure up those feelings of yesteryear. The excitement of the find, the internal cry of “Eureka” and the self-satisfied grin while hauling some discarded jewel away.

I'm talking, of course, about the unofficial German sport of Sperrmüll hunting. Sperrmüll is nothing else than those odds and ends clogging the attics and cellars in Germany -- bits of once-valuable junk for which they no longer see a use: a worn oriental carpet here, a defective Power Rangers alarm clock there. Every couple of months, these items are set out on the sidewalk and picked up by trash trucks the following morning. That is if a passer by -- like myself -- doesn’t sort through the stuff first. Officially, very few Germans admit to surreptitiously nabbing junk from the sidewalk. Like women's mud wrestling, dwarf tossing and cockfighting, it’s a sport that only the brazen would openly say they enjoy or participate in. But on any night when the good citizens have stacked their rubbish on the street corner and gone back to watching the 7 o’clock news, you’ll find the junk foragers slowly cruising by carefully inspecting every pile. Kind of like dumpster diving without the dumpster.

“The best stuff can be found in the country. The farmers have no idea of what they’re throwing away," a German colleague once told me. A good tip worth exploring, I thought -- and it turned out to be true. My rule of thumb: the more remote the farm house, the greater the chance of finding a wonderfully intact piece of mahogany furniture. All the better for a chap like myself searching for that Biedermeier chest of drawers.

Of course I could just go out and buy one -- and it's not that I couldn't afford it. But the joy of the hunt brings me back to that pure thrill I felt as a child. And being on the other side of the Sperrmüll divide can be just as much fun. On a Sperrmüll evening a few weeks ago, I placed a battered chrome grill on our street corner -- the kind that any self-respecting cutlet wouldn’t be caught dead on. But I didn't just throw it out on the street corner. Rather, I tried to present it as attractively as possible. I placed it next to items of lesser optical value and gave it a rakish tilt so its metal surface would reflect the last rays of the setting evening sun.

It was gone in 15 minutes.

Contributed by Ian Scott Paterson, a native of Ventura, California who is currently living and working in Hamburg.