Greetings from... Your Brightest Possible Future

t’s a real pity, Gesine Bänfer wanted us to know, that we couldn’t have visited her daughter’s kindergarten at the end of last week. This scene was fine and all, she conceded: The building a low-slung, primary-coloured series of attached, self-contained classroom units, each with its own patio and garden, like a row of holiday condos. Vines hanging from trellises for shade. The sloped roof tiled in solar panels. A communal cob oven out here in the rear courtyard where the kids learn to bake. Gleeful German five-year-olds streaming out the main entrance — there was Gesine’s daughter Stevie now — and onto automobile-free streets, strolling toward their ultra-efficient, mostly solar-heated homes, there to munch on exquisite Brötchen from the neighbourhood bakery and continue the process, evidently already under way, of evolution onto a higher plane of existence.

Sure. Ja. Sehr gut. This is Vauban, after all, where Time magazine named each of the 5,000 residents a 2009 Hero of the Environment. They earned the laurel for the simple virtue of living in gentle, enlightened harmony with the earth in this extraordinary suburb, which was erected over the past decade on the ruins of a Cold War French military base on the outskirts of the storied Black Forest city of Freiburg. And so, yes, there is much here to delight in. There is Gesine, and there is her English-bred partner Ian Harrison and their three lovely preteen girls, and there is the music Ian and Gesine make together on medieval instruments by way of a career. There is their cozy Passivhaus, a marvel of solar heat retention that, like every other dwelling in Vauban, requires no more than 30 percent of the usual energy budget for a German home. There’s the general store around the corner, just a couple of years old but already the bustling hub of the community — “the spider in the web,” Ian calls it with offhand, Vaubanesque pride — and the frequent trams gliding quietly through on tracks covered in lush grass. There is the Wagenburg squatter community, sewn seamlessly into the social fabric along with students in hyper-efficient apartments over here, seniors in ultra-accessible ones over there, and artists and designers and craftspeople in studio spaces around the way. There are the wide, ample biking and walking paths, the communal play areas, the little copses of forest primeval here and there with tree houses and swings built right in, and the chicken coop next to the district heating facility, where your kids can learn how to handle live poultry, and you can leave fifty enlightened post-national euro cents if you need an egg.

Yes, there is this whole Vauban scene, as if some Teutonic wizard had ransacked the dreams of every idealistic urban planner in the free world and stitched together all the bits and pieces of walkable, mid-rise, mixed-use, transit-friendly, eco-conscious design in the lee of a Black Forest hillside as the setting for a fairy tale called Little Green Riding Hood Rescues Hansel & Gretel and They All Flee the Dark Forest to Live Together in Solar-Powered Social-Democratic Harmony So Luminous It Convinces the Wolf to Self-Domesticate and Form a Limited Partnership with the Witch to Provide Efficiency Retrofits at Reasonable Prices. Yes, yes. All that. Lovely. Wunderbar.

But you see, Gesine told my wife and me, if we’d come at the end of last week — well, the kids were harvesting and cooking the potatoes they’d grown for themselves. And wouldn’t that have been, you know, double-plus lovely? Superwunderbar ?

I know this part of Germany. Or I thought I did. My father, a fighter pilot in the Canadian Air Force, was posted to southwestern Germany in the early 1990s — first at CFB Baden-Soellingen, the Canadian base an hour up the Autobahn from here, then a bit farther north, at the mammoth US base at Ramstein, for a NATO job. I worked summers and spent my holidays in the region as an undergrad, gawking at Gothic cathedrals and drinking Glühwein in the Christmas markets.

Those bases were fully steeped in the folklore of the postwar Pax Americana, thickened in those days with the giddy first flush of fallen–Iron Curtain victory. Freiburg was a pleasant day trip, a museum piece full of winding cobblestone laneways from which to peruse medieval battlements. Germany in general was a pair of mangled orphan twins still learning to walk again after the horrific excesses of their deranged parents, Nazi and Communist alike. There were variations on the theme farther afield. Spain was a charmingly underdeveloped backwater, just beginning to recover from its own escape from the fascist boot. France was a theme park with union problems. Italy was a theme park with management problems. Scandinavia was a tidy but rather glum branch plant of the emerging global economy, specializing in safe cars and disposable college apartment furniture. And who knew how long it’d be before anything east of the Elbe resembled modernity? These were fine old countries, sure, picturesque on the front of a postcard, but it was North America that was going to lead the way — culturally, politically, and industrially — out of Europe’s dark century.

On the edge of the main residential area at CFB Baden-Soellingen stood a small retail strip with a German-style café-bar above it — the preferred hangout for Canadian teenagers. I was a regular there in the summer of 1992, occasionally finding myself amid a table or two of young labourers recently arrived from the collapsed GDR. They favoured denim jackets and heavy metal T-shirts, and between our fragmented German and their fumbling English we figured out that they liked the place because it was so Western — by which they evidently meant non-European. North American. The next frontier.

Our conversations were inevitably disjointed and pilsner hazed, but what I remember is that every one of those East Germans had vague ambitions of emigrating to America, and that when you asked them why, they described a place that sounded like a Coca-Cola ad randomly spliced with clips from rock videos and action movies. I remember even more clearly the sense of offhand pride I felt at living out someone else’s fantasy. They kind of wanted to be me. It was intoxicating.

Not twenty years later, I stood in the courtyard of the kindergarten in Vauban and felt something akin to vertigo at the dramatic inversion of roles. I also felt something I’d never experienced in Germany: naked envy. Worse than that — I felt deprived. Underprivileged. Needy. If only my kids could look forward to attending a school this lavish in its amenities, this thoughtful in its design, this enlightened and new. I felt a little bit like some miserable wretch on the deck of an old immigrant steamer, wrapped in a tattered blanket against the maritime chill, gazing in wonder at the New York skyline.

It wasn’t just the solar-tiled, potato-farmed kindergarten. I could expand my purview in concentric circles of awe: from Vauban to Freiburg, overseen by the first Green Party mayor of a major German municipality; from the municipal government to the federal, which passed the world’s most ambitious renewable energy legislation in Berlin’s revamped Reichstag (it now produces more energy than it consumes, thanks to a Norman Foster retrofit); and from there to western Europe as a whole. A great chain of innovation stretching from Scandinavia to the south of Spain, ultimately encompassing all the essential infrastructure of our brightest possible future.

If you accept the premise (and I do, as basically all of Europe does, despite the diversionary tactics of an intransigent chattering class here in North America that would have us believe a poorly worded email or two negates a hundred years of scientific inquiry since the greenhouse effect was first detected) that beating climate change and ending fossil fuel dependency together represent the defining challenge of the twenty-first century, then its first, tumultuous decade gives every indication that the innovations needed to overcome that challenge will happen in Europe. After a century as Western Civilization’s primary battleground and museum of antiquities, Europe has again become its pace-setting think tank and laboratory.