When Art Guided my Exploration of a City

Jazzy, funky cartwheeler, found at the Graf Adolf Platz. The one that made me realize there were more.

Shall I cross the street, or turn right here?
Hmm, this looks like a nice street, let’s see what’s here.
If I go here, then go left somewhere, I think I end up at that cafe.

Some of the thoughts I could have when faced with choices where a decision is needed to continue exploring a city. Wandering around is such a great way of exploring a city. It’s what I did when I had just moved to the Düsseldorf area. Getting to know the city, by walking its streets, guided by chance and a sense of direction that can fail in a place that is not built on a grid of straight lines. Which happens to often be the case in European cities, especially in the older parts. And so I walk. Deciding which corner to turn, or not, when I reach it. Based sometimes on the vague outlines of a vague plan, but mostly on gut feeling.

And so it happened, that on one of my expeditions, after turning one of these corners I decided to turn, I noticed the Haringesque statue. It was a figure standing on his (or her) hand. It had me puzzled for a bit. I had seen it before. When we first visited this city on the Rhine to see if we wanted to live here. But this one seemed different. As if it had been redone. Maybe even shrunk a little.

The Radschlager outside the Uerige brewery in the Old Town. The first one I saw.

Turned out, I had stumbled upon a new guiding principle for my explorations of the city. I had a goal. One that had discovering streets I hadn’t been to before, built into it. What is was? Finding as many cartwheelers of the series I could.

In a very different style, outside the Schadow Arkaden, on a square that looks very different today.

The cartwheelers, or in Düsseldorferish: the Radschläger, are symbolic to the capital of Nordrhein-Westphalia. Somehow, there are several legends that this symbol is said to be born out of. There is the story of children cartwheeling around town to celebrate some victory over an enemy, which could be in line with the statue that can be found in the heart of the city at the Burgplatz.

Children cartwheeling on the Burgplatz in the heart of the Old Town.

My favorite version might not be the most historically accurate one, though. It involves the spokes of one wheel of a carriage carrying a marrying couple breaking, and a man offering himself as replacement for the spokes, making the wheel function as a wheel again, and litteraly cartwheeling the couple in question to their happy-ever-after.

The origin of the Radschläger symbol is puzzling. Maybe that’s what this one depicts.

Cartwheeling is so much ingrained in the Düsseldorf-spirit, that in the time I lived there, a recently elected lord-mayor, whose campaign featured poster with him as a Radschlager on it, celebrated his election victory by cartwheeling along the half-way line of the local top flight football club. I’m not a cartwheeler, myself. But I do like discovering the nooks and crannies of a place I moved to.

When it comes to cartwheeling, some politicians have been known to keep election promises.