Munich, an eventful Sunday night
Last Monday, the zealous mouthpieces of the Bavarian prefecture were a little disoriented in their reports of the Sunday news. Whereas the first weekend of December had been marked by snowfalls that temporarily blocked rail and air traffic in Munich, the following weekend saw heat spikes that were as sudden as they were unusual. The fires were anything but accidental, and came at the very beginning of winter, putting a number of structures of domination out of action.
Without an image, without a word, and in three different places: in the Forstenrieder forest to the south-west of the city, in the Perlach forest further south, and also right in the middle of Munich, under a bridge spanning the Isar river. In the first two cases which were a bit more rural, as one major regional newspaper put it, “it would be a huge coincidence if two heavy, bulky and expensive forestry machines far apart from each other were to catch fire at the same time due to technical faults”. In each case, it was a tree feller – a machine costing 500,000 euros apiece to cut, delimb and chop down trees in no time at all – that went up in flames under the stars.
On the night of December 14/15, in the middle of the Forstenrieder Park near Pullach, between the A95 freeway and Wolfratshauser Straße, two new forestry machines parked 30 metres apart went up in smoke. The attack took place during the night, and firefighters had only to extinguish the remains of the smoking carcasses in the early hours of the morning.
