Jumping Geriatrics

Senior citizens are a highly misunderstood group of Germans. Their sole purpose in life is not -- despite what many people think -- to shut down their young neighbor's parties by calling the police, to grumble about dog poop in the streets, or throw hysterical fits if their train arrives five minutes behind schedule.

Senior citizens are also politically conscious and active people. Last year, a German activist group called Gray Panthers celebrated its 30th anniversary of fighting for senior rights. In 1989, the Gray Panthers even established a political wing -- the Grays -- a party whose results usually appeared as an invisible condiment on the smallest slice of an election pie-chart marked "others."

But even the Grays' political invisibility seems to be becoming a thing of the past. In the last municipal elections in Berlin, the Grays won the unprecedented 3.8 percent of the votes. German seniors are coming. With a vengeance.

Let's play

Clever politicians know how to spot trends early. That is why the Bavarian city of Nuremberg decided to jump on the bandwagon of senior renaissance and open a senior citizens' playground, where grandmas and grandpas could get together to bowl, play chess or simply hang out with their peers. If you're under 60: tough luck! You'll have to look for friends elsewhere.

"It will be a place where the senior generation can find a refuge from younger people," said Deputy Mayor Horst Förther, who is also in charge of sport activities in the city. "We agreed that it was a good idea, given our demographic changes."

The project in Nuremberg was inspired by research from the Finnish university of Lapland. The experiments with what Finnish researchers called "three-generational play" showed that senior citizens experienced significant improvements in balance, co-ordination and speed after only three months of "playing."

Dangers ahead

"I am considering a running track, a path for roller-skating, a soft badminton court and a trampoline, which is easy on the joints," Förther said. "All activities can be carried out slowly so that the old people aren't pushed beyond their limits."

Parents who ever made the fatal mistake of purchasing a trampoline for their children -- losing, as a consequence, the peace of their mind and the quiet of their garden -- would beg to differ. A trampoline may be easy on the joints, but it is known to produce an adrenaline rush in children on pair with bungee jumping off the Chinese Yangtze river tamer known as the Three Gorges Dam. It turns children into wild, uncontrollable, self-sustainable noise-machines. It may have the same effect on senior citizens.

"Retired people need a space to be themselves without someone coming along and spilling ice-cream on their trousers or breakdancing," said social worker Andrea Weber, who specializes in the lifestyle of the elderly.

A cultural shift

Aside from the question whether ice-cream eating breakdancers have nothing better to do than throw scoops of chocolate-vanilla gelato at the local senior population, the German war of generations may take a turn for the bizarre.

If, in early afternoon hours, playgrounds start filling with bouncing and screaming grandpas, those very same young people who had their party shut down the night before by their intolerant neighbors, may have to resort to calling the police to whine about the jumping geriatrics of Germany ruining their alternative, hung-over, 4-pm breakfast.

Things could get really interesting.