Rüdiger Moos - a nonexistent German place in Rotterdam

Imagining a place that I did not see in a dream - it was revealed in a bus stop

And now it exists at least on the internet.

Note: This is not the best picture. Better ones are below. This should be more subtle.

A long time ago I sat in one of those glass bus shelters and waited. Then the bus came and I saw its destination mirrored in the glass of the bus shelter. The bus said: Kralingse Zoom. But in the reflecting glass I read: Rüdiger Moos. From that moment that nonexistent German place has taken root in my subconscious. If I take the right Rotterdam bus, and drive it to its last stop, then I will be in Rüdiger Moos. How will it look there?

Kralingse Zoom is a big metro and bus hub on the outskirts of Rotterdam. Many lines go there. The explanation for Moos is simple, it's just the mirror image of Zoom. It is unclear where Rüdiger came from.

There is no Rüdiger Moos in Germany and these places gave the best fit:

• Rüdigheim, Neuberg

 

• Rüdigheim, Amöneburg

• Rudingshain, Schotten

• Rüdigerstraße, Wurzburg

And because there is no Google street view in Germany I just tried to find the nearest Google photo to these places. Sometimes these were far away. From these random places the following photographs matched my imagination the best and clarified my ideas about this place.

It must be a place on the outskirts, at the edge of the city. There must be some semi-wild nature, preferably neglected, but also traces of urbanity. 

There must be trees and some darkness. It should not be a totally open field. Preferably a clearing, with some dead trees, preferably birch trees.

Preferably at the end of the road. Where you can go no further by car or by public transport. Where it is dark and lonely at night. Like Thomas Ligotti writes in Noctuary in The Strange Design Of Master Rignolo:

 "So I was going to tell you," Grissul began, "that I was out in that field, the one behind those empty buildings at the edge of town where everything just slides away and goes off in all directions. And there's a marsh by there, makes the ground a little, I don't know, stringy or something. No trees, though, only a lot of wild grass, reeds, you know where I mean?" 

"I now have a good idea," Nolon replied, a trifle bored or at least pretending to be.

"This was a little before dark that I was there. A little before the stars began to come out. I really wasn't planning to do anything, let me say that. I just walked some ways out onto the field, changed direction a few times, walked a ways more. Then I saw something through a blind of huge stalks of some kind, skinny as your finger but with these great spiky heads on top. And really very stiff, not bending at all, just sort of wobbling in the breeze. They might well have creaked, I don't know, when I pushed my way through to see beyond them. Then I knelt down to get a better look at what was there on the ground. [*** see also below] 

The place might even look like the view from the parking garage of the Kralingse Zoom itself. The semi neglected nature next to the highway. Even though you're just meters from civilization you're also totally on your own there. No one goes there:

It might look like the semi-wild nature that you can see from your train window. Most likely you will never walk there. You most probably ignore it as the eyesore it is. And you ignore its haunting beauty. That's how Rüdiger Moos operates. It makes itself invisible, but in the meantime its haunting atmosphere permeates the whole city.

[***] I asked an early version of ChatGPT to generate illustrations for this story. And the results are here: Urban Adventure in Rotterdam: Thomas Ligotti - The strange designs of Master Rignolo 1

The pictures are here:

 

Yesterday I asked Copilot to generate an image. But it is too romantic:

Copilot:

This scene captures the poetic tension between civilization and wilderness. A winding dirt path draws the eye from the moorland foreground into the hazy silhouette of a distant city, nestled among trees. Heather and gorse bloom in purples and golds, while a windswept pine tree stands sentinel, its twisted trunk hinting at years of weather and solitude. The sky glows with late afternoon light, casting a golden hue across the terrain and softening the edges of church spires and rooftops beyond.

It feels like the kind of place where you could walk for hours, letting the city fade behind you as the quiet of nature takes over. If you'd like, I can help you write a story or poem inspired by this setting next.

Copilot:

This isn’t the kind of place that gets postcards. It’s the kind of place that feels like it’s waiting for something to happen—or maybe like something already did, and no one talks about it. The clearing is rough and uneven, with stringy marsh grass and patches of standing water that reflect the gray sky like broken glass. A couple of dead birch trees stand like forgotten sentinels, their bark peeling in long strips, skeletal branches reaching out as if to snag the wind.

The bus stop is there, squat and utilitarian, with a faded sign that reads “RÜDIGER MOOS.” It looks like no one’s waited there in years, but the bench still holds the shape of someone who might’ve sat too long. Behind it, the forest presses in—dense, dark, and indifferent. You can just make out the edge of the city beyond the trees: a few rooftops, a distant tower, the ghost of urban order dissolving into the wild.

It’s the kind of place Grissul would talk about in a low voice, like it’s not just geography but memory. If you want, we could write a short story set here, or even build a map of the surrounding area. There's something hauntingly rich about this edge-space.