Laisa/Mühlheim am Main (dpa/lhe) - Local call systems were once commonplace in Hesse. Today they are only used in a few villages. In Laisa in North Hesse, for example, a district of Battenberg in the Waldeck-Frankenberg district, Mayor Jörg Paulus regularly informs the 560 residents of the town about the technology from the 1950s. "You can inform people at very short notice. The announcements are only in the newspaper the next day," said Paulus, himself a journalist at a local daily newspaper.

"There used to be such systems in almost every village. They were the local means of providing information about what was going on in the village," said the managing director of the Hessian Association of Towns and Municipalities, Johannes Heger. The technology replaced community servants who would otherwise roam the towns and provide them with messages. Today the systems can only be found sporadically, said Heger. A technique like that in Laisa still exists in Hesse in several districts of Dautphetal (Lahn-Dill-Kreis) and in the Wächtersbach district of Leisenwald (Main-Kinzig-Kreis).

Paulus announces community news over around 30 loudspeakers in town, provides information about local club life and events. The system is not pure nostalgia, but enables active village life, said the 43-year-old. "That way everyone knows. No one is excluded. That's good for the village."