BERLIN — It’s quiet in Germany. School’s out, Chancellor Angela Merkel is on vacation and the country is recovering from the latest government crisis.

So where is everybody? Judging from my Instagram account, some Germans are hiking the Alps, or visiting temples in Myanmar. But Germany’s summertime soul is in its Kleingärten — literally “small gardens.” That’s where we are. That’s what we are. And that’s where you can see the country change.

This being Germany, what counts as a Kleingarten is defined in the “Bundeskleingartengesetz,” or “Federal Small Garden Law”: A Kleingarten (“Kleingärten” in the plural) is a garden of no more than 400 square meters ( 478 square yards) that is used for noncommercial subsistence gardening and recreation; it must be part of an agglomeration of at least five gardens that also encompasses communal areas and facilities, the Federal Court of Justice has ruled. You can find them outside villages or next to urban parks or squeezed into the Neverland between railways and housing. Sometimes, there’s just a few. Sometimes, there are hundreds.

Kleingärten are not confined to, but have always had a particularly important function for, the cities. In the industrializing, rapidly urbanizing 19th century, they were a refuge for poor workers who had to live in overcrowded and gloomy apartment buildings. Crops from small gardens helped the city’s poor to survive the economic crisis that followed World War I. They were where people slept after they were bombed out during World War II. They were where Eastern Germans grew the strawberries they could not buy in the Communist regime’s economy of scarcity.