Castles in the Air, and on Very Tall Hills

Traveling with me is always a balancing act

I was just about to post about our entry to Cambridge, when I realized while going through pictures that I’d missed one other German city – Cambridge’s sister city, in fact. That city is Heidelberg, the jewel of the Neckar River Valley. It’s fairly famous and therefore draws large amounts of tourists, completely disproportionate to its size but probably not to its quaint beauty.

Like Cambridge, Heidelberg has over 100,000 people but is dominated by a university. Walking up and down the entirety of the Hauptstrasse is a good way to get a feel for that part of the town. Many of the university buildings are either very old and won’t let you in or new and in use and won’t let you in. But they’re nice to look at from outside.

Looking quite schloss-y

The main thing to see in Heidelberg, as you may have guessed by now, is the large castle (affectionately known as the 'Schloss' - Germans sometimes pick odd sounds to express their affection) at the top of a rather steep hill. It’s a bit of a ruin, but the ruining didn’t actually happen until the 16th and 17th centuries, when a combination of lightning damage and French sabotage spelled its doom. The red bricks of the castle make it shimmer like something out of a fairy tale. Mark Twain said of it that

“Nature knows how to garnish a ruin to get the best effect. One of these old towers is split down the middle, and one half has tumbled aside. It tumbled in such a way as to establish itself in a picturesque attitude. Then all it lacked was a fitting drapery, and Nature has furnished that; she has robed the rugged mass in flowers and verdure, and made it a charm to the eye. The standing half exposes its arched and cavernous rooms to you, like open, toothless mouths; there, too, the vines and flowers have done their work of grace. The rear portion of the tower has not been neglected, either, but is clothed with a clinging garment of polished ivy which hides the wounds and stains of time. Even the top is not left bare, but is crowned with a flourishing group of trees & shrubs. Misfortune has done for this old tower what it has done for the human character sometimes − improved it.”

After briefly losing our breaths climbing the hill, we toured around the lovely grounds of the castle on what turned out to be another beautiful day. We didn’t actually pay to go in the castle (I’d been in it before, but it's not as cool as the grounds). The best way to see the castle is from just outside it, which also affords a nice view of the rest of the valley.

Got the jumping picture on the first try - for once

There’s another cool view of the castle from the Old Bridge spanning the Neckar River, whose reddish tinge matches the castle’s. I’ve heard that the Philosopher’s Walk, a hiking trail up the hills on the other side of the river, gives a pretty cool view of the castle and city also, but we didn’t have time to do it.

That's funny, the damage doesn't look as bad from here...

So if you want to see a charming old German city with fairly uniform architecture, and if you don’t mind your spouse serenading you with songs from The Student Prince (Laura put up with it pretty well), Heidelberg may be worth a trip. 7.5/10.0.

St. Bernards, Cheese, and Beautiful Mountain Chalets OR The Things You Get By Avoiding Centuries of Warmongering

As my brother was driving us to Switzerland, he kept telling us how beautiful it was and how lucky he felt to live within driving distance of it. Since it was dark by the time we crossed the border, I feigned skepticism, wondering aloud if the country actually had any mountains at all. Large sections of the sky didn’t even have stars – beautiful country indeed...

“That’s because the mountains are blocking them,” Zack insisted.

“Sure, Zack, whatever you say. I’m just not sure how your psychiatrist will feel about these ‘mountains’ when I tell him you’ve stopped taking your medication...”

“Sigh,” said Laura (not literally, but you get the idea – this is her reaction to many of my conversations with Zack, especially on very long drives).

Jumping in front of mountains that, it appears, actually exist

We each had a goal for going to Switzerland. Zack, who’d already been there nine times, merely wanted to soak up more of the beautiful vistas of mountains and the charming-yet-ubiquitous chalet houses on the mountains. Laura wanted to see a large St. Bernard, preferably with a small barrel labelled ‘XXX’ on its collar. I wanted some delicious cheese. All of these expectations and more would be fulfilled before the trip was over.

Okay, so the St. Bernard didn’t have a barrel around its neck, but it was a very large dog, certainly capable of rescue missions if it didn’t look so darn sad all the time. And when we woke up the next morning, I had to admit that we really were surrounded by some pretty incredible - nay, breath-taking - cheese vendors. And mountains.

As we drove from Interlachen to the Lauderbrunnen valley, Zack popped in a CD and soon “Rocky Mountain High” was thumping through the car’s speakers. I had actually never heard the song before, and as a result I suspect it will always remind me of the Swiss Alps. I don’t know if John Denver ever went to Switzerland, but I think he would have approved.

Paragliders launching from the mountains above Gimmelwald

We took a cable car up to the small mountain town of Murren, then took a hike to the even smaller mountain town of Gimmelwald, where we enjoyed a relaxing lunch staring at the humungous peaks around us, some of which extended directly into the clouds. I had some delicious cheese. It was delicious. We all thought about living in that valley for the rest of our lives. The sense of displacement from home was even greater there, since it was a lot of trouble to get there from Europe, let alone America. Eventually, we scrapped that idea and started making plans to move to Colorado and open up a bakery. Mountains are big, and they have a gravity about them that makes it hard to leave.

Avalanche-stoppers save Zack and Braxton from certain death

But of course, we did eventually. We went back to Interlachen and had some cheese fondue that couldn’t be beat. Then we got up the next morning and drove to Basel. But I will leave Laura to tell that part of the story, because again, I don’t feel I could do it justice.

Interlachen/Lauderbrunnen Metro Area Aggregate Score: 9.0/10.0. If only I spoke German...

It's Finally Oktober

Since most of these posts have been fairly time-independent, you might think that we've just been traveling pretty consistently and I do a (somewhat) good job of keeping up with them. However, while I'm not posting in order, it's been a while since some of these trips actually happened. Sometimes I need to let things mull around in my head before I know what to say about them. We did a lot of traveling before coming to Cambridge, and though we've done some since, I felt the spacing of the posts would work out best if I put lots of detail into every place we saw last fall, since when we're in Cambridge it's far easier to blog than to hop on a plane to the Continent.

So anyway, this post is about Oktoberfest, in Munich. We went. You might think to yourself, "Well, Oktoberfest - that makes him only 5 months behind." You're wrong - the majority of Oktoberfest takes place in September, so I'm really 6 months behind. Oktoberfest is the world's largest fair, and began in 1810 to celebrate the marriage of Crown Prince Ludwig of Bavaria and Princess Therese (for whom the Theresienwiese, the grounds where the festival takes place, is named).

Laura puts her heart into jumping over the Theresienwiese

In fact, because of another monument to the Princess that was mentioned on my diminutively-insufficient map of Munich, I initially led us astray to the other side of the river, where the parks were quite beautiful, but the large crowds we'd expected to see were conspicuously absent. Eventually Laura, my better half, managed to catch my mistake and we soon emerged at what looks a lot like the Illinois State Fair TIMES A BILLION.

Laura keeps the precepts of Oktoberfest written on her heart

I mean, it's big. Make no mistake about that. It's also (during the day, at least) quite family-friendly. Granted, there are people walking around consuming large amounts of beer, but that's very different in German culture. Also because Bavarian beer is very light, other Germans are less affected by it (my brother's landlord says it's the same as water) as they usually drink stronger stuff.

There are many stereotypes about German culture which all come out at Oktoberfest. For instance, they actually do wear traditional Bavarian clothes - lederhosen and all. It's considered important in Germany to own a set of these clothes for occasions such as these, and they seem to have built up the critical mass of people necessary for it to seem almost 'cool' - we saw several high schoolers in lederhosen, which, I'm fairly sure, would signify the Apocalypse in a modern American high school.

"Fine, Mom, I'll wear the lederhosen! You don't have to twist my arm..."

Getting inside one of the large tents is a must - we didn't have any trouble getting in during the day, but the reservations get booked up for the evenings pretty far in advance. Inside, you will be treated to a variety of sausage, chicken, and other meats. In addition, the tents usually have what for lack of a better term I'll call "um-pah" bands - complete with accordionists, tuba-ists, and the occasional alpine horn-ist. The bands play some contemporary music, but tradition dominates the music lineup (and everything else about Oktoberfest, for that matter).

Our cruisers can't repel tubas of that magnitude!

There are rides as well, but if you're fully enjoying the food and drink, you probably wouldn't want to take part in them. Just walking around the Theresienwiese takes the larger part of an afternoon, and it's well worth seeing once in your life. I wouldn't take a trans-Atlantic flight just to see it, but I know several people who would.

We saw a bit of Munich coming back from Dachau, and a bit more trying to find the Theresienwiese, but I don't know if I've seen it well enough to give it a fair rating. That being said, most of what I saw was very beautiful. I think I'll give it a peremptory 7.0/10.0, with the caveat that I may move it up or down slightly if I ever come back to see the city itself.

The Hills Have Lives

The Mirabel Gardens, Salzburg Cathedral, and the Festung

One of the least unique things about Laura and I as a couple is our feeling about The Sound of Music. She likes it, and I don't. Granted, I haven't seen it in 10 years, so maybe I will find new things about it that my more mature cinematic self can dislike.

But I'm betting that none of those things, new or old, will be the scenery. We decided to stretch our German Railpass to the limit, and actually took a train all the way to Salzburg, just across the Austrian border. We were lucky to catch another beautiful day, and Salzburg is a nice place to catch beautiful days. If you happen to be an unmarried male, you may not know that Salzburg is the setting for The Sound of Music, but I'm guessing everyone else knew already (my mom has confessed to me that she took German in college for the express purpose of one day going to Austria to become more like Julie Andrews).

Nuns, but no Sister Maria

But beyond all that Von Trapp yodeling, there's quite a bit to Salzburg. Granted, we started with the Mirabell Gardens, and we had to wait in line behind several skipping couples until we could get a free shot at the infamous archway of foliage.

Jumping instead of skipping

You might think that I as a connoisseur of music history would be interested in Salzburg because it was Mozart's birthplace. Interesting, true, but not enough so to shell out €10 to tour his old house. To the extent that child geniuses exist at all, I think Mendelssohn was as good if not a better example of it than Mozart, who was trained like a machine from birth. And Mozart wasn't actually that fond of Salzburg, although the city makes lots of tourist money off of him today. The coolest musical thing I saw there was the cathedral, which is huge and old like many European cathedrals, but also has four separate organs flanking its sanctuary (which, the acoustician in me would like to point out, would be hard to keep together if they were all playing since they all face away from each other and the reverberation time must be at least 5 seconds) which look pretty intimidating.

Laura looking prim and proper

But the most worthwhile thing in Salzburg, at least by my estimate, is the huge fortress ('Festung') on the hill in the middle of the city. It claims to be Europe's largest fortification, "possibly the most beautiful," whatever that means. Yes, it costs some money to get in, but it costs less if you climb the hill yourself rather than paying for a lift, which makes you feel better about paying to get in because you've already saved so much money.

The hills are alive - that's probably why they built the Festung

What's so cool about the Festung, you ask? Well, for one thing it's huge, imposing, and has a great view of the beautiful valley, river, and hills. You really need to climb to the very top of this one and catch the breeze on a sunny day - okay, I admit I may have burst into "The Hills Are Alive..." once or twice, but I don't know any more than the first line (when I was a kid, we used to sing it as "The Hills Are Alive and They're Gonna Eat You!") or so.

In addition, the Festung has a golden hall whence the archbishop ruled, and it's made of ornate wood and gold overlay - like Medusil in The Two Towers. Maybe I've exposed too much of my innate nerdiness in this post already, but a good appreciation for Tolkien and epic fantasy will go a long way toward an appreciation of European history - lots of majestic buildings, vistas, and weapons of death. The Festung also has a museum of medieval weapons which is a bit grisly but informative.

Braxton gets corrupted by sheer power in the Golden Hall

All in all, a city that lives up to its hype - don't come here for Mozart, come here for Salzburg. 7.5/10.0

Pilgrimage to Leipzig

Anticipating that the day after Dachau might be something of a downer, we had decided to go to Leipzig, city of light and music, for a pick-me-up. Actually, the ‘light’ part was in doubt at first – our entire weather forecast for the week was somewhat inaccurate. We went to Dachau on what was supposed to be a gray, gloomy day, but it actually turned out to be very pretty (not that we felt much better as a result). The next day in Leipzig was supposed to be sunshiny, to hopefully raise our spirits and make us feel better about the human race (yes, I do tend to script my life like scenes in a movie). This prediction was looking equally dubious, as we rode a train through four hours of rain and clouds. But as we left the train station, the clouds were beginning to break, and it ended up being the beautiful day we’d hoped for, although we never would have appreciated it as much if it had happened the way I’d scripted it in my head (or maybe that’s just the post-production editor in me, trying to insert morals into events that don’t need them).

Leipzig is mainly known for its connections to Western music through the composers who spent many years of their lives here. There were too many such composers for us to do justice to them all in one daytrip, so we had to prioritize. After a quick, failed attempt to find RichardWagnerplatz (which I swear was on the map but sadly did not seem to have a correlate in reality), we went to the house of the composer who is more associated with Leipzig and whose legacy left the city pilgrimage-worthy in the first place: J.S. Bach.

Laura in the Thomaskirche

Despite being a huge name in classical music today, Bach led a pretty low-key lifestyle throughout his compositional career. It was only the Baroque period, and composers had not achieved the international rockstar status that would later be associated with Mozart or Liszt. After several years in Weimar and Cöthen, Bach accepted a position as Cantor at the Thomaskirche in Leipzig, where he would spend the remaining 27 years of his life. While there, he enjoyed a prolific career, writing, rehearsing, and accompanying one cantata per week, as well as churning out a couple of little Bachs who would become pretty well known composers during the Classical period.

Jumping by the Bach statue

Much like every other tourist attraction you’d like to see in Western Europe, the Bach museum was undergoing renovations and only had a small portion of its exhibits up, with no English translation available. But we did get to spend a lot of time in the Thomaskirche, which was one of the main things I wanted to see while in Europe. Bach’s immense faith and compositional impact, all while serving on a relatively small scale to a local congregation, have always been an encouragement to me. But the fact remains that later composers and audiences would not have been inspired by Bach or even known who he was had it not been for the diligent musicological efforts of the next guy whose house we would visit, Felix Mendelssohn.

You see, the classical music world in Mendelssohn’s day was sort of the opposite of ours – while we are trapped in the past, making the same tired overtures to a relatively small cabal of dead Europeans, the musical programs of Mendelssohn’s day were solely focused on the present, a relatively small cabal of live Europeans. Tastes had changed with the times, and Baroque music was ignored and forgotten. Despite Bach’s paradigm-changing mastery of counterpoint, chromaticism, and fugue, audiences 80 years later preferred to listen to the cookie-cutter classical garbage emanating from any number of no-name halfwits who are today completely forgotten. But Mendelssohn, who had risen from a child prodigy (better than Mozart, according to Goethe) to one of the premier composers of his day, also took a strong interest in staging the works of master composers long deceased. It was through Mendelssohn’s efforts staging Bach’s St. Matthew Passion in Berlin that ignited later generations' interest in Bach's music.

Mendelssohn looking oddly diagonal

Mendelssohn is my idol in many respects – he was a polymath, also creating numerous drawings, watercolors, and paintings, some of which are displayed in his house. He also spearheaded music education by founding the Leipzig Conservatory. He was friends with Liszt and the Schumanns, and they hung out at each other’s houses. He had a recital hall in his house, where friends and family would periodically perform new pieces they were working on. If I were to be displaced to any place and period in history, it would probably be late 18th Century Leipzig.

That being said, Leipzig is still very nice even if you’re not crazy about history. The University is quite modern in some parts, including a space-age tower that looks a bit like an open book or a wisdom tooth, depending on your perspective. The city has many beautiful open squares with fountains (a must for any old European city), very good street musicians, (though not as transcendent as Prague’s), and, according to Laura, really incredible hot dogs.

Final rating: 7.0/10.0

Dear God, make me dumb, that I may not to Dachau come

Well, not all of European history or travel is cheery. After a pretty inspirational trip to Wittenburg, we prepared ourselves for a depressing trip to Dachau, the town of 40,000 to the northwest of Munich. The town's chamber of commerce likes to pretend that there are other reasons to visit the town (like its castle or church), but whether it's advertised or not, the real reason we remember or visit Dachau is because it was the site of the first German concentration camp.

When we got off the train at Dachau station, the lack of any acknowledgement of the camp made it a bit awkward for us - we didn't come to see the castle either, after all. Not speaking German or wanting to ask a bus driver where we could find a concentration camp, we ending up just following the other tourists (mostly Americans) onto a bus that ended up taking us to the entrance to the former gunpowder factory that later became the Dachau camp.

Laura took the audio guide when we entered through the visitor's center, but I declined, afraid of the sensory overload that too many concentration camp stories in one day might create. It turned out that by the end of the day, we were both absolutely overwhelmed, and we didn't even come close to seeing everything there.

The Prisoners Memorial, on the main assembly ground

The camp was created primarily for political prisoners in 1933, and it would become the template for the other concentration camps built by the Nazi regime. While many of the other early camps were closed, Dachau remained open until it was liberated by the US 7th Army in 1945. Over those years, Dachau housed about 200,000 prisoners, of whom 25,000 died, mostly from disease and malnutrition consequent of its abysmal living conditions.

The museum has more infomation than I could take in in a day; it begins with a long exposition on the rise of the Nazi regime - the radical revolts and uprisings that plagued the Weimar Republic from the left and the right throughout the 1920s. Eventually the Nazis gained the upper hand over the Communists and began to seek the elimination of their political enemies. Despite the Weimer Republic's consitutional protections (similar to those of the US Constitution), after the burning of the Reichstag in 1933, the Nazis were able to put forward a number of measures aimed at hunting down their political enemies. Since most of those were not killed (and, in the first years, many were eventually released), they needed a place to put them, which led to the founding of the Dachau camp. The title of this post was a jingle sung by German citizens as they watched their friends and loved ones get carted off for unpopular political stances, religious views, or ethnicities.

Note that Dachau was not an extermination camp in the tradition of Auschwitz and Bełżec in that it was not intended to simply kill its prisoners. Conditions gradually worsened as supplies shortened during the war and more prisoners came, until the sleeping conditions made a submarine look spacious. A set of gas chambers were built toward the end of the camp's use, but there is no evidence that mass exterminations were ever carried out there. The largest killing recorded at Dachau is that of 500 Soviet soldiers being killed by firing squad in the camp's last days. If that sounds like a justification, please believe that it is not. There is not a thing about visiting Dachau that makes you feel good, but I have heard that in terms of nausea and general pessimism about the human condition, Auschwitz is even worse.

But I can only speak from my own experience, which is that I can't remember feeling quite as sad as I did when going through Dachau. Seeing the showers where prisoners were tortured, the "Work makes you free" sign over the entrance, the crematorium where corpses were burned, it's a pretty chilling experience. When the camp began admitting female prisoners, some were brought to the male prisoners' quarters and forced to prostitute themselves, under the assumption that this would make the prisoners better workers.

By the entrance gate to the camp

I think everyone who visits a place like this finds a story that sticks with them the most - for me this was a song called the Dachau Anthem, written by two musicians being held at Dachau in its early years. The music is posted in the museum, and as I sung through the dissonant melody with its hopeless-yet-defiant lyrics, I felt a bit of solidarity with them, as though they were there with me singing. I don't know if art can molify the pain that places like this created. Maybe nothing can. But it's pretty powerful stuff.

I had always had a vision of prison camps in terms of "The Great Escape" - barbed wire, guard towers, and the inevitable tunnel under the fence. Dachau had the fence, and the towers, and a line (inside the camp) which prisoners would be shot if they stepped over. But there was no tunnel. And I felt none of the old romanticism within me about how I would have planned my escape had I been there. All I could feel was that this place was too much for me. It overwhelms me just seeing its ruins, and I cannot begin to imagine what its prisoners felt.

We took the bus back into town, and stopped in Munich for supper before taking the train back to Ladenburg. Just stepping out of the camp made me feel better - the air seemed fresher, the colors deeper. But the memory did not leave me completely, and I hope it does not. It's a terrible memory, but maybe there is good that can come from terrible memories.

As my brother said, "It's the kind of place you don't want to visit, but you feel strongly that everyone should visit it, if there's a chance that in so doing we will prevent the future from creating another Dachau."

New Post for a New Year

Hello all,

I just had lunch with a friend who asked me (politely) whether I was done with the blog. I realize that I've been a bit behind on this, but it is not for lack of places traveled or things to say about them. It's been more the end of term crunch/grad applications/traveling home for Christmas.

What, you may ask, were we doing home for Christmas when we were in such a picturesque and relatively warm country already? Well, my parents graciously gave us plane tickets home for Christmas, which was a great break from work and a chance to see lots of friends and family. If we decide to stay in Cambridge for the next few years, opportunities to come home may become fewer, but it was wonderful to be able to do it this year.

I'm actually sitting in the Raleigh airport waiting for our flight to London as I type this, and our decision of whether to stay in England or not may depend somewhat on how annoying the new airline policies for transcontinental flights are.

At any rate, I vow to do a better job keeping up with the blog in the new term/year. We've seen plenty more places that we need to tell you about, and my thoughts on some of them have gestated long enough to be possibly interesting, or at least a nice distraction over your lunch break.

And if you're looking for more distractions until I get time to write something real, I got a piece in the current issue of Gates Scholar magazine.

Hope everyone is well - will catch up soon.