Around Deutschland in 14 Days

Kevin and I just returned from a two-week trip around Germany, organized and paid for by the Humboldt Foundation, and while I never want to look a gift horse in the mouth, I am glad that it’s over. Ten cities in 14 days means that we never got to spend more than a day or two in each city, and sometimes significantly less time. On the final jam-packed day of the trip, we managed to leave Bamburg, visit Rothenberg and arrive in Würzburg all during normal business hours. It was just a little much. When you visit new cities at such a fast pace, the most you can take away from each is a snapshot of its most famous building and the flavor of its most famous dish. My memories of the trip read like a laundry list of such things:

Bamburg: the Bamburger Reiter, Rauchbier (that’s smoked beer)

Münster: the Münster Rathaus, Haxenfleisch (that’s a whole pork leg)

Hamburg: the Hamburger Hafen, Matjesfilet (that’s raw pickled herring, and I like it!)

Fortunately, since Kevin and I had visited many of these cities before on longer more leisurely trips, we didn’t have to feel that we were missing much. This time on our layovers in Berlin, Dresden, and München, we got to see some of our favorite museums one last time and a few new places that we never would have seen on our own. The workshop of the luxury watch manufacturer A. Lange & Söhne, located high up in the Ore Mountains, was actually pretty cool; the tour of the Airbusfactory in Hamburg, I could I have done without, although I bet there were engineers on our trip who would have disagreed.

Still, there were days when, in the middle of a three-hour walking tour of a city following a four-hour bus ride, Kevin and I would want nothing more than to slip off from the rest of the group and settle ourselves into a shaded café, where we could read novels and sip our double espressos. Sometimes we did. Those were my favorite memories of the trip.

But without sounding to hokey (I hope), what the trip lacked in leisure time it made up for by throwing us in the constant company of interesting people. There were 33 people on our bus, and they were of all ages, nationalities and disciplines. There were Jordanians and Egyptians; Chinese, Japanese, Thais, and Malaysians; Russians, Poles, Kyrgistanis; Indians and Madagasks. (The one Madagask being my friend Dina from my German class in Frankfurt). There was even one other American – a chemist from Washington State.

Oddly enough, although this was a German-sponsored trip of Germany, the working language was English. Everyone on the trip spoke English, more or less, and so Kevin and I got to purge ourselves of all the cocktail conversation that we’d been saving up for eight months. As some of the only native English speakers on the trip, we had a captive audience.

But don’t think that I didn’t practice German at all on my summer vacation. Our tour driver was a charming old Sicilian who looked just like Rosano Brazzi, and as he was one of the only people on the tour who spoke German but no English, and I was one of the only people who spoke any German at all, we often sat together at dinner. After many beers he’d open up to me about the secret to making good Spaghetti Alio Olio and everything he knew about the Mafia. (There was a terrible quintuple homicide at a pizza place in Dusseldorf during our trip; it was obviously a mafia hit.)

Also, as part of its effort to maintain and spread the German language, the Humboldt Foundation provided a German tour guide in every city,and so as the rare German-speaker, I was obliged to always travel with the German-speaking tour guide. Often, I was even asked to translate German into English, when members of our group hadn’t understood. At one point, I even overheard our German tour guide, telling another tour guide, “You know her German's actually pretty good.” It almost made it all worthwhile.


For posterity’s sake, the pictures in the slideshow belong to the following cities: Münster, Bonn, Hamburg, Berlin, Dresden, Bamburg, München, the Danube River, and Rothenburg ob der Tauber.

Mistletoe

I had never seen real, live mistletoe until I came to Dresden, but in Dresden it’s impossible to miss. In every park or housing complex, the trees have a cluster of perfect little globes hanging from their uppermost branches, just like Christmas ornaments. At first it was really exciting to see it throughout the city, and I would stare outside the windows of my streetcar searching for the tree with the most mistletoe. But of course, mistletoe is a parasite, and any tree it infects, unless treated, will ultimately die. I have no idea if Dresden is suffering from some massive blight or if the park service is trying to do anything about it, but if they don’t, I can imagine that in a few years the city will be totally treeless.

In many ways the ever-present mistletoe is an appropriate symbol for this beautiful yet blighted city. Something is choking the life – and youth – out of Dresden. After several days of riding the streetcars across town, it occurred to me that I almost never saw any young people, much less any children. The average age of Dresdeners must be around 40, and a city without children is a city that is slowly dying.

Dresden has a population of about 500,000, but it looks as if it’s infrastructure could support a population almost twice that size. It just feels deserted. Whole blocks of apartment buildings are uninhabited, awaiting demolition, and the city’s wide boulevards are mostly empty. More than once, I walked down the long stretch of sidewalk parallel to my subway line without passing a single human being. This would just never happen in Würzburg, where I have to jockey with Hummer-sized baby strollers or bands of young boys on skateboards for space on the sidewalk.

Even in Dresden’s new downtown shopping centers, something seems amiss. There are dozens of storefronts but none you’d ever want to step inside. Most of their wares look secondhand or cheaply made or just downright retro. I encountered more than one bookstore with whole rows of globes for sale. Who buys globes anymore? I spent a lot of time in Dresden’s bookstores the week I was there, and only once did I notice anyone seriously contemplating the purchase of a globe: a pair of gray-headed grandparents, no doubt buying one as a well-meaning but inappropriate gift for their 10-year old grandson, who has just been accepted to the local Gymnasium, the high school for college-bound students. I’m sure he had rather received a computer game or some new Manga, but perhaps he will come to appreciate the gift when he’s older and planning his route out of Dresden.

Bull in a China Museum

The week I was in Dresden it rained all day, every day, so there was nothing for me to do but visit museums all day long. Fortunately, Dresden has dozens of world-class museums, so it wasn’t much of a sacrifice on my part. I spent my third day there exploring the rambling collections of the Zwinger. Originally built as a pleasure palace for Augustus the Strong (he kept his concubines in the galleries and held tournaments in the courtyard), it now houses several museums: the Gemäldegalerie Alte Meisters (Renaissance and Baroque paintings), the Rüstkammer (armory), the Porzellensammlung (porcelain collection), among many others.

The Gemäldegalerie has a reputation of being one of the best museums in Europe, with important works by Raphael, Botticelli, Titian, Dürer, Holbien, Vermeer, Rembrandt, and basically anyone else who ever achieved a modicum of fame, but it was it was a less famous work – Ruben’s Leda and the Swan – that really took my breath away.I have long been a fan of this painting, which depicts the maiden Leda being seduced by Zeus in the form of a swan, and I used to keep a postcard-size version of it on my bulletin board when I was in college.


I loved how Leda’s pale skin and the swan’s snowy white feathers glow against the solid black background. And I always found the graceful arch of the swan’s neck as it reach up to give Leda a kiss right on the lips terribly erotic. But it wasn’t until I saw the 10-by-12 foot original, that I realized the painting it positively pornographic! Leda and the Swan were actually “doin’ it,” and the evidence is right their in front of you in all its glory. Needless to say, I bought a new, larger copy of the painting to take home with me.

Next, I visited the Rüstkammer. Now, I’ve never cared much for the history of warfare, but the elaborate gold and silver and jewel-encrusted suits of armor were pretty cool, and so I did like everyone else in the museum was doing and whipped out my digital camera to take a picture. Two seconds later an angry female guard was all over me, yelling in that angry guttural voice that Germans always have in the movies. It turns out that you had to pay an extra 5 euros in order to be able to take pictures in the museum. Who knew?

Anyway, I hated to come across as “the ugly American,” but I wasn’t about to pay 5 euros when all I wanted was a single picture, so I just packed up my camera and moved on. But not five minutes later, I was yelled at again for leaning in too closely to a suit of armor. Yikes! And I wasn’t the only one: Visitors were getting chewed out left and right by the museum’s staff of very severe-looking female guards and for relatively minor offenses. Dresden’s numerous museums are overrun with these dower-looking middle-aged women, about one every 10 feet. It makes absolutely no sense that the museum should employ hoards of people for such a useless task since it already has a thoroughly modern security system – until you consider that the unemployment rate in Eastern Germany is even higher than Germany’s national unemployment rate of 14 percent. People have to earn their daily bread somehow, and I guess the government would rather employ them in useless jobs in the state’s art museums than just putting them on the dole.

This thought softened my heart for a moment, but then, a short while later, I was yelled at yet again, this time for talking to Kevin on my cell phone. Now, normally I would say that talking on a cell phones in an art museum was the height of rudeness (I used to work in an art museum, after all), but I had had the ringer turned off and took the call in a secluded corner of the museum, where I never spoke above a whisper. Besides it’s not like I could have gone outside to take the call – it was raining cats and dogs! Despite my precautions, one of them hunted me down and nearly bit my head off. I was about to give her a piece of my mind, but fortunately, my German wasn’t up to the task. So, I just left.

I wanted nothing more than to go back to the hotel and nurse my wounded pride, but it was still raining, so I decided to take my chances with the guards one more time and went next door to the Porzellensammlung. Now, I’ve never cared much for porcelain – it’s much too frilly and fragile for my tastes – but even I have to admit that the museum’s collection was pretty cool. One large white room contains dozens of nearly life size porcelain animals, all in white. The rest of the museum’s long, narrow galleries display almost two thousand years’ of Asian porcelain in arrangements 20-feet high and set against brightly painted walls in orange and red and purple. The effect on the viewer is like being a tiny figurine in a giant curio cabinet. Or maybe just a “bull in a china shop.”

Anyway, I desperately wanted to take a picture, but again I was too cheap to pony up the 5 euros for a photo-pass. Still, I figured it never hurt to ask, so I mustered up my courage – and my recently acquired knowledge of the German subjunctive – and said to the little old lady guard in my politest voice: “Would it be possible for me to take a picture here, just one?” Of course, her response was, “Do you have a photo-pass?” I shook my head and started to move on. But I guess my use of the subjunctive must have had its affect on her. Or maybe she was just amused that someone my age would want to take a picture of the collection – I was the youngest person in the museum by about 50 years – so she relented and let me take my picture. She even led me over to the one spot in the tight little wing where I could get the best shot!

Dresden: Das Grünes Gewölbe

"In Dresden, there is one thing that you should endeavor to do and that is visit the so-called Grünes Gewölbe or Schatzkammer.” (Johann Georg Keyssler, from his European travel guide, 1730)

Although written nearly 300 years ago, these words could not be truer today. In 2004, after a fifty year hiatus, the famous Grünes Gewölbe (Green Vaults), the royal treasury of the Electors of Saxony, where restored to their original home at the Residenzschloß in Dresden and reopened to the public. It’s funny to think that Dresden, with its troubled history and impoverished landscape is home to one of the world’s wealthiest museums. But even before having read Keyssler’s advice, it was already my number one reason for visiting Dresden. I spent my entire first two days there, and I didn’t even break for lunch.

The Green Vaults are above all a royal treasury, or Schatzkammer, but they are also an excellent example of Wunderkammern (cabinets of curiosity). The idea behind wunderkammern such the Green Vaults was to assemble in one place the most amazing objects that Art and Nature could produce, a sort of Noah’s Ark of the wonderful. The best pieces would seamlessly combine the two, for example the coral and silver challis (above, left), which depicts Ovid’s tale of Daphne’s metamorphosis into a laurel tree. The point of objects like these was not utilitarian (it’s unlikely they were ever even used), but to surprise and dumbfound the viewer. Few modern visitors are likely to believe that a rhinoceros horn drinking vessel is made from a gryphon's claw, but they’ll still enjoy how it tickles the imagination.

First I visited the Historic Green Vaults on the ground floor of the museum. Even in it’s modern incarnation, it’s clear that you’re going inside a high-security vault: Tickets to this exhibit are only available to groups of thirty people at thirty-minute intervals, and before entering the exhibit you have to leave all your belongings at the coat check and step through an air-locked entryway. But once you’re through, you enter a series of rooms, each more wonderful and luxurious than the one before. I felt a little like Charlie seeing the Chocolate Factory for the first time.

The first room is the Amber Kabinett, where, as its name suggests, everything is made of amber: small sculptures, drinking vessels, a complete chess set, even a full-size armoire. The honey brown amber positively glows, as it’s lit from behind and set against dark purple walls. Next, is the Ivory Room, filled with at least a hundred delicate ivory sculptures balanced precariously on individual consoles against warm marble-patterned walls. Most of the sculptures are what’s called “turned ivory,” a single tusk of ivory that has been carefully “turned” on a lathe and whittled-down into mind-bogglingly complicated geometric shapes: an intricate spire set atop a hollow icosahedron containing six smaller icosahedra, one inside another, with the whole thing positively floating above a single narrow column. It’s impossible to comprehend that these marvels were carved with 16th century tools.

Beyond the Ivory Room are a pair of traditional treasury rooms, the first containing the Elector’s collection of silver and second his collection of gold (actually gold-coated silver, but who’s going to scratch the surface and find out?). Sadly, much of the family silver had to be melted-down and turned into currency in order to finance the Seven Years’ War, but what remains has been displayed to its best advantage. These rooms are decorated for maximum glitter effect: The Silver Room is bright red and covered with gilded mirrors, and the Gilt Room is lime green and covered with gilded mirrors. Like the Hall of Mirrors as Versailles, the scene is reflected back on itself, endlessly multiplying its already opulent treasures.

Next up is my favorite room, Pretiosa Room, which contains the most curious of the vault’s treasures. Hundreds of delicate sculptures created from coconuts, ostrich eggs, nautilus shells, barocco pearls, and rare stones line the mirrored walls. Each one is a perfect synthesis of the natural and man-made: such as an ostrich egg drinking cup in the shape of a very life-like ostrich. When you unscrew its head and try to drink from its silver neck, the wings flap in your face – a sort of Baroque practical joke, but an unbelievably bizarre and beautiful one.

Next door, the Coat of Arms Room appears a little bland after the opulence of the previous galleries, but it’s a welcome change, since by this point in the tour your brain is likely in sensory overload. Originally used as a sort of grand mailroom, new acquisitions and secret documents could be stored in hidden cabinets behind the plaques before they were put on display. Unfortunately, only 36 of the original coats of arms belonging to the House of Wettin remain; eight were destroyed by fire during the bombing of Dresden. The curators have carefully left part of the room unfinished to remind visitors of the damage the museum sustained – and overcame.

Beyond is the grandest room of all: the Jewel Room. The Electorate of Saxony was just one of many German principalities, but the family, under Augustus the Strong (1670-1732) endeavored to be the wealthiest and most powerful. In order to enhance its prestige among the other princes, and ultimately win their vote to become King of Prussia and Duke of Lithuania, the family amassed a collection of jewels befitting a king. The Elector owned complete sets of garnitures (buttons, buckles, rapiers, daggers, hat pins, etc.) for every occasion: sets in ruby, emerald, sapphire, carnelian, tortoise shell, and two sets of diamond. According to my audio guide the tortoise shell set was the most expensive, although it doesn’t explain why.

The Jewel Room’s most valuable object has been moved to a more secure location upstairs in the Neues Grünes Gewölbe (New Green Vaults), a larger, thoroughly modern gallery space, where visitors can get a better view of some of the collection’s most interesting pieces. “The Dresden Green,” a pendant originally belonging to August III, August the Strong’s son, contains the largest green diamond in the world – 41 carats. Its unusual green color comes from the fact that the stone was exposed to naturally occurring radioactivity below the earth’s surface. It is truly a wonder of nature – and art.

Although “the Dresden Green” brings in the crowds, it’s the collection of curiosities, like the cherry pit pendant carved with 185-unique heads, that captured my attention and kept me coming back for more the next day. Rather than describe ad nauseum all the really cool stuff I saw, I’ve created my own little wunderkammer, a "Best of the New Green Vaults.” (My apologies to the State Art Museum of Dresden for the liberties of their photographs.) I hope it gives you the same sense of jaw-dropping awe that I experienced. Enjoy!

Dresden: The Frauenkirche

On my first day in Dresden, I headed to the Neumarkt to see the Dresden’s most famous landmark, the Frauenkirche. As I mentioned before, the church, one of the finest Protestant churches in the world, was reduced to rubble during the famous firebombing of Dresden in February 1945. Only one fragment of one wall was left standing. When the war ended, Dresden fell under the rule of the Soviet-backed Communist government, which decreed that the ruins of the church should remain untouched, as a memorial to the victims of the war – and also as a useful propaganda tool against the West.

However, after Reunification, Dresdeners immediately began an international fundraising campaign to rebuild the church. (An interesting fundraising letter addressed to the Queen of England is on display at the Staatmuseum, reminding the Queen in no uncertain terms that she should pony-up, as her government had destroyed the church in the first place. It doesn’t say how much she gave.)

Anyway, the reconstruction of the Frauenkirche is an amazing technological feat. Using historic blueprints and “the latest computer technology,” they’ve managed to rebuild the church exactly as it was before the bombing, and, wherever possible, they’ve used the remaining stones from the original church. But of course, it is impossible to match sandy new stones to the original dark grey ones, which had been seasoned by hundreds of years of soot. So the result is a strange salt-and-pepper effect, which is a little off-putting at first, but after a while kind of grows on you. Ultimately the distinction between old and new seems fitting.

But inside the church, and elsewhere in the Neumarkt, all of this emphasis on building things back exactly as they were has a striking ersatz feel, like Disney’s imagining of what Dresden must have been like before the war. For obvious financial reasons, the builders of the new Frauenkirche had to use plaster and synthetic materials to recreate the original pink marble columns and gilded puttis. And the difference is obvious. Surrounding the Frauenkirche are a dozen new-old high-rises, where the lack of the appropriate patina is even more noticeable. Their smooth stucco facades and generic Baroque detailing makes you feel as if you’re being tricked, as if you’re walking through a Hollywood back lot instead of a real city.

I hate to be a critic of such a noble endeavors. After all, I understand the impulse all too well. When Little Rock was struck by a tornado several years ago and much of my historic neighborhood destroyed, my immediate reaction was to want it all put back exactly the way it was. I feel very much the same way about New Orleans, even though it’s not really my town. But I hope than when New Orleanians do start to rebuild, they won’t do as Dresden has done. There must be a way to recapture a sense of what was lost without attempting recreate it stone for stone. I’d rather walk through a slightly less beautiful city than through a fake one.

Dresden Greets Its Guests

At some point it should have occurred to me that Dresden might look a little different than Würzburg, that bucolic Bavarian town I’m happy to call home. After all, I knew Dresden’s history: Once Germany’s most beautiful city – “Florence on the Elbe” – on the night of February 13, 1945, an Anglo-American bombing campaign reduced it to rubble, killing an estimated 35,000 people. More than 50 years of communism followed, during which time the city was rebuilt as a “Soviet replica state.”

But had I stopped to think about these details, I would have relegated them to the distant past, having little to do with Dresden as it stands today. After all, I am only just old enough to remember Peter Jennings announcing on “World News Tonight” that the Berlin Wall had fallen and forecasting the eminent reunification of Germany, and that was almost 20 years ago. Surely any differences between East and West would have long ago disappeared, or so I thought. But I guess cities have a longer view of history than 25 year olds. And as Faulkner famously wrote, “The past isn’t over. It isn’t even past.”

As it was, I was completely unprepared for the change of scenery as my train made its way East. Tidy, well-tended Bavarian villages gave way to gritty industrial towns, where half the buildings seemed abandoned to rust and decay. Dresden, entered from the West, seemed like only the biggest of these.


Actually, Dresden makes an interesting contrast to Würzburg. Both were nearly bombed into oblivion by the Allies, but where Dresden languished under communism for half a century, Würzburg “rose phoenix-like,” the tourist literature likes to say, part of West Germany’s “economic miracle” (Wirtschaftswunder). And so today, where one of Würzburg’s farmers might live in his family’s 19th century farmhouse, it’s been completely renovated, landscaped, and equipped with a two-car garage. A farmer outside of Dresden, in rural Saxony or Thuringa, might live in the same type of house (with its steeper Eastern-style roof), but it’s surrounded by rusting farm equipment, fallow fields, and comes with an old outhouse on the grounds.

[I recently read in Tony Judt’s excellent Post War that in 1989, shortly before reunification, 60 percent of East Germans lacked central heating, 25 percent lacked a bath, and one-third had only an outdoor toilet. Judt also writes that during the period when the Marshall Plan was pumping $14 billion into Western Europe, Stalin extracted the same amount from Eastern Europe.]

The view from my window was more East than West, not unlike what I’d seen on a trip to Eastern Slovakia and Hungary years earlier, but I never would have expected to see the same conditions in the “wealthy” Germany of 2007. It was as if traveling East, I was traveling back in time.

“The past is not over. …” Indeed.

So it’s interesting, then, to find myself in Dresden at a moment when the city is busy erasing this unfortunate period of it’s history and replacing it with an exact replica of the city in all its Baroque glory.

Everywhere I go in Dresden, I see bulldozers tearing down the old Stalinist-style high-rises, those shoddy, soul-destroying concrete blocks that housed droves of drably clad workers. (The “New Brutalism,” one critic called it.) Across from the train station, a whole row of these relics awaits the chopping block. The first supports a 20-foot-tall neon sign, long dark, which reads: “Dresden Grüßt Seine Gäste” (literally, “Dresden Greets Its Guests”). I can just image the implicit message of such propaganda, cir. 1960: “Welcome to Dresden. See our amazing Communist architecture.”


Meanwhile, not two blocks away, a massive building project is underway in the historic Neumarkt. (I love it that in Europe a square called “New Market” is still four hundred years old). A dozen yellow cranes are erecting Baroque-era high-rises to frame the city’s famous Frauenkirche, a symbol of all that Dresden lost during the war and has since regained. Completely destroyed in bombing, the post-war Communist government refused to allow it to be rebuilt, preferring to leave its remains as a reminder of the evil West. Rebuilding started immediately after Reunification and was finished by 2006.

Once these candy-colored buildings are completed, the square will look very much like it did on the morning of February 14, 1945. That’s pretty amazing, when you consider that virtually nothing was there 24 hours later: not the Frauenkirche; not the palatial Zwinger museum; not the Residenzschloß, former home to the extravagantly wealthy Electors of Saxony. Kurt Vonnegut, who witnessed the fire-bombing of Dresden as a German prisoner of war, described the scene that day in his novel/memoir Slaughterhouse Five: “Dresden was like the moon now. Nothing but minerals.”


But it’s not as if the locals want to erase this memory from the collective consciousness. On the contrary, that fateful day and its immediate aftermath are the centerpiece of the exhibits at the Staatmuseum and the subject of a popular DVD on sale all over town and available in six different languages. It’s more that they seem to want to forget that Communism ever happened. And I guess I can’t blame them. Baroque palaces are a lot more attractive that Soviet-style apartment buildings, and they have the added benefit of bringing in more tourists.

It’s not hard to imagine how beautiful Dresden will be in a few years, a true destination, “Florence on the Elbe” once again. And if the Staatmuseum ever wants to run an exhibit on what Dresden looked like before the Great Rebuilding, I’ve got a few photos I can loan them.