Crash Course on Germany

Munich was not technically our first stop in Germany—we also had “train layovers” in Hamburg and Köln during which Jay and I did some quick “steeple chasing” to see the main highlights of the towns—but it was the first place we spent any real time. The most immediately striking thing to me about Germany is how much World War Two is still omnipresent. In Amsterdam, the war had clear long-term effects on the city, obviously in the complete rebuild of the bombed out neighborhoods but also more subtly in that the trees are exactly the same height because the old trees were all cut down for firewood during the war. But in Munich (and the surrounding area) the fallout from the war is more obvious and will always be a major part of the fabric of the city/country: many of the buildings were never really rebuilt from the war and instead have a façade painted on them to appear as if they had been rebuilt; Dachau will always be synonymous with the atrocities of concentration camps, no mater how hard the local tourism board tries to highlight other town features. 

I guess you can call this "reconstructed"...

Right in the main square, some nice facade painting

Upon arrival in Munich, Jay and I quickly hopped on another New Europe Free City Tour. The tour was not quite as good as our last one, I think because the guide hadn’t quite figured out how to spin the WW1 and WW2 history with the sunnier side of Bavaria into a coherent story about the city, but it was still a great quick intro. My favorite thing was seeing the subtle Holocaust tributes around the city. Our guide said that Munich’s approach to Holocaust remembrance is unique: rather than have a big showy display with lots of signs and information, the city has many small subtle memorials, which you then go home, google it, get curious about what you find, and end up learning more about WW2 than you had set out to. An interesting approach I think, and here are two examples that stuck with me:

• Early in Nazi rule, the clergy of the Frauenkirche cathedral decided to hide items of monetary and spiritual value for the nearby synagogue in their basement. The cathedral was bombed, though the towers (and thus the basement below them) were spared because the Allies used the towers to mark the city center of Munich. After the war, as a thank you, the Jewish clergy helped fund the rebuild of the cathedral. To this day, there is menorah painted in the ceiling of the cathedral to pay tribute to this unusual partnership.

• In another part of the city, there is an alley with a path of bronze stones set into the cobble stone. Apparently, the alley was where objectors would dodge the nearby Hitler memorial for to avoid saluting the SS. If you were caught taking the alley too many times, you were arrested (and likely killed), yet this threat did not deter many people and their bravery is thus memorialized.

The next day we took the train out to Dachau, the first Nazi concentration camp and a model for all the others. Like the Anne Frank House, I haven’t processed the experience enough to write coherently about it. All I’ll say for now is that I have no idea how folks still live in that area. I can’t imagine facing those atrocities everyday—there are prominent remembrance signs throughout the area, the town bike path is the old rail line to the camp, and many of the roads and buildings in the area were built with prisoner labor.

To try to get my mind off the camp a bit, I spent the afternoon at the Deutsches Science and Technology Museum. This museum was an interesting example of much the guide book you purchase can shape your trip. Our Frommer’s has a half-page rave of the museum:

“The world’s largest and oldest technological museum of its kind, the Deutches Museum contains a huge collection of artifacts and historic originals…For one of the most popular exhibits, you can descend into the bowels of a coal and salt mine…What makes the museum fascinating for adults and children alike is that there are buttons to push, gears to crank, and levers to pull. In any case, you could easily spend a half-day here.”

And Rough Guides has a small, skeptical paragraph:

“Munich’s most overwhelming museum—the Deutches Museum—occupies a mid-stream island in the Isar. Covering every conceivable aspect of technical endeavor…this is the most compendious collection of its type in Germany.”

I think if I had only purchased the Rough Guide book I would have skipped the museum, but Frommer’s made it sound so awesome! In the end, I think both summaries are true. The exhibits are sweet, especially the mining exhibit, and it’s more of a history of science and technology museum than I was expecting, with technologies for any given endeavor from its earliest days up to the 1980s so you can see the development of the field. On the other hand, there are about 65 different topics covered and the only way to really appreciate the museum would be to get an annual membership and tackle one or two sections per week (and speak German, because most signs are not translated).

I don't know what year this represents of what they are mining, but how cool!

Lastly, we ventured into the Bavarian countryside to check out the Neushwanstein castle. I think of castles as an artifact of the middle ages, but this one was built by King Ludwig II starting in 1869! It was never finished because he died mysteriously in 1886, but the rooms that are finished are insane. The castle was designed as a tribute to the operatic works of Wager, and each room is themed according to one of his operas. The strangest room is the cave room—truly, a room designed to look like a cave, right of the king’s private quarters—honoring one of Wagner's operas set in a cave, I think. Most of the rest of the rooms are just way over the top ornate. Jay and I decided that room decorations increase to a point where you are like, “Ok, come on, too much,” and then if you keep decorating they come back around to “That’s so awesome!” I wish I could have taken pictures, because it’s hard to describe—every inch of the room, floors, ceilings, walls, was covered in mural and mosaic work; the kings bedroom was full of intricate woodwork that took 14 carvers four and a half years to complete; the gold and bejeweled chandeliers each had 64 candles and weighted 2,000 pounds.

Oh yeah, and then there is the fun fact that Neushwanstein inspired the castle in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. The location is stunning, surrounded by wooded hills and alpine lakes with snow capped mountains towering the background. And the castle really does look like it belongs in a fairy tale:

Princess Castle!!

The castle as it would look without the scaffolding on the big tower

Note: It’s interesting as I go back and reread this—I expected the Bavarian culture (beer gardens and the tasty food) to feature more prominently in my memory of Munich. Somehow against the background of everything else we saw, that part just seems, frankly, irrelevant.