Through Bavaria

I went to Nuremberg for my second pilgrimage of the week. Five months was enough to enamour me with the German railway system, and I decided I simply had to trek to the Railway Museum in Nuremberg to see its baby pictures. I carpooled from Berlin to Nuremberg and crashed with a girl there, spending the evening chatting about organic groceries and quirky housekeeping neuroses. The next morning I went to see the former Nazi rally grounds south of the city -- they're enormous, they had a pastel mock-Colosseum, and lots of efficient historical plaques and photos, and were almost totally empty. Then I wandered the old town, which was impressive, because Nuremberg's the former semi-official capital of the Holy Roman Empire, and looks the part.

And then I went to the Railway Museum, and spent an hour in bliss. The best was the Hanover King Ernst August's early reaction: "I don't want any railways in the country! I don't want every cobbler and tailor to be able to travel as fast as I can!"

Later, I travelled south, and stayed some nights with Elisabeth and Hans, retired and living near Munich, random secondhand acquaintances turned friends. (And kind, and generous -- and I should mention that I've been continually amazed for the last few months at the welcomes I've received from friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends, all over Europe.) We spent two days rolling through Munich by subway reading train ads to "Learn Wall Street English Fast!", and speeding over southern Bavaria by car, on autobahn through yellowy moor past tiny red-roofed villages with the Alps always in the distance.

We fulfilled another dear romantic once-thwarted wish of mine, and visited a medieval abbey, possibly once complete with long, damp passages, narrow cells and ruined chapel, all however now nicely kept up. There were (photocopies of) books on display dating from the ninth-century founding, faded twelfth-century reddish floorstones in the chapel, and a map somewhere showing the sizeable 20 km or so chunk of Bavaria south of Munich that used to belong to the abbey. It was impressive.

And we took a train up the highest mountain in Germany, saw a little Bavarian palace and a big Bavarian palace, watched the mechanical Munich town square clock strike, and visited the former concentration camp at Dachau, where political opponents of the Nazis and other inconvenient people were kept until 1945. This was also impressive, in a way -- huge and bleak. I read about horrible things in the museum until my mind was numb, and felt lost and couldn't form any coherent impression. As we left, I kept seeing the faces from the photographs on the people in the parking lot.

I heard about fifties Dachau from Hans, who went to school there. The place had disintegrated during the war; early on there was essentially no school building, and classes were held in local pubs.

I left on Sunday morning, and now I'm back in Freiburg, running errands and packing.

The world smiles with you

I eat my words. Or possibly my hat. Berlin's a much nicer place, in sunshine, than I gave it credit for. It has lots of glassy shiny colourful buildings, and it's that rare thing, a big city that's managed to create open spaces without having them look as if they were bulldozed clear yesterday in preparation for a parking lot to be built tomorrow. I slept in late this morning, then went undirectedly wandering, and saw all this and more.

It also has lots of neo-classical Victorian official buildings with svelte nymph-columns and Latin inscriptions along the lines of "Erected by King Frederick to the honour of Apollo and the Nine Muses". Berlin's the capital of the former Kingdom of Prussia, which meandered along in backwater obscurity for hundreds of years before becoming big in the eighteenth century. So its building burst was late compared to most German cities. Most oldey-buildings are erbaut 17- or 18-something, by the time when mischmasches of ancient religions were retro or appropriately regal rather than blasphemous.

Everywhere in Berlin -- particularly the centre of the former East Berlin -- is under construction. Some of the construction defies belief -- they want to build a new main-Berlin-Palace! To mimic the glorious old eighteenth-century one! Which was bulldozed by the DDR fifty years ago while perfectly intact to make space for some sort of government building, which was itself bulldozed a few years ago to erase all memory of the deed! And they're repainting the inside of the Marienkirche (the oldest still-used church in Berlin)! but when I was there today, the whitewashed-but-unpainted walls were being rehung with pictures! I don't understand much, but the sheer energy's nice.

I forgot to mention that yesterday I went to inspect our men in Berlin, otherwise known as the New Zealand Embassy. It's a carpeted office on the third floor of an office building somewhere south of the centre. It's staffed largely by enthusiastic Germans, it has two pictures of Helen Clark on the wall, it has multi-month-old North and Souths and a view out to Checkpoint Charlie. And I went to see the archaeological remnants of Troy, dug up in Turkey a hundred years ago by a German businessman and smuggled to Berlin before their discovery was announced. This was clearly either the source of, or a successful application of, the principle that possession is the fastest nine-tenths of the law. Troy consisted mostly of clay pots, it seems. Now we know what was in Helen's dowry.

To Nuremberg this afternoon, and Munich tomorrow.

Ich bin kein Berliner

In accordance with my newly-ratified policy on foreign travel, I checked in at the youth hostel on arrival in Göttingen, then headed out into the nearby woods to go hiking.

The newly-ratified policy has developed gradually over the last few months, starting when I realised on one of my weekend trips that despite my continuing Europe-seeing excitement, I was starting to have gorgeous-old-building-ennui. It's just not possible to keep finding everything wonderful for six straight months, especially when you're as ignorant of historical and technical details as I am. So, to properly enjoy my last week of travels, I've issued to myself the following proclamation:

• first, that I'm here to enjoy myself, and needn't Make The Most Of Every Moment or see uncongenial sights -- so I can go on pretty but insignificant backhill hikes, curl up early at night with a novel, and avoid Museums of Natural History without guilt
  
• second, that I'm here to educate myself -- so I can follow what Lonely Planet calls "the lemming routine" without shame, and go on tours or take the audioguide rather than always relying on imagination or intuition or independent thought

When I go home, I promise I'll never again sneer at tourists who are clueless or ignorant or can't speak the language. Really, perhaps it's best to go travelling to a place of which you know absolutely nothing beforehand. At any rate your net gain in knowledge is certainly thereby maximised.

Anway, the policy's working well. The hills in Göttingen are very nice -- gently sloping, and with mini-farms on the nearer edges rented by eco-keen city-slickers -- and the old earth fortifications round the town, where I wandered later that night, are pretty cool. I got home, and went to bed, and slept for a very long time.


The next day, yesterday, I took the train to Berlin, where I've been since. It's exciting; it really does feel like a big city; but it feels drab enough that I wouldn't want to live here. Perhaps it's inevitable for a town famous for wars and workaholic princes, totalitarianism and techno. I don't know. Maybe it's just the winter rain.

It's very good for me, though. I've seen a dozen classes of German schoolchildren, presumably on educational trips to the capital. I feel exactly the same. And really, after five months of bluffing my way through conversations with Germans on history and politics (which happen often, because Germans really like talking about history and politics), I'm grateful for an excuse to find out things like what the German parliament does, how so many Jews ended up in Germany, why the Berlin Wall was put up in the first place. I'm particularly ignorant of the Cold War -- I suspect, somehow, that this is standard for New Zealanders my age -- and it's been nice filling in whole "here be dragons" segments of my mental historical map.


My mathematical tour of Europe continues. In Göttingen -- whose main, perhaps only, claim to fame is as the home of a university that for a long time housed all the best mathematicians in Europe -- I saw a plaque to Riemann's former lodgements, in a boxy apartment overhanging a cut-price clothing store. Later I made a little pilgrimage out to the grave of Carl Friedrich Gauss. In Berlin this afternoon, in a spectacular Hohenzollern palace, I saw a picture of Bessel. He was labelled as an astronomer, and carrying a clock. Clearly the assumption that mathematicians are "er, those guys that deal with numbers" is of very long standing.

For a final news-tidbit -- I, too, have a hat! It was sourced on the weekend in a secondhand shop in the Freiburg old town. It's tweed and buckety, a little silly-looking . . . but of course nonetheless rather fetching.