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.