Visiting Germany, April 2015

My third trip to Europe this last April was probably the most interesting thing I did this year.    I decided to fly to Berlin, Germany and after six days or so head to Munich for another six days.  I wanted to make some side trips to interesting cities, and, eventually ended up going to Salzburg, Austria for one day, and to Hohen

Fernsehturm and Church, Berlin

schwangau where the last few Kings of Bavaria had their summer home.  This is where “Mad King” Ludwig I built his magnificent and expensive Neuschwanstein Castle, which is a 19th century fantasy castle in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps. After all this I took the train back to Berlin and fly home the next day.  It was two weeks altogether.

To go to Berlin, you have to change planes in Munich anyway so why not visit Munich first and take the train to Berlin and then back to Munich so I could fly home from there?   Apparently it was cheaper to book a flight to Berlin than to fly nonstop to Munich. Berlin does not have a world class airport although they are working on building one in Brandenburg.  I was unsure if it was advisable to just skip the Berlin leg of the trip but as it turned out it was a pleasant journey in a somewhat antiquated jet.  They had to bus us out to a different part of the airport and we climbed on using a moving staircase. 

Berlin was fun.  It was hipster heaven and kind of a museum of the bygone days of communism.    I stayed in the former Eastern sector and most of what I saw was in the Eastern sector.   

statue of German construction worker

The German Democratic Republic was big on massive apartment blocks, statues of Marx and Engels, (forget Lenin, he wasn’t German) and a few memorable building facades illustrating the valiant young socialist youth doing battle with fascism and happy workers building the socialist paradise.  In East Berlin all the streets are named after Socialist heroes of various kinds.   My hostel was right across the street from the U-bahn stop named for Rosa Luxemburg.

down with imperialism

A nearby street was named for Karl Liebknecht.  They were German communists who tried to start a Russian-style revolution in Germany just after the first world war, but the Freikorps paramilitary made short work of them, so they became martyrs to the cause.  When the Soviets finally occupied the Eastern Sector in 1945, they renamed all the streets in the East for these socialist heroes. 

Henry Moore's:  Does this dress make my butt look big? (Munich)

Apparently the Soviets took a lot of art and loot back to Russia with them, which they haven’t returned, but left enough of it behind to fill several large art museums on the Museum Island.   Of course the Germans did a lot of their own looting and pillaging so there you are.  

The Hohenzollern Schloss rises again

The old Hohenzollern Schloss sat in the middle of the Museum Island and was pretty badly damaged in the Second World War.  The Soviets decided to have it demolished and built something else on it.  Now, 25 years after the fall of the Berlin wall the Germans are rebuilding an exact replica of the Schloss on the original site.  The whole area is a huge construction site.  I feel like maybe I should come back in a few years when it is all finished. 

The only statue of Lenin I could find was in the German Historical Museum.

Lenin rescued from the scrap heap of history

Apparently it was one that was taken from somewhere in Lithuania and scheduled to be melted down but the war ended and it was saved.    As for the Hitler era, it is as though it never existed. It is there, certainly, but you have to go looking for it.  Hitler’s bunker is now buried under a parking lot somewhere.  There are only a few extant buildings from the Hitler era, and the Russians and the German Democratic Republic were not much into historic preservation.   I suppose I could have gone to see the remnants of Dachau or the one near Berlin, but the whole thing is such a downer.  I chose instead to go see the art museums and the antiquities from an older time.  The Gemaldegalerie was excellent, as were the art galleries in Munich and other parts of Berlin.

The Berlin wall still has remnants here and there and there are a few places where it has been preserved, mostly covered extensively with graffiti.  The graffiti is sort of a shape-shifting wall art museum or the best of it is.   The worst of it is just the same as what you can see in Chicago and just as ugly. 

crossing the wall

What is worse is that people continue to mark up and scrawl their names on some really great and interesting mural art.  I think it is a bit like scrawling a moustache on the Mona Lisa.  But hey, it’s outdoors and the weather will destroy it eventually anyway.  Visiting the St. Georgen Friedhof, a large cemetery on the eastern side of Berlin was instructive.  I saw what definitely looked like machine gun tracer, shrapnel and bomb scars on many of the memorials.  I expect that cemetery was once the site of a battle. 

Apart from the wall there are memorials that preserve the guard towers and the death zone that the German communists called “The anti-fascism defensive rampart” when in actuality it was a wall

old guard tower

put up to prevent East Germany from losing all its skilled workers to the west.   Around Potsdamer Platz I  got a close look at some of the old guard towers with gun ports.  Apparently the wall guards who didn’t have the nerve to shoot people were arrested by the Stasi. 

German beer puts American beer to shame, however, and, being a habitual insomniac, I was regularly down at Belushi’s bar having a late night snack of German potato chips and Franziskaner beer watching some football match between Dusseldorf and Manchester FC. 

Midnight snack

The euro has near parity with the dollar and it was not that expensive.

The rest of the trip I’ll summarize below in probably too much detail: 

April 21.  Went to the Gemaldegalerie, which is in the Kulturforum, near Potsdamer Platz.  Spent several hours there, then went to the Kaiser Wilhelm Gedaechtniskirche and visited the Berlin Zoo.  That evening I learned that there was going to be a national rail strike.

April 22  I checked out of my hostel and took a couple of streetcars to get to the Hauptbahnhof where they told me that getting to Munich was not impossible. Apparently by re-routing my journey west to Hannover and then south to

train to Berlin

Munich I could get to Munich just about as soon as I would have without the strike.  It took up a day’s time anyway.  I arrived in Munich at around 5 pm. and checked into my hostel.

April 23.  I walked around central Munich, visited two of the major churches of Munich admired the baroque architecture and the Zentralbahnhof.

the famous glockenspiel at Marienplatz, Munich

 

April 24. Caught an early train to Salzburg, Austria, walked the streets of Salzburg, visited the gardens of the Schloss Mirabell, climbed the Kapuchinerberg to the Monastery, 

nice dress but her breath was terrible

saw Stefan Zweig’s memorial, visited the Dom zu Salzburg and had a meal and a beer at a April fest celebration before taking the train back to Munich.

April 25, 2015:  took a train to Hohenschwangau and Neuschwanstein near Fussen in the Bavarian Alps.  Toured both castles and hiked up to the Marienbrucke which has a nice view of the Castle from

Neuschwanstein tower

above, then took the bus back to the station and took the train back to Munich.

April 26.  That morning took a long walk from my hotel up the Luisenstrasse and visited the old North Cemetery.  Then after lunch somwhere I spent the afternoon at the Alte Pinakothek.  Then I walked down another street, stopped briefly at the Nazi documentation Center, which was closed or under construction. went back to my hostel for a while then walked around the immediate neighborhood.

April 27.  On this day I walked in a southeast direction along Schwanthalerstrasse to the church of Saint Paul near the Theresienwiese. 

From there I went to this large open area where there was a giant carnival going on with rides, etc. that was the Volksfest.  Then I visited the giant Statue of Bavaria and the hall of heroes which contained marble busts of just about every eminent person from Bavaria I had ever heard of and many I hadn’t.  From there I wandered in a easterly direction along the Mozartstrasse and had lunch at the Goetheplatz at the local McDonald’s, before continuing along the Lindwurmstrasse to the Old South Cemetery

which is a huge old cemetery with many fine stones.  After that I followed the Pestalozzistrasse back north to explore the Sendlinger Tor, the Sendlinger Strasse and Oberanger strasse, visited the Asam church and the Viktualenmarkt and had supper at another Nordsee.  I visited the Marienplatz again a couple of times before and after dark.

April 28.  Took the train back to Berlin from Munich, relaxed at the hostel in yet another room at the St. Christopher’s Hostel for one more night.

April 29.  Took a bus back to the airport in Berlin. Took the plane back to Munich, then flew back to the US, arriving around sunset. Our plane passed the southern Tip of Greenland in daylight and I got a nice view of the terrain there before continuing across the icy wastes of Northern Quebec.