I wonder what they call Swiss cheese in Germany?

Samstag, 15. Juli 2006

I had to title the entry something I’ve been wondering. I love German Swiss cheese, but I’ve no idea if it actually is Swiss cheese, or from Switzerland, or what. It tastes like Jarlsberg Swiss, but it’s not called that. I attempted looking up the words on the label to no avail. Bah! It’s good, though. The bread and cheese here are so good—why do people even bother with McDonald’s? I don’t get it.

Getting on to my day. First off, I hate my camera! With a seething passion! (I had to start off by saying that. Now I may continue.) I went to Nürnberg (Nuremberg) today! It was completely unexpectedly awesome. I was kind of reluctant to go there because you think Nuremberg and you immediately think of Nazis and World War II. As Americans, especially if you ever, ever, ever have seen the History Channel, you can’t think of anything else when you hear of that city. It’s infamous as the site of the famed post-war trials, because the Allied forces thought, in 1945, that it’d be a grand idea to try the biggest war criminals at the site of where the largest Nazi gatherings in all of Europe once took place. Heh.

But as I said, it was completely unexpectedly awesome, and totally not that at all. (At least, we opted not to go to the stadium where most of it all happened, including Hitler’s biggest speeches… Yeah. Unanimous vote to forego that experience.)

Anyway Mary and I sat at Goethe yesterday afternoon and looked at our tourbooks, attempting to figure out which city to visit today. We were in an empty classroom, me with my laptop open, and Ian sitting across the room, tapping away at his own keyboard. “Augsburg is nice,” I said, pointing to the Romantic Road’s largest city, where my Medieval literature professor once taught. It’s supposed to be an incredible Medieval city with a university.

Ian, listening in, suggested Nuremberg instead. “It’s really nice,” he told us, and Mary and I were surprised. We looked at the tourbook and read through some of the city information—castle, check; churches, check; open-air market, check—and I still wasn’t too hot for it, but it seemed the logical place to go, because it was about two hours from München and much more prominent as a tourist location. And, it’s known all over Germany for its Christmas festival, which is supposedly fantastic beyond measure. Okay, I thought. We can see. We walked over to the Haupbahnhof and looked up tickets on the electronic dispenser and discovered we could use the “Schönes-Wochenende” or “Beautiful Weekend” ticket—what we’d used for Salzburg—to get there for 30€, for up to five people. Mary and I were thrilled. Only 15€ each! We bought the ticket for Saturday and went to our respective homes, saying we’d meet at 5:30 to catch the 6:10 train, to arrive in Nürnberg by 9-ish. Not bad.

I got to the Hauptbahnhof at 5:33 and Mary said she’d seen Stephen, the guy from NC Charlotte, the day before, and she had invited him along. Another person to split the ticket with! 10€ each! He came after a short time and we found seats together on the crazy double-decker train. Double-decker trains are seriously the best European thing ever. (Okay, that’s not true, but they’re still really, really cool.) After being seated for a little while, a white-haired man came over and in slow German asked if we were using the Schönes-Wochenende ticket. Mary and Stephen looked at me to see if I’d understood a single word. I’d heard “machen” and “Schönes-Wochenende ticket” so I said, “Ja, wir haben das.” He then asked something none of us caught, so we looked at him helplessly. He then said, “Danke,” and sat down behind us. We exchanged glances with each other, and with him, and he realized we hadn’t understood. “English?” he asked, and we nodded. “You have the Schönes-Wochenende ticket, yes?” We nodded. “Can I be on your ticket?” The ticket is up to five people, but I looked to Mary and Stephen. Neither looked easy about saying no, but we really did not want to say yes either. Mary shrugged and we decided more or less, whatever. Weird. When the ticket guy came about a half-hour later, I didn’t point to him to include him in our ticket, but when he was asked, he pointed to us and the ticket guy nodded and moved on. I immediately wondered how many people bum weekend rides just like that. Weird.

It was a long, scenic ride in the light of the rising sun. There are a ton of farms in Bayern (Bavaria). Tons. It’s sort of different from traveling between Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, let’s say, where there are spots of vast farmland, too, but here, it’s different. The towns—villages, really—look ancient, as if they haven’t changed in decades, perhaps centuries. The white-washed wall and reddish stone roofed buildings are covered with fresh flowers draping from window sills and in every cluster of buildings there is clearly one ancient-looking church spire. It’s so bizarre. No “McDonald’s” signs visible from miles away. No neon lights. Barely any cars. No huge gas stations or eighteen-wheelers parked anywhere. So different.

We finally arrived and decided to take the subway one stop to the center of the Altstadt. Many European cities seem to have an “Altstadt,” or the like, the part of the city that used to be a medieval town clustered around a castle of some kind, usually walled in by water or a thick stone wall. Salzburg was like this, and even Paris to some extent. These were the hubs until perhaps the eighteenth century, when the cities really started to grow and spill out into the surrounding farmland—for some this happened as late as the late nineteenth century—sometimes creating cities as large as München. We took the U-Bahn and got off at Lorenzkirche, St. Lorenz Church, and walked up into the morning air. It was freezing! Somehow it had not warmed up a smidge since sunrise and the three of us in T-shirts (yes, that’s a neu-deutsch word) were frigid. Despite that, the weather was fantastic. Clear blue Bayern skies with a brisk breeze promising a cool and lovely day. (Bayern’s colors are sky blue and white, for their famous skies.) My fantastic Wetter-Glück continues! I was immediately impressed with the absolute gorgeousness of the city I saw around me. The impeccably paved streets (cobbled, of course) and ancient and modern stone buildings mixed together were so unlike what I was expecting—I have no idea what I was in fact expecting—I was suddenly very happy to be in Nürnberg.

We found breakfast at a coffee shop—all coffee shops in Germany are very, very obviously American imports. They’re all in English and are very much Starbucks knock-offs if not Starbucks in actuality—we’ve seen a few of those. Nevertheless the cappuccino hit the spot and we were off in the slightly warmer sunlight, going north (thanks, trusty compass) toward the rest of the main attractions of Nürnberg. Most everything was just starting to open, but as we walked up the broad avenue (dodging some very out-of-place cars) we suddenly walked into a huge market square in front of the Frauenkirche. Just like the market near Marienplatz in München, this market sold everything from fruits, vegetables, beer, wine, and cheese to handmade goods of various types and quality. At the far end of the square was a surprising and unique sight—a tower of carved figures, the symbol of Nürnberg. And the fountains, every block or two, were splendid. Continuing up the street, we found the town hall, or Rathaus, to our right, a intricate and austere building, opposite another church, Selbaldkirche, or St. Sebaldus Church. I was amazed by the intricacy and ancient looking exterior, and going inside, I was absolutely shocked—it had been destroyed in the war. The interior was as perfect-seeming as the outside, but all along the main section of the church were huge black-and-white images of the 1945 bombing of Nürnberg, and the entire main section of the church, including pieces of its two towers, had been destroyed, most of it leveled, the rest a mere shell, in the bombings. Looking around, I admitted the grout looked a little modern, but it looked gothic enough for me to be convinced of its authenticity.

We continued north up the street and found the Nürnberg Stadt Museum, and wandered in, getting our student discount and going up to the top floor to go down, looking at the different stages of Nürnberg. The top floor had a narrated German slideshow (I could understand so much of it!!) and we saw Nürnberg as an Imperial city in the middle ages—it was the sometime home of the Holy Roman Emperor—to high Renaissance center of art and even Reformation-age place of debate and religious reformation. The city had been strongly effected in 1525 and mostly converted in the Reformation, different from most of southern, conservatively Catholic Bavaria. They moved from important building to important building, and we all silently decided to check the places out that we hadn’t seen. Then a picture flashed of a fantastically ornate building with three huge domes, with carvings all along its sides. Mary immediately said, “We should definitely go there!” and then I looked at the city model in front of us on the table, facing the slideshow screen. The highlighted space was—empty. A white square empty of a building. Mary and I were both disappointed. Where had it gone? I looked back at the image on the slideshow projector and strained to understand the German. It had been destroyed in the “Zweite Weltkrieg.” By whom? Axis or Allied? I looked down, at the carefully empty square, and thought—why would it still be empty if that church we saw had been painstakingly rebuilt post-war? Two floors down, I found the answer. It had been a synagogue. I gaped. It had never been rebuilt, and today the space stands as a memorial.

Of course, the gaping continued. The stream of black-and-white images, starting with those taken in the late 19th century, went all the way up to the 1950s. Seeing Nürnberg from 1938 to 1945… wow. Wow. I can’t really describe how—scary—it was. I saw the Rathaus—we’d just passed it!—streaming with Swastika flags, pictures of Hitler at a podium in front of a tremendous crowd…. Even the Marktplatz in front of Frauenkirche with troops marching through it. But the next room was—if possible—worse. It was a scale model of Nürnberg in 1945, post the bombings by the Allied forces. It had been decimated. Decimated. All but one major church—the miraculous 14th century gothic beast of Lorenzkirche—had been nearly crippled. Houses were rubble, everywhere, patches of razed and untouched—though mostly razed. It looked like the television footage of a Midwestern town after a level 5 tornado. The pictures on the walls were just—wow. Sights I’d just passed in the city, in rubble. And we did that to this city. It’s like we’d bombed the German Florence. (If you love Italian history, art, or literature, you definitely can appreciate how much that would hurt the world’s history.)

The loss of history, the loss of culture was crippling, and my disappointment with the loss of history was at odds with my disgust at the Nazi images. Yet even so, did our side really need to bomb the poor churches? Were there soldier barracks in them or something? Why, why? Here was a city where Martin Luther had lectured, where the first Protestant pastors argued for their right to worship! Where Albrecht Dürer, the famous Renaissance artist and first painter of the self-portrait, lived. Where the Holy Roman Emperor and his queen lived for a time in their palace. A center of art, of literature, of commerce throughout a thousand years of history. This lovely, culturally rich city had been destroyed. It was like seeing the World Trade Center images—but somehow worse. The WTC hurt a lot because there was obviously a tremendous loss of life, but so much of the anger and pain were from the emotional weight of America being attacked on our own territory. Imagining New York or Washington, D. C. decimated by an aerial raid is something more like what this felt like.

You never, ever see this side of the war in America. You see America taking the blame for Hiroshima, but not for this sort of thing, not for Germany, or Austria. We killed, they killed. It’s all war in the end, all painful; no matter the ideals someone gets hurt. While the smoke was still clearing from St. Selban’s, people started rebuilding it, shocked and hurt by the loss of their place of worship; it took until 1960 to finally wipe away the last of the dust. The same was true for München’s Frauenkirche in Marienplatz—it had been half-destroyed, all save the city’s symbol, the “onion” domes, and people immediately started rebuilding it, to prevent history from falling into forgotten ruin. At least war was somewhat fair when it was swords and bows and arrows… At least an entire city couldn’t vanish in a day, then.

War never has just one side, one view. I’m so glad I was here to see some of the other side of it—er, not that side, I mean seeing images of post-war, decimated Germany for the first time. I want to try to wrap my head around the whole of things as they were. It’s part of the whole walking in someone else’s shoes experience—you really can’t say you understand someone until you try that, no matter how much you think you know. And understanding history from all angles is one way to prevent re-experiencing it. Seeing the rubble of Nürnberg—I understand a lot more now, especially more of why Germany took so many decades to rebuild itself, why they take their twentieth century history lessons in schools very, very seriously. When I go to Dachau next Saturday with Goethe, I’ll see another side of it altogether. (Dachau was the site of an infamous concentration camp.) This is the way of a true historian—analyzing all angles to understand the best and truest picture possible. I’m so glad I got to go to Nürnberg, to see all of that, to somehow understand so much more than I did before.

Leaving that museum was somewhat of a relief. So many contradictions in Nürnberg, a city of rich art and architecture, of disputed religion and deadly politics. I suppose a thousand years of history is also a thousand years of constant change and growth, for good and ill, and we Americans are still far too young to see that change in our own cities, in our own people. Perhaps another few hundred years and we’ll have fought through the same changes of leaders and country and people and somehow understand. We were never really sacked and rebuilt by invading armies over centuries of war—well, perhaps southerners in cities wrecked in the Civil War have some idea, some inkling we Yankees lack. I’m not sure. But enough waxing political and all that. I don’t like getting embroiled in politics because, like religion, we’ll never all agree. (Frankly, I think that’s how it ought to be. I happen to like diversity of opinion and belief, provided we don’t go forcing our opinions on others. Getting on, though…)

After that, we went up a tremendous hill toward the Imperial Palace, which was rather expensive to visit. We took a few pictures of the city from the hill then wandered back down, stopping at a restaurant for the classic Nürnberg treat—the Nürnberger. They’re small wurst, the smallest traditional wurst in Germany, and they’re famous for serving them on bread like a sandwich or with plenty of sauerkraut. Mary and I ordered the Nürnberger platter and Stephen the Wienerschnitzel. We ate happily in the sunlight and proceeded on our touring of the city, slowly but steadily. We attempted to see all the major sites—all the interesting ones not requiring expensive admission fees—and finally made our way back to the train in the late afternoon. We all decided, after getting some Eis (ice cream, or the German gelato-like version of it, which is fantastic!) that Goethe really ought to open a Nürnberg site for the Institut. It’s such an interesting city, so large and small all at once, that it’d be quite an interesting place to live in and explore—its history aside, it’s quite modern, too. They have Instituts all over, so why not there? We all agreed Nürnberg had been absolutely nothing like what we’d expected, and we were thrilled to have gone.

The train was long and I was thoroughly exhausted by the time I got home. On the way back to the dorm I got some delicious German Swiss cheese (yeah, I’m sure there’s a name for it here, because it’s not actually Swiss cheese…erm…heh) and some crackers, enjoying some fresh cherries from Marienplatz (from a lady selling cherries with a sign that said, “Frauenkirche liebt Kirschen!”—“Kirche” is church and “Kirschen” are cherries). I hopped up on my wide windowsill and ate my strangely awesome dinner and discovered that I can *just* see the “onion” domes of Frauenkirche from my room window. I admitted it was quite worth living with the evil Hausfrau to have that view. Ah, Germany.

Now, of course, for pictures…
Album style
Slideshow style

Enjoy!