WMD: Travelling to Germany, or at least Bavaria, is all about history. It's what the people you meet like to talk about, because relatively speaking, they've got a lot of history to discuss. And they've got plenty of artifacts of their history to show: great cathedrals, fortifications that survived the Middle Ages, noble city houses, a piano Mozart played on, beer brewed according to rules laid down half a millennium ago, palaces that were exercises in self-aggrandizement, and sacred sites that still draw thousands of pilgrims today.
And despite having some of the prettiest landscape around -- with carefully delineated farm fields, plains, gentle hills and rivers in the north, and the rivers, lakes and beginning of the Alps to the south, Bavarian history is all about people, and not about the land. They love their land, it's a major source of food, housing and recreation for them, but it's also tame by Canadian standards. (Canadian history is not the history of people but the history of land, the use of land and the effect of that land on the people who came here and barely survived it. Canadian history begins with geography, and the Germans who flock here to wander through our woods understand this completely and love Canada for this reason.)
When I was in Bavaria, I was told a bear had wandered over from Italy to the German side of the Alps. For all I know, it's still there. As of last week, it had killed a few sheep, but as far as anyone knew, it was the only bear around, perhaps the only wild bear in Germany. The Bavarians who told me about the bear talked about it almost with affection, or at least humour. This is the scope of nature in southern Germany: Major mountain range with one cuddly bear. Contrast that to Vancouver, where we have plenty of bears in the smaller mountains overlooking the city. No one here who knows anything about bears regards them as cuddly, because anyone who's spent even a few hours in the woods a bare half hour from the city knows nature is not cuddly. Nature is pretty cool, and to live cheek by jowl to it is even cooler, but it also has us under siege, a state of existence Germans almost regard with awe.
The interesting thing about much of the physical history you see in Bavaria-- the cathedrals, palaces and great homes. -- is that they're recreations. Much was destroyed in the Second World War by Allied bombing and painstakingly rebuilt and recreated to the tiniest detail by Germans who wanted to resurrect their pre-war historical and cultural treasures. It's almost a sham. You wander into the great cathedral at the centre of Munich and think, wow, those Renaissance guys knew how to build a church. And then you see a display off to one side showing how the cathedral was gutted completely in the war, and all the intricate carvings and the magnificient frescoes that adorn the ceiling were destroyed or terribly damaged. And then you realize that what you are seeing, which is so magnificent, is only a few decades old, and you almost feel ripped off, because you've got churches older than that back in a young city like Vancouver. But then you realize that what you are seeing is a testament not so much to the artisans of 500 years ago, but the workers and artists of 50 years ago, who put their sweat and labour and intellectual skills into recovering what was lost, even as their cites and homes around them were buried in rubble. And you also realize that if it hadn't been rebuilt, we'd all be poorer for it. I can't think of a better honour to the will of the post-war Germans than those rebuilt cathedrals--economic miracle, BMWs and FIFA championships aside.
The Germans I met don't shy away about talking about the destruction wrought by the war. While they are wary and (very) weary about always having their country connected to the war and the Nazi period, they almost make a ritual of talking about how Munich was 50 to 80 per cent destroyed (I heard various figures) or how Augsberg was 50 to 75 per cent destroyed, or how Landshut, a charming medieval city to the east, was spared bombing altogether, and its great brick cathedral suffered only broken glass from the blast of distant U.S. artillery fire. The Germans I met don't go so far as to call themselves victims, despite what an American travel writer I met at the Munich airport's brew pub said. "They always bring up Dresden," she said in disgust about her German hosts. "And so I ask them: Then why'd you start the war?" They will also, on occasion, point out reminders of the period, and of the occasional brave reactions to it. In Altoeting, the country's major Catholic pilgrimage centre, they've built a special small chapel in one corner of the church. On that spot, eight citizens of the town were shot by German soldiers, only hours before the war ended, for wanting to surrender to the oncoming American army. The chapel honours their memory.
Our guide in Landshut pointed out a stained glass window in one of that town's churches. The stained glass, replaced after the war, tells the story of a local saint who was martyred by the secular authorities centuries ago. But the post-war artist, in a nod to what had just happened in his country, included the faces of Hitler, Himmler and Goebbels among the men torturing and killing the saint. Our guide, a funny, warm woman, pointed this little fact out almost with glee.
The Globe's Doug Saunders had a good column in last Saturday's edition about how Germany is very afraid of nationalistic and racist displays during the World Cup, not just by its own citizens, but by the thousands of foreign fans, including British fans who do Hitler salutes and Spaniards and Italians who make monkey motions when players of darker skin colour touch the ball. It shows just how cautious Germans are about not wanting to allow anything that happened in the last century to have a chance of recurring, if only symbolically. I was told by one guide about how annoyed they were that a march by a few dozen neo-Nazis in Germany will generate coverage around the world, but a countermarch by a hundred thousand Germans the next day to denounce the neo-Nazis will receive almost no notice. Bavaria is very conservative, and harbours a few folk who have sympathies for neo-Nazi ideas. But the Germans who opposed them are vigilant. Wandering out of a delicatessen in downtown Munich, I came across a newspaper box showing the front page of a tabloid: in big, bold letters, the headline was warning the city (and it was a warning meant to incite action) that neo-Nazis were planning to hold a rally during the World Cup. I haven't seen any reports of that march happening. Perhaps the newspaper headline played its role, Germany's future history remains secure and the efforts to rebuild all that was lost in the madness of two evil decades has had its effect.
WMD2: The photos explained:
Top: the two towers of the onion-domed Gothic cathedral of Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady. The people of Munich held a referendum in the '90s to prevent any buildings from being built that would be taller than the cathedral's towers. It's one reason why Munich has few tall buildings, none in the city core, and still maintains the height restrictions of several hundreds years ago combined with new construction that's not much higher.
Second from the top: The view toward the German/Austrian border from the walls of Burghausen, a fortress dating back to the early Middle Ages and vastly improved and strengthened in the centuries since. Burghausen also became a repository for noble women who were basically confined there.
Third from the top: The Asamkirche, originally a private early 18th century church that has become a public place of worship. Done in the rococo style.
Fourth from the top: The same church after the Second World War.
Bottom photo: June 3 front page and headline from June 3, 2006.
WMD: Catching up. Yes, I arrived back in Canada after a successful trip to Ireland. My two last locations visited in Ireland were an archaeological site, at 5,000 years the oldest known farming site in Europe, and Skerries, an incredibly charming seaside resort a short hop north of Dublin. I'll be writing an "official" story about my trip for my employer sometime later this month and will post it here. Note: it will be largely cribbed from posts here, so regular Blinkit readers will see some overlap.
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