European Wonder: GERMANY

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18th, 19th, 20th and 21st October, 2005
Munich, Germany and then the Rhine Valley, Germany.


Day 7

Today I have seen the sun both rise and fall from the confines of my seat and traversed three seperate countries in the interim. By the time the bus reached Munich this evening I was clinging to the last of my patience with this fool's enterprise, and had long since abandoned my customary vigil by the window for sights unseen. Unfortunately, we were about as far from town or entertainment as possible, so all I could do to burn off the excess energy was storm stupidly back and forth around the camping grounds. Oh, don't worry yourself, I wasn't staying in a tent or anything; hell, in that cold we'd have frozen to death. No, we were staying in pint-sized trailers complete with.....well, complete with beds, but that's about it. Indie and I bunked together and had a bit of a laugh at pretending we were trailor-trash hicks.

Eventually everybody assembled again for the evening jaunt to the local restuarant, where we had traditional German food. I ordered goulash or something with these funny little white potato dumplings.... nice, but strangely chewy. Our little table of friends had an extra dish served by the harried waiters, and before I knew it Indie was sampling that as well, so with muffled laughter we all tried a little of the unexpected fare. I waited for the inevitable blow-up, but apart from a few frowns from the waiters when everybody was served except for one plaintive cry on the other side of the room, we escaped unscathed.


Day 8

The morning began with an excursion to the Dachau Concentration Camp just outside of Munich. It was not quite what I would have expected; larger, I suppose, and emptier, with a few buildings and a lot of gravel. Everybody spoke in low tones; a sense of despondency, of abandonment, seemed to hang about the place. The enormous building that was once the Nazi soldier's offices had been converted into a museum detailing the history of Dachau, complete with photos and personal accounts. Most of the prisoner barracks had been levelled; by fire or bombing or something else, I'm not sure. Only two still stood, lonely sentinels facing the cavernous courtyard between them and the museum. Inside were pigeon-hole style bunks created to squeeze as many people into a small space as possible. Outside the museum a commemmorative artwork stood, of emaciated bodies trapped in barbed wire. Beyond the buildings, at the perimeter of the compound, was a high wire fence with those same coiled lengths of barbed wire atop them, as well as a shallow ditch running the inner length of it and sentry towers every so often.

Visiting the museum was a bit trying..... there were just so very many relentlessly stark photos of horribly emaciated people, both in piles of dead limbs and in the gaunt faces of survivors staring somberly into the lense. I couldn't help but feel the anger of injustice tightening my chest at the horror of that place and all that had happened there to those poor, vulnerable prisoners. Near the end of the building was a room of artwork and such relating to the war. One particular work which really struck me was of a swastika formed with the bent, mishapen forms of two skeletal figures. This, to me, seemed to perfectly summarise just what the war and the Nazi's had meant to the world: persecution, suffering and death.

The mood on the bus after Dachau was of general gravity or quiet distress. Randall tried to prompt us into an excitement for the upcoming tour of Munich, but I for one could not so easily shake the images of the morning, and his forced joviality felt obscene, like somebody laughing at a funeral. It was at this point that Randall, perhaps mistaking an emphatic sorrow for hatred, said something surprisingly insightful for him: firstly, that we shouldn't blame the horrors of Dachau on the German's we were to meet today - in essence, the old adage that the sins of the father are not that of the son. Which shook me a little, as I realised that this was what I had been subconsciously doing; painting the whole of Germany with the same brush, instead of being careful to remember that it had only been the German Nazi's who had perpetrated these acts, not the civilians or anybody else. It is easy, seeing the evidence of wholesale slaughter and torture methods - exceeded, in my opinion, only by the Japanese -, to become so disgusted that you begin to think with aversion of everything and everybody associated with the issue. Which is completely unfair, and I really don't believe I would have transferred the blame onto any German's I met, yet it made me think more carefully on the issue.

When foreigners who have never visited ask me about Australia, their initial questions tend to hover around the subjects of kangaroos in the streets, beer, deserts, and the perceived image of the typical laid-back, carefree Aussie. But when most people think of Germany, what are the first images that spring to mind? Giant sausages, beer, Arnold Schwarzenegger (who's actually Austrian), and Nazi swastikas, right? It's different for everybody, but generally most people still associate Germany closely with her horrific past. I think that's because it's so hard to understand and accept how anybody, even a hardened soldier, could condone such a mass-genocide of so many of their fellow human beings. It is a concept so comlpetely alien, so brutally impassive, that you simply cannot make sense of it.

That all said, I must stress that I speak, and was thinking, not necessarily of Dachau alone but of the whole Jewish holocaust. Dachau itself, the very first German concentration camp, and model for all that followed, was a "labour camp", not a "death camp". This means that the people who died here generally did so of starvation and from being overworked, but were not gassed en masse as in places such as
Auschwitz.

The second point that Randall made (yes, I've rather lost track of the story) was that it was actually rather commendable for the German government to be so open and accepting of their country's responsibility to be held accountable for what they had done. Most countries - Australia with our 'Stolen Generation' included - have something shameful in their history (usually conquered or exterminated natives), which they've yet to apologise for. So for Germany to be erecting commemorative sites such as Dachau (though it could certainly be argued that they're making money from the venture) and publishing the facts of their part in World War Two, is rather meritable.

But enough of all that. What was left of the afternoon was spent on a brief walking tour of Munich, which included highlights such as the Old Town Hall, the 'famous' Glockenspiel with it's musical clock in the Marienplatz, or main square, and my personal favourite, the Frauenkirche (meaning Church of Our Lady) with it's devil's footprint imbedded in the floor. 'The devil in a house of God?' I hear you wonder, and that in itself is funny enough for my twisted little half-atheist mind, but the story behind it is funnier still:

The architect of the church needed some help with the funding or something and made a pact with the devil for his assistance in the matter. Which makes perfect sense, of course, for when building a monument to God, the first person to call on is logically Lucifer.... At any rate, the 'out' clause -- and why is there always an out clause? If I loaned somebody the wherewithal to do something, I'd damned well make sure that their side of the bargain was fulfilled! If the devil's such a bad guy, why's he such a pushover? -- was that if Satan could stand in the centre of the finished church (I thought demons couldn't enter churches? Or is that just vampires?) and not see a single window, then the architect kept his soul and the devil went home empty-handed.

Heartless cheat that he was, the architect built the church with many pillars lining the inside at certain angles, so that while there are the usual enormous windows down the length of the church to flood it with light, if you stand at what is apparently the centre (if you ask me, you're still in the reception hall, and the 'centre' should mean the middle axis of the building), then indeed not a single window can be seen. Realising this, the devil, in great vexation - you could even say he was 'hopping' mad - stamped his foot in the floor, leaving the city an eternal tourist-trap in the form of a suspiciously hoofless and average footprint, before returning to Hell in a rage to take it out on all the less-fortunate architects' souls and the undoubtedly large population of condemned paedophile priests he's got down there.

After the tour we were cut loose to create havoc for a few hours, with the solemn promise to be at the famous Hofbräuhaus München beerhall for dinner that evening. So I wandered with my little group, window-shopping and waiting for the girls to try on one article of clothing or another. We made a treasure-hunt of searching out the brightly-painted plastic life-size lion statues planted all over the city, which Randall had told us were in commemoration of the people who died a few years back when some lions escaped from the local zoo. I later (much later, weeks later, after earnestly telling people this shyte) found out that he'd been lying his tush off and that they were just a parade of tourist-trap statues to brighten up the streets.... Zurich apparently has a parade of cows. Tour guides really shouldn't try to be funny. They're not paid to spread ridiculous tales amongst poor gullible tourists. Damned yobbo fool.

At any rate, having dutifully mourned the deceased and taken photos with the prettier or more outrageous (no, they didn't seem funerary, but what town wants to be full of depressing memorials?) lions, we had the traditional German bagel and/or bratwurst, chilled out to a hippie couple busking in the street with didgeridoos (and who were not, as it turned out, Australian), browsed through a fruit market and some souvenir shops, and made our way back to the full-to-bursting beerhall, where we unfortunately couldn't sit together for lack of space, and had to squeeze ourselves in with whichever groups we could find. I consoled myself with a stein, or litre-glass, of shandy and some traditional german fare with the ever-present white, doughy dumplings.

The waitress for my table soon earned herself the title of the crabbiest waitress any of us had ever dealt with, and it was with some reluctance and great laughter that anybody would dare to gain her attention for anything. I myself waited to order for a full ten minutes, with my hand waving in the air and calling to her every time she passed, then found my food plunked down in front of me with enough force to almost herald disaster. By the time I'd made inroads into the huge serve of food and had finished the stein, which I was honor-bound to do, I was ill from the sheer quantity of liquid and went back to the camp alone, a slightly harrowing experience with the late-night emptiness of the metro carriage and the seediness of my fellow travellers. Not to mention the one or two kilometres of slightly-lost wandering along the darkened roads from the metro stop to the site. But, having arrived safely, I can say it was an afternoon well spent and a pleasant evening.



Day 9

Today found us again locked into the confines of the bus, travelling this time to the German town of St. Goar on the Rhine River. After a cuckoo-clock lesson, a stein-making lesson, and the obligatory sales pitches that seem to come with package tours (did you know that the first toy teddy bear ever was made by Steiff in Germany, and the name 'teddy bear' originated with President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt, who loved game hunting and was presented with a stuffed bear after a day of unsuccessful hunting), most of the group filed down to the river for their cruise and I, ever the penny-pincher, opted to wander about the cute little town with Indie.

In the evening we arrived at our destination for the night, a genuine converted 12th-Century castle overlooking the Rhine Valley. It was lovely, and Bree and I ran about with our cameras trying to capture it on film (or digital, haha) before the last of the light died. We were not, unfortunately, entirely successful, so I borrowed an aerial image of the castle from a website, which you can see at the top of this entry.

After a cafeteria-style dinner (more dumplings) most of the group boarded the bus for a wine-tasting evening in a nearby vineyard, but as I was never a particular fan of the liquid and more inclined to keep the fare than pretend otherwise, I stayed to explore the nooks and crannies of the castle with Bree, posing uninhibitedly where we would. Much to my delight, I was staying in a dorm in the tower, though again the top of the structure was barred from me. Argh! Is it so unusual to want to explore the turrets and the dungeons and the towers and the battlements of each castle? Am I to be forever denied?


Day 10

It seems, however, that for once I should have parted with my pennies and joined the winos, for last night was soon to take on near-mythological proportions amongst those who had witnessed the carnage. This morning the group was rife with whispers of scandal and with sunglass-hidden, averted eyes. Apparently the wine had been potent, for the return ride to the castle had seen something of a near-orgy occur, complete with missing clothes, girl-on-girl action, swinging couples, and Randall making out with the hussy of the group, whose name I'll not mention for her own good (she spent the whole trip acting like a b*tch on heat. No offence, just truth). I'm told, by two reliable sources (a young couple who'd huddled in stupefied horror at the back of the bus) that certain people had not emerged from the bus with their chastity intact, and though they'd not divulge names, it soon became apparent that one of the young couples were on very shaky ground, indeed. Ah, love!

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Photos

Jugendherberge Burg Stahleck
borrowed from site: http://www.djh-info.de/cms/upload/aktuelles/401_djh_news_JH-Bacharach1.jpg

Dachau's Opinion of the Nazi Swastica
The Nazi Swastica, created of two starved and torturously bent bodies