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Published: July 13th 2014
J. S. Bach
It's Bach!Our stay in Berlin was over, so we had one more breakfast in the breakfast room, bid farewell to our hosts at Pension Peters, and made our way to the
Hauptbahnhof to catch our train to Leipzig. It was another ICE (inter city express), and we had reserved first class seats, so naturally, our car was almost empty; there was only a single passenger other than us. The train ride to Leipzig is only about an hour, so we didn't have time to get uncomfortable or sore or anything, and actually, I barely had time to drink my coffee before we got to the Leipzig
Hauptbahnhof. We disembarked and found the exit we needed and headed across the street to our
hotel, and checked in. It turned out to be a pretty nice room, with air conditioning, even. There being quite a bit of day remaining, we decided to go out and see what we could see.
Our hotel is in the central district, so we're pretty close to everything. We strolled around just taking it all in, and ended up at
Nikolaikirche. This church is where the
Monday demonstrations started, which is credited for ultimately causing the fall of the
Thomaskirche
One of the churches in Leipzig where Bach worked. Also, he's currently buried here. DDR and the restoration of democracy in East Germany (more about that when we get to the STASI museum tomorrow).
Thomaskirche is not far from Nikolaikirche, so we ran into it in our wandering, as well. There was a dude busking with his accordion out in front of the church
right next to the statue of Bach, and he wasn't even playing Bach (who likely would have been as delighted to hear his music on an accordion as he would have been to hear it Switched On on a Moog synthesizer). We went inside and looked around, found out that Bach was actually buried in the church up by the altar (there were even flowers), but that not a lot had been preserved from his time at the church; Bach was the cantor of Leipzig from 1723 to 1750, and St. Thomas was one of the churches he was in charge of. From what I read, the church has two organs; the main one is not suited to Bach's music, so another one was built which was.
When we exited the church, the accordion guy had been replaced by a string quartet, playing Bach's "Air on a G string",
Buskers!
These guys were good. and then the final movement of Mozart's serenade, "
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik". They were very good, we took some photographs and dropped some money in their bowl and I thanked them ("
Sehr schön, vielen dank!"), and moved on.
Eventually, we were hungry and decided to go eat at this place called ALEX, where I had some
Currywurst und Pommes Frites, and Cheryl had
Flammkuchen; we both had
Radler to drink, which was very refreshing. After whatever meal that was, we strolled some more, in the direction of
Augustusplatz. On the way, we happened on this curious sculpture, "
Unzeitgemäße Zeitgenossen", or "Untimely Contemporaries", which is apparently a pun in German. It seems a bit punny in English, too, but more of a curious juxtaposition, I suppose. It's a sculpture by
Bernd Göbel, and some kind of commentary on the DDR and hypocrisy, according to Rick Steves. I've not had much luck finding anything useful online about the piece, but here's what Saint Rick has to say:
...insulting, exaggerated caricatures of hypocritical DDR figures. For example, the teacher clutches a mallet used to pound communist ideology into her students; the third guy over, with the too-big laurel wreath covering his eyes, is detonating St. Paul's Church.
I'm sure Cheryl will dig up more about this piece of art. We took a selfie at it, like ya do.
We ended up in
Augustusplatz, which was called Karl-Marx-Platz during the time of
Radler
Very refreshing, pilsner beer with sprite or lemonade. the DDR. It's a wide open space with the
Oper Leipzig to the north, and the
Gewandhaus to the south. It's almost surrounded by music. To the west is the
Krochhochhaus, which, above the clock, bears the inscription
Omnia Vincit Labor, or "Labor Conquers All". To the southwest is a building, the
Paulinum which is reminiscent of a large church; it's actually a part of the University, on the former site of the
Paulinenkirche, which ironically survived the war pretty much intact, but was dynamited in 1968 by the communists.
We wandered about a bit, taking photographs and trying to not get hit by cars or trams (what was street and what was square was somewhat ambiguous, marked only by a very small curb), and then we moved on around the opera house, where we found a
Denkmal to Richard Wagner, and a park with a pond full of ducks and koi, and then we were back at our hotel for a bit.
We decided we wanted some
Eis, so we went in search of a place, which we found, and which had super awesome
Bechern, of which we availed ourselves. Cheryl had some
Erdbeeren concoction, and I had
an
Amarena-Becher, which is various ice creams with sweet black cherries in a syrupy sauce and whipped cream. They were delicious, and we marked the place out for a return trip before we leave Leipzig.
We wandered around for a while, and and finally came back to the hotel for an early bedtime because we were going to have a full day the next day.
Good day, and welcome to the next day. 😊
It turns out our hotel has a breakfast buffet, so we decided to just do that for breakfast since it was easy, and we had Places To Be. It's a pretty nice buffet with lots of little meats and cheeses if you're into that, eggs and bacon and sausage if you're American, a bunch of pastries and rolls and cereals if you like your carbs in the morning, and the best part: a waffle iron with single serve waffle batter already measure out for you. It's a little strange eating breakfast in a place called the "Steak Train", which is actually a steak restaurant by night, and indeed it has a railroad car motif going on.
We finished up breakfast and set
out for our museum of the day:
Gedenkstätte Museum in der „Runden Ecke“, the museum about the
Stasi, the secret police of the DDR. The museum starts off by telling the story of the
Friedliche Revolution, which was instrumental in bringing about
die Wende, or the fairly abrupt change over from totalitarian rule by the Socialist Unity Party to the reunification of Germany.
It seems that the DDR government was trying to project an image to the international community, and although there existed a plan for impromptu internment camps and rapid rounding up of dissenters, it was not executed during the protests; probably because killing and/or imprisoning peaceful protesters was not consistent with the kinder, gentler DDR. Ultimately, it all just got away from Honecker, he resigned, the Berlin wall fell, and in short order the two Germanies were one again.
In November and early December of 1989, the Citizens' Committee in Leipzig learned that the Stasi were destroying documents as fast as they could, and so they stormed the Stasi headquarters (in the building which now houses the museum) in order to preserve whatever they could for proof of the widespread wrongdoing of the Stasi.
The museum itself has quite a few artifacts
from the time, including an office as it would have looked at the time (very mundane clerical-looking office), some disguise kits, many photographic gadgets, a giant paper-pulper which was used to destroy documents, apparatuses to steam open mail for inspection, and many many others. The overall impression I received was that the whole purpose of the Stasi, at least by the end, was to perpetuate itself and its vast internal spying network; it seems like the Stasi recruited every single person in the country to spy on every single person in the country just because it could. The couldn't possibly have gone through a fraction of the data collected, but they dutifully collected every phone call, every conversation, every vehicle's license plate passing their various cameras.
Of note is the switch from using torture, imprisonment and murder to something more subtle, "
Zersetzung", or something we might call "Gaslighting". Essentially the idea is to cause the politically unreliable target to lose interest by inducing a kind of insanity by doing things like moving things around in their apartment, resetting alarms, sabotaging vehicles, and the like. The Stasi really perfected this method of "psychological warfare", and other like agencies were quick
Krochhochhaus
Labor conquers all! to adopt them as well.
Now, there are places where people who were residents of East Germany at the time can go and look at their Stasi file. Usually this results in shock and heartbreak at the magnitude of friends and acquaintances (and spouses, children, and other family) who were actively informing on them.
Given all of this, a great many things right now make me even more uncomfortable than I already was: The Department of Homeland Security, "if you see something, say something", and the NSA's internal spying, and the continual "otherization" of everybody ("Stranger Danger!"), and the seemingly widespread quiet acceptance of all of this as a price for our "security". None of this is good, and I fear where it will lead us.
At any rate, we eventually finished up at the museum, which I highly recommend visiting; it is well worth the couple of hours it takes to look at all the exhibits and listen to the audio guide for each of the stops. I'll leave you with a bit of humor from the audio guide: "A young man writes to his mother in the west, 'Mother, thank you very much for the
Nicht Paulinerkirche
New university building on former site of Paulinerkirche. pistol; I have buried it in the garden out back.' Not too much later, he writes again, 'Mother, you can send the flower bulbs now, the Stasi have dug up the garden.'"
We were parched and peckish after our visit to the museum, so we stopped at a
Cafe Kandler where we had some
Mineralwasser and some pastry stuff. I had Apfelstrudel, and Cheryl had something which she liked, but I still don't really know what it was. Everything was tasty, and we moved on, exploring more of the city center. We also happened upon that string quartet again, this time playing a selection from
The Mission. We stopped and listened again for a bit, and then wandered off. Eventually, we stopped at Starbucks because Cheryl still hadn't had any coffee, and got giant Americanos to go, and went back to the hotel to rest and refresh ourselves in preparation of part II of today: a trip to the Monument to the Battle of the Nations.
The monument is away from the city center, and necessitated a ride on the S-bahn, so first we had to go figure out what tickets to get and just where the hell we were
Oper Leipzig
It's the opera house! going exactly. It turns out the map of the S-bahn covers a lot of ground and the reason we had trouble finding our destination was that it was still really close to the center of the map. We had to back off of the machine to let some people who knew where they were going buy tickets, and then we sorted it all out and got the right tickets. Our train was to leave platform 1 or 2, except there were two platforms named 1 and two named 2, and it took a bit to sort out which one we needed, but we figured it out and caught our train.
We hopped off, and it ended up being a bit of a walk to actually get to the monument, which is called
Völkerschlachtdenkmal. The monument is pretty damn big. No, bigger than that. The monument commemorates that time when Napoleon got his ass handed to him finally and had to take his armies back to France. Tiny Beethoven was pretty happy about the whole thing, because he was still pretty butthurt about the whole Napoleon thing; apparently he had written this symphony (No. 3) and was going to dedicate
it to Napoleon, whom he admired at the time, but then Napoleon done went and declared himself Emperor, which made Beethoven mad, so he scratched out the inscription and just dedicated it "to the memory of a great man". (
It's actually a little more complicated than that, but that's the way I heard it first, and I like the story.)
Tiny Beethoven said "Suck it, Napoleon! Now you can't be in my symphony.", plus some other stuff I shan't repeat here.
We got many pictures of the monument (did I mention it was big?), and then decided to start the journey back to the
Zentrum, to start thinking about dinner. This time we opted to take the tram, which was nice because we got to see a bit more of Leipzig, although mostly, we got to see a lot of people because the tram got really crowded. But we made it back to the
Hauptbahnhof, and went back to the hotel and freshened up again.
Then began the search for dinner. I do not think we were terribly hungry, because we walked all over the place and nothing really excited us, not even
Auerbachs Keller, which Rick Steves halfheartedly recommends in his Germany travel book.
Cheryl didn't want Italian, and I didn't want Indian, and neither one of us wanted Chinese or Japanese. A lot of places were really crowded, and we finally sat down at a different German restaurant, but looked over the menu and didn't see anything we wanted, and since nobody had showed up to help us, we bailed.
In the same way one ends up at Denny's, we ended up at
Kildare's Irish Pub. We were initially not impressed, but our server was friendly, and we decided to just go with it. We initially ordered mozzarella sticks (they seemed pretty safe), and some
Leipzig Gose Johanna, which had some kind of berry syrup added to the beer. The sticks were served with duck sauce (!), but were tasty and I actually liked the
Gose. Cheryl ordered BBQ ribs (how very Irish) and I had a Kildare's House
Pfanne, which is just a pile of various meats (pretty much literally translated from the menu) and some fried taters, onions and mushrooms (or
Champignon-Zwiebellen-Kartoffeln). We finished our beers while waiting on the mains, so we ordered another, only with different flavoring. On the menu was something called
Gose Waldmeistersirop; when we asked what
Waldmeistersirop was, she
Tiny Beethoven and Apfelstrudel
I finally got some Apfelstrudel. It was delicious. didn't know how to say it and just said "really sweet", but later on came back and said "Woodruff". Neither of us knew what the hell woodruff was, so naturally, we
looked it up on the interwebs; it's a wild baby's breath. We were both like "Hell, yah, we have to have that!", so we ordered a couple.
So, they're green. The beers are green.
Our food showed up soon about when the new beers did, and mine was delicious, just wonderful, and Cheryl liked her ribs. She also liked the beer. The green beer. I, well, didn't. It was okay, but it hammered some section of taste buds I'm certain do not like to be hammered, and it was just ... too much. However, a beer's a beer, so I managed to finish it (I've never intentionally left a beer unfinished before, and I'm not about to start now).
We finished up, and strolled back to the hotel and got the pre-game for the Netherlands-Brazil match on the teevee machine, and thought about packing, but didn't, and I blogged and kept an ear on the game, and Cheryl watched the game an blogged and surfed and we just
had a generally relaxing evening.
We don't leave Leipzig until 14:30 today, but we had to check out of the hotel no later than noon, so we've got some time to kill; we're sitting here in the
Hauptbahnhoff outside the Starbucks taking advantage of the two hours of free wifi writing blogs and sipping on iced lattes.
This morning, we did the breakfast buffet again (wish I hadn't had the little
Würsten, which I assert is the plural of
Wurst), and then went out in search of a place to get my hair cut. We made this cunning plan yesterday when it did not occur to us that "tomorrow" was Sunday, when many things are closed. The haircut places are among "many places", so no haircut for me. Dieter and Gudrun will just have to put up with me with long hair. :/
We went and scoped out our platform, so now we know where we'll have to be for our train, and we checked out, and here we sit.
See you in Dresden!
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J&J
non-member comment
With all your walking..... wearing off the sweets? Nice pictures and now I need to dig in the webpages to learn more! Thanks. Any word from Barb, Laura and Joe? I want their blogs too!