Advertisement
Published: September 25th 2014
Edit Blog Post
Day 7: Sunday 21
Nuremburg
Danny is a marathon runner but at the moment he has an injury which stops him running but he walks everyday so he took me down to the river which is walking distance from his home to the walking/running track he generally uses. It is a beautiful forested area and the track circumnavigates the river. As expected every now and then there s a bridge which crosses the river so you can do a circuit. Danny walked and I ran on this crisp autumn morning and it was glorious. Lots of people here walk with what look like ski sticks – from old people to young. I’m sure it must have something to do with off season ski training.
Brekky this morning was muesli with Danny’s home made yoghurt and coffee.
Frank, Danny and I then went in to the town of Nuremburg. This is another city which was completely leveled in the war. According to records Nuremburg was founded in 1050 and over the centuries, particularly the 15
th and 16
th it attracted a lot of artists, craftsmen and intellectuals. It is located in
Bavaria which is the south eastern part of Germany and it is where the alpine region starts. As you drive along the countryside it is peppered with small villages with sloping terracotta roofs and usually towering church (or maybe a castle) steeple.
As part of its historical life Nuremburg has a series of underground tunnels which in medieval days was used to make and store beer and spirits. Due to sanitation problems water was not suitable to drink and because beer was boiled it became the safest form of drinking fluid for the people. Even children were given beer. All the population was allocated a portion of beer per year up to 1.5 li/day. But they were hard working folk and so they tended not to sit around and get drunk – but many still did. There were strict formulas for making beer legislated by the local government specifying how much and what type of grain was to be used, how much hops and how much water. Interestingly there was no mention of yeast as this was all happening before the time of Louis Pasteur who discovered and documented the process of fermenting. All of these brewing
processes produced byproducts such as carbon dioxide and so there were simple but effective extraction processes and structures built into and up from the cellars. This was to be important during the Second World War.
These tunnels ran the length and breadth of the city and so when Nuremburg was being bombed many of the citizens took shelter in these underground spaces. Some of the tunnels were modified to include ‘dog legs’ so that when a blast hit the effect of the blast would be reduced as it traveled through the tunnels as a result of hitting the zig zagging walls. For any of you who have read or seen the Twilight series I can tell you it would not have surprised me to meet the Voltarie down there and to meet a grizzly fate at the hands of the vampires. And I’m not joking ….. At the end of the tour you could taste the whiskies made by the distiller who manufactured his products using the underground cellars for storing and maturing his spirits.
After that we wound our way over the cobbled stone pathways, which in winter become slippery and dangerous due
to ice forming on them, up to the Imperial Castle. It is the symbolic heart of Nuremburg. The most important part of the complex is the Chapel which was built in 1200. A walled fortress surrounds the Castle and it is impressive in its size and intricacy. This building was also destroyed in the war and has been faithfully been reconstructed to its former glory. It really is like stepping back in time – except for all the tourists.
After that we went to the Documentation Centre (Dokumentationszentrum), which is a state of the art building that has been built into the existing structure known as The Reichsparteitagsgelände or otherwise known as The Coliseum. This is one of Hitler’s grand buildings which he wanted to create to show how big and powerful the Third Reich was however this was never finished and now it’s this great relic that no one seems to know what to do with. He engaged an architect whose name was Speil and it was he who put Hitler’s vision into bricks and mortar. The Document Centre archives an extraordinary history of Nazi Germany not only in print but also in film. There is footage which most of us have seen but this place had footage that is not normally shown. Hitler had a female documentary maker who was responsible for filming him and the people of Germany for propaganda purposes. The back-story round how and why she shot her footage as she did was fascinating. It was all about individualizing the German experience whilst making them completely the same. Its hard to explain but it certainly glorified the German experience under the dictatorship of Hitler. After 2 hours Frank and I had seen about 2/3rds but we were being picked up and had to leave. It would be a place to see again but we would start in the morning not the afternoon next time.
We shopped and bought food for dinner and Frank cooked for us all.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.109s; Tpl: 0.011s; cc: 7; qc: 42; dbt: 0.0456s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb