Fun: Tchau, Europe!
Ah, Germany. The final destination for our European voyage was symbolized in my mind by castles, beer and the Romantic Road (what could be more romantic than traveling with your brothers, after all?). Our original plan was actually based around the idea of traveling down the Romantic Road and seeing what may be the highest density of awesome castles in the world, and I was really, really excited about it. Well, as things happened, we ended up not seeing a single castle in Germany, but only because we found some marvelous alternatives that were even more appealing.
Frankfurt ended up being the city that felt the largest among those that we visited in Germany. Frankfurt marks the northern end of the major leg of the Romantic Road (hence the original reason for our visit), but has a lot to offer in the way of big-city culture itself. We ended up booking a hostel in the heart of Frankfurt’s substantial red light district — far more active than Amsterdam’s on the nights we were there — which was in the heart of downtown. Call us lame but we ended up spending a good bit more time in the used bookstore a couple of blocks away than the red light district (outside of the hostel) itself.
I learned that Frankfurt is the current home of the European Central Bank, the organization responsible for setting the monetary policy of the euro (the European version of the Fed). It’s housed in a gigantic and beautiful building right in the middle of the city, and we actually stumbled across it by accident while we were out exploring the city.
The headquarters of the Central Bank in Frankfurt. The building behind the euro is the bank itself.
Like Frankfurt, we originally added Wurzburg to our list because of its location near the Romantic Road. It’s a much smaller town than both Frankfurt and Munich but contains a couple of significant sites that gave me enough of my castle fix to diminish the trauma from missing them along the rest of the road.
It’s actually probably somewhat wrong to say that Marienberg isn’t a castle…it’s officially called a “fortress,” and seems to have a lot of the components of what I look for in my castles. It’s immediately visible from most places in Wurzburg due to the fact that it’s plopped down on top of a hilltop overlooking the rest of town.
The fortress sits on top of a big hill. You can see a long way from the top.
We went up and looked around the fortress, which was pretty cool, although there wasn’t much in the way of exhibits or information about what we were looking at. There was a tower in the middle of a castle that served as a prison — it required that the prisoner be lowered / dropped through a passage in the floor where they would be held underground, out of reach of the only way out. They also had a ridiculously deep well for its time — over 100 meters deep – that dropped down to a depth where fresh water could be fetched in order to prevent dependence on sites outside of the walls during wartime.
This place, like many other mansions / churchs / homes of the wealthy in Europe, was ridiculous. We took a tour through the palace, which was commissioned by the (apparently very arrogant) prince-bishop of Wurzburg during the mid-1700′s. A huge amount of effort must have been put in to making this place so ornate. The large staircase to enter the palace, for example, has the largest fresco in the world painted on the dome above it, and a chain of rooms designed purely for walking through began with a moderately ornate room and ended with rooms where everything was gold encrusted and even a room that was built almost entirely of mirrors.
Much of this building was actually destroyed during an Allied air raid in World War II, including many of the extraordinarily ornate rooms. However, they’ve been rebuilt to excruciating detail (using photographs and interviews of some of the people who have worked there) to simulate their original condition as well as possible. I was convinced.
Munich ended up being possibly my biggest surprise highlight of the trip. I didn’t go into Germany knowing much at all about Munich, but it didn’t take long to learn that it was one of the biggest hubs of Nazi power (and the place that Hitler & the Nazi party won / seized control) during WWII. As you might expect, this fact proved to be fertile soil for tourists and a number of companies were offering tours that provided information about the city and surrounding area during the rise of Nazism, the ruling of the Third Reich, and the liberation. Having generally avoided joining official tour groups until reaching Germany, we decided to cave in here because we were all really interested in hearing what a German tour on WWII sites would be like (not to mention that many of the most historic WWII sites in the world are in Germany). What a good decision.
We ended up taking two tours, both of which were pretty worthwhile. Our tour to the concentration camp Dachau stood out though — it was absolutely fantastic, certainly the best tour I’ve ever been on and quite possibly my favorite single event from our entire month abroad. Dachau was one the first concentration camp (the first major one, I believe) used by the Nazis, and many of the ideas that became ubiquitous in other concentration camps were actually developed and tested at Dachau before new camps were created that used them. Dachau itself was used primarily as a site for political prisoners — it was not classified as an extermination camp although there was a small gas chamber and two incinerators (extermination camps had far larger facilities), although a number of “undesirables” were sent there after the eastern front began to fall to the Russians and some of the other camps had to be abandoned.
One of the parts I find most interesting about WWII (and maybe war in general) is the social manipulation that plays a central role in keeping people where their leaders want them. Although I clearly disagree with the Nazi’s motives, it is hard to deny that they were perhaps the best social manipulators that the world has ever seen. Some of the techniques they used, such as empowering Nazis through techniques replicated in the Stanford Prison Experiment, actually formed the foundation for much of the party’s power. Our (fantastic) tour guide pointed out a couple of their tools of deception that were present in Dachau specifically; the front gate, for example, had the words Arbeit macht frei (“work will set you free,” which in retrospect is false in the context of concentration camps but made for a great motivator for prisoners) emblazoned on the gate, and prisoners in almost all camps were stripped of everything the Nazis could take (possessions, haircuts, public religious rituals, many essential human rights) in order to undercut their own self-worth and ability to express themselves. I could go on for a long, long time about this topic, but maybe I’ll dedicate a separate post or two to it one day.
Work will set you free.
Much of the camp is actually gone now; all but one of the barracks that housed prisoners has been demolished, but many of the administrative buildings are still there, as well as the gas chambers and incinerator rooms.
A memorial at Dachau dedicated to those who lost their lives with the hope that the atrocities committed there would be remembered forever. This is one of my favorite pictures from the trip -- it was particularly profound to see it at the camp itself.
We actually ended up having a pretty hard time determining what to do with our limited time in Munich (what’s new?). One of the big events that we did have to pass on was a guided tour to Neuschwanstein castle. Neuschwanstein is perhaps the best known castle in all of Europe to tourists because it is actually the inspiration for the Disney castle that we all know and love. It’s a huge tourist destination out of Munich as well but unfortunately our curse of speed kept us from making it up there.
Fireworks + Neuschwanstein = Disney