Pt3 - 2:

SOUTHERN GERMANY

23^rd – 28^th June

 

If it’s Sunday it must be Germany. There was nobody to gestampen our passports as we crossed the Rhine on the autobahn to Freiburg. From there we swung east into the heart of the Black Forest, which lived up to its name. By now the rain had set in again and even though it was only mid-afternoon it was dark enough to flick the headlights on. We wound through steep moody hills covered in dense stands of symmetrically straight pines; you half expected the Big Bad Wolf to chase Red Riding Hood across the road. By the time we arrived at Seerbrugg on the eastern tip of the Schluchsee the showers had developed into a biblical deluge which sounded like rocks on the roof of the silver bullet. We pulled into a carpark on the lake and sat in a cold grey silence watching the water sluice down the windscreen. This is supposed to be summer for christ’s sake! We could have this weather much more cheaply back in bloody Bridgetown and for the first time on the whole journey I caught myself mentally calculating the costs of abandoning the Awfully Big Adventure and heading home. But I quickly marshalled a whole bunch of reasons why it wouldn’t be the smartest move to make in the heat of the moment. Instead, I wondered aloud what the weather was like in Spain, perhaps we could swerve south and head for Barcelona? Tess and I tossed the idea around for a while but in the end decided to push on and push through. In the meantime, if we had to get pissed on it may as well be in Bavaria. And if we were going to get pissed it may as well be at the local Youth Hostel on the shores of the lake. We booked in and had the luxury of a large room to ourselves. Pissed off with being pissed on and just plain pissed - we drank too much of our French alcohol and slept like two logs.

Although the rain had eased a bit and the broken sky yielded rare patches of bright sunshine the waterlogged landscape remained dark and dripping in the deep shadows of the Black Forest as we made our way across to Lake Constance. We’d planned to find accommodation around here and spend some time enjoying the place but it was all so grey, windswept and uninviting we stopped only briefly for coffee and pushed on.

Almost immediately the road climbed vertically into steep hills, snaking through dense forest until at the very top the vista opened up into rolling green pastures, small woods and classic alpine villages where they grow Toblerones. I’m sure they wash and comb the grass and dust off the mountains up here; everything was disturbingly perfect. Each tidy little farmhouse had firewood stacked with mathematical precision against the walls for insulation. As we crested the final rise along the spine of the ridge the view out over lush alpine valleys to the distant snow-capped Swiss Alps took our breath away. As we watched, a squall blew through the middle of the setting and an incandescent double rainbow gradually appeared overhead to frame the entire scene. 

Camping was still out of the question so we hunted down a room at the Gästhof Schönblick and wandered into nearby Lindenberg to stretch our legs. Quite by accident we ended up at the local cemetery, one of the most immaculate I’ve ever seen. Every headstone was unique and designed with flair, every plot was planted with a veritable garden of colourful flowers watered from a cast iron pump with watering cans provided. Top cap it off, the view was literally to die for.

*

The drive to Munich took us first to Neuschwanstein, the fairy tale folly commissioned by Ludwig II in the 1860s to honour the composer Richard Wagner. Approachable only on foot, it nestles into a rugged mountainside outside Füssen. The rain pelted down as we climbed the steep path to join the long line of visitors awaiting admission. It took a while to get in but it was worth it for the elaborate, whimsical and fabulous decoration, especially the carvings. The imitation grotto is the pinnacle of this grand fantasy and the Singer’s Hall is splendid in its downright dippiness. Interesting that the castle, still unfinished, was opened to the public immediately on Lud’s death in 1887 and the first public performance in the truly Wagnerian Singer’s Hall was in 1933…whose idea do you reckon that was?

Next stop was the monolithically ugly Passionspielhause in Oberammergau. I suppose there’s a design concept in there somewhere but the only thing divine about it was the tedium. Whoever dreamed up the wheeze of actually, really, truly nailing a volunteer to an actual, real, true cross once a decade was a PR genius, nothing else would bring you to the place.

We forged on through the relentless rain to the Ammersee south of Munich. On spec, we pitched up at the Hotel Wartaweil right on the shore of the lake. Tess stayed in the car while I went inside. I liked the place straight away. It was warm, clean and friendly, with the atmosphere of a large country home. I felt like I should be wearing lederhosen and one of those funny little Bavarian hats. We settled in to 29, a comfortable room overlooking the lush gardens and the lake, and toasted having survived another depressingly damp day with a cheeky red we’d brought from France in our finest Tupperware mugs.

*

The Ring Road took us the 50 kilometres around the outskirts of Munich direct to Dachau. I wasn’t sure what to expect; would it be a gruesome reconstruction or a rubble-strewn field of symbolic poppies? The reality was somewhere in between, with a dash of the Yad Vashem. The watchtowers, electric fence, perimeter floodlights and many of the main buildings, including the Crematorium, are preserved intact while only the first two barracks of the original thirty, one either side of the central roadway, still stand. Behind them lie the foundations of the other 28 barracks in a vast gravel wasteland defined only by the avenue of poplars planted by the inmates more than 50 years ago. The tracks where the cattle trains drew up to the gates emblazoned with Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Sets You Free) remain.

The museum in the main administration block is an abbreviated version of the Yad Vashem, though no less powerful. And like the Yad Vashem, you leave the building to find a quiet place to contemplate the enormity of the Holocaust and the evil at the heart of humankind.

There were many visitors today but most were swallowed in the vast site, each silently lost in their own thoughts, and I nearly always had the impression I inhabited the space alone. There was everywhere the curious counterpoint of birdsong. The Showers and the Crematorium are full of ghosts, sad souls memorialised in grainy monochrome photographs as a tangle of bones at the bottom of a deep pit…

We seized the advantage of a welcome break in the weather to swerve in to the supermarket at Herrsching for some snags, onions and fresh salad. We found a clearing in the forest above the Ammersee and christened our camping stove, utensils, chairs and table with a bang up barbie. The ground was still too waterlogged to pitch the tent so that would have to wait. Besides, we quite liked the Wartaweil.

The mornings there kicked off with a big breakfast and unlimited coffee. Mein host Jürgen politely enquired about our plans for the day and offered friendly advice on the easiest way to realise them. His pet parrot, Pippo, entertained us with his party trick of stealing our bic lighters and pretending to hide them in the pot plants. We always set off in good spirits.

Today we caught the train from Herrsching in to Munich. We met an Australian academic on the platform who helped us with the ticket machine. A political scientist from Parramatta studying US minority groups at the university here, he rode with us into the city. He missed the big blue skies of home and the white sand oozing between his toes. Here, he said a little wistfully, he and his wife take an esky when they go ice skating to keep their drinks from freezing.

Munich is hard to dislike, even with its dark history as the womb of Nazism. Largely pedestrianised and with vast parklands forming a buffer zone around the CBD, it is a prosperous city with the people at its centre. It’s a bit like looking through a fisheye lens, small and crowded around the edges but full of larger than life characters in the middle. The Marienplatz is basically a public theatre, an open stage for buskers and eccentric performers of all sorts. A young soccer player smoothly juggled five balls around his head, hands and feet in a dazzlingly dexterous display of hand-eye coordination. With a distant nod to Samuel Beckett's Endgame, one guy covered his upper body in gold paint and took up station in a garbage tin where he made like a statue except for his eyes, with which he commented eloquently on the passing parade. Yet another fellow, an older bloke dressed in a sharp white suit and a fedora hat, perched himself on a chair fixed to a wall about 3 meters off the ground and boogied to music playing only in his head. There was so much going on you hardly knew where to look. Aside from the festive air, the other thing that really struck me was how wealthy the locals looked, even the bums wore Burberrys. 

For all the entertainment, the main attraction in the Marienplatz is the famous Rathaus Glockenspiel, an elaborate musical clock which enacts two historically significant stories twice a day, once at 11am then again at midday. The intricate machinery occupies two levels; the top shows the marriage of a prominent local Duke while the bottom shows a dance allegedly performed by a local guild during the plague year of 1517. All the figures are life-size and dressed in colourful traditional costume. The whole performance takes about 15 minutes; I really think you need to be the sort of person who spends too much time sitting in the lounge room with your elderly mother to watch it from start to finish.

We each ate half a pig for lunch with dumplings and a mustard potato salad and excellent crackling, a light snack for your average Bavarian. To walk some of it off before we got on the train back to Herrsching we wandered into the green precinct.

The gardens are an attraction in themselves. The Hohenhof with its beautiful rotunda and the extensive English garden, pretty much a forest in the middle of the city, even has its own river, a tributary of the Isar. It was a delightful stroll past waterfalls, over bridges and through shady avenues on the roundabout way back to the station. We paused on one bridge to watch young guys surfing a perfect permanent wave set up for the purpose; it was strangely weird watching them slide across the face of the wave and back again without actually going anywhere.

Now, six hours after the pig out – literally – we’re still not hungry. We’re hanging in the saloon at the Wartaweil with ½ litres of Lowenbräu in front of us and Pippo nicking our lighters, and that’s a wrap for the day.

*

At breakfast Jürgen asked if we were enjoying our stay.

“Very much,” I said, “Pity about the rain though.”

“Aha! You visit ze Rhine today?” He was amazed. The Rhine is a long way from the Ammersee.

“Nein, I said… it’s… a pity… about the… rain,” I enunciated clearly and slowly. He was still puzzled, so I repeated myself, miming the rain and pointing out the panorama window of the dining room at the leaves dancing in the steady drizzle. I couldn’t be sure whether it was my accent or his hearing, but he got it and we chuckled about the misunderstanding.

Pippo scurried off with my lighter. “Today we visit Nördlingen,” I articulated carefully.

“You vill like Nördlingen, it is very pretty. Und romantic!”

Und he was right, although the weather did its best to bugger the experience up. 

Nördlingen is actually two very distinct entities, the inner walled town going back to the 12^th century surrounded by the modern town. Apart from the obvious differences in architecture, the modest skyline of new Nördlingen is dominated by cranes, something we’ve noticed about almost every German village of any size since we crossed the border. But it is the old town we’ve come to see. We entered through one of the five gates in the old city wall, parked the bullet and climbed the tower of St George’s Church. A fine fairy’s piss of drizzle misted the view into the far distance, but added a sheen to the ancient rooves directly below. Six hundred year old timbers and medieval facades are beautifully preserved. Although some of the lines are a bit wonky and you probably wouldn’t want to try it after too many sherbets, the walk around the top of the old walls is still very much doable. It’s a tribute to the powers that be in Nördlingen that nowhere is out of bounds or closed out of concerns for visitor’s safety. The ancient structures are maintained with pride and an eye to history; something not readily apparent back in Australia where heritage is treated very casually. The most wonderful thing about Nördlingen is that we were the only people here and had the whole place literally to ourselves.

We swerved off the road back to the Ammersee for a thermos of coffee in the forest. It was full of older pines with dead branches radiating from the lower trunks like spokes in a turnstyle. The light and depth reminded me of a Russian master I’ve seen whose name escapes me. I only remember standing in front of the canvas, wherever it was, and being swallowed by it, seduced into it, disappearing into the cool and fragrant depths.

By the time we reached Kloster Andechs the rain had abated. Andechs is my kind of monastery, basically a brewery and a pub with a cloister tacked on. Nobody comes to Andechs for the religion, they’re here for the beer. The Doppelbok Dunkel – and I’m not making that up – is a rich black beer just one cream factor short of Guinness. A litre comes in a stein almost too heavy to lift, even when you’re sober. It's about 403%, so by the time you’re done you fall down the steps to the carpark three parts wrecked. Tess drove us the short distance back to Wartaweil for our last night in Bavaria. I don’t remember much about the several beers we apparently enjoyed with Jürgen and Klaus the gardener.

Next time: The sun finally shines again in Austria...