Pt3 - 5:

NORTHERN GERMANY

7^th July – 13^th July

 

The weather was resolutely Transylvanian as we left the suburbs of Prague behind and pointed the bullet in the general direction of Berlin. We approached the border north of Teplice through heavy rain. Here, the road climbed steeply into a range of classically conical hills, like the hills kids draw. With the altitude came a scything wind that occasionally had the bullet dancing on the corners. We crossed the frontier at a burg called Windblastedstadt, or something like that, where the stunted and busted trees whipped around in a force 10 maelstrom. We hung a left at Bad Dipsydorf (sic) south of Dresden and ended up overnighting at Machen near Leipzig in the former East Germany. The campground was very peaceful, with a lake and manicured gardens and birds singing in the trees, a welcome relief from the mad turbulence of the journey up.

The low cloud burned off soon after we left Machen. Tess drove the hour to our first stop, which gave me the unaccustomed leisure to gaze idly out the window at the passing panorama. The bright sunshine revealed a Germany very different to the one we’d seen in Bavaria. The countryside was flat and forested; the villages smaller, more frequent, more architecturally compact. The narrow roads winding through close buildings reminded me of regional France.

Wittenberg is a pretty little town with pleasant gardens and clean cobbled streets. You wouldn’t pick it as the birthplace of a religious revolution, which is what Martin Luther unleashed when he nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints Church in 1517 and kicked off The Protestant Reformation. This isn’t the place to go into the tectonic implications of that simple act for the religious establishment of the day, nor the million plots, sub-plots and sub-sub-plots woven into and around it, but it was a bit like heaving a boulder into a fish pond. Just one consequence: the challenge it posed to the universal authority of the Roman Catholic Church, and the Pope, emboldened Henry the Eighth to split with Rome, create the Church of England in 1534, divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn, mother of Elizabeth I. The Theses are enshrined in bronze on the door of what is, by standards in this part of the world, a very humble church. Inside, the intricately carved pulpit and the elaborate pews for the local nobility hint at its historical pedigree.

It’s warm and dry enough to pitch the tent at Campingplatz Gaisberg on the shore of the Templiner See just outside Potsdam. You reach the lake along a narrow, winding and leafy road through dense forest. An easy drive from Berlin, it’s clearly a popular holiday destination. Much of the accommodation is fixed; small cottages, large permanently planted caravans and family-sized tents complete with landscaped gardens, lawns, even garden gnomes. One place had a larger than life ceramic St Bernard chained to the front picket fence. I didn’t want to imagine what their suburban bungalows looked like back in Berlin, but it’s obvious they don’t do enough drugs…or maybe they do too many.

Nearby Cecilienhof is where Churchill, Truman and Stalin met in 1945 to negotiate the fate of post-war Germany. It’s a vast estate built during WWI for the Crown Princess Cecilia, a member of the ruling Hohenzollern dynasty, and incongruously designed in the image of an English Tudor manor house. Needless to say, the Prussian Hohenzollerns were consigned to the dustbin of history with the defeat of Germany in 1918, so this extravagance was the last hurrah for them. You already know I’m a history nut, but dad passed on to me a particular passion for anything to do with the war so this was a site of special interest. The English, American and Soviet suites are furnished exactly as they were for the conference, including the 3 meter diameter main conference table designed and built in Moscow especially for the event. Interestingly, if you’re interested in European history that is, of the Big Three only Stalin survived the war and remained in power; the ailing FDR died immediately after the Yalta Conference and Churchill was rewarded by the British people for his successful defence of the realm with the bum’s rush at the July 1945 election.

Sans Souci is the Hohenzollern Schönbrunn. The palace itself is only one of several stately houses on the six hundred acre site and its extravagance is consistent with all the other excesses created by entitled, not to say incestuous, European royalty. The pinnacle of folly is The Chinese Tea Room, a gaudy and transcendentally tasteless pavilion that looks more like an exotic opium den. The whole shebang is a pale imitation of the Austro-Hungarian Hapsburg’s overweening hubris and is testament to the wannabe Hohenzollern’s desperate pretensions to grandeur. Even the name, Sans Souci, is an insult to the struggling population of pre-WWI Germany who had every care in the world. Basically, Kaiser Wilhelm was a monumental tool.

*

Speaking of tools, remember all those cranes decorating the skyline of every town and village in rural Germany? As we emerged from the S-Bahn at Freidrichstrasse in the former East Berlin we discovered the source, the massive colony of industrial cranes that is central Berlin. The city is a hive where they breed; there was not a street free of major demolition and construction work. The sky was a lattice of steel superstructure, down below all scaffolding, duckboards and heavy machinery, the traumatic birth pangs of a reunited country compressed into this one vast building site. Posters everywhere extolled the future vision: “Neue Berlin – Onward and Upward”. The Reichstag was wrapped in plastic like some Christo nightmare, chalked with cement dust and encased in scaffolding. Only the Brandenburg Gate stood clear and free in this crazy cacophony; on the eastern side stalls sold relics of the German Democratic Republic – flags, army and police uniforms, badges, caps, t-shirts. Eventually, the thunderous pounding of mating jackhammers drove us onto the 100 bus for the Pergamon Museum.

Many of the buildings in the museum precinct are old Berlin. The Pergamon itself is a U-shaped neo-classical edifice with a bullet-pocked façade and a patina of streaked grime from decades of neglect. The interior is a different story; it’s vast enough to house full scale reconstructions of much of the most significant Pergamon architecture, including the altar, and a detailed model of the entire city layout which would have been pretty useful back in Pergamon itself. There are also mosaics and statuary from Miletus and several other sites down the Turkish west coast. The other attraction is Ishtar Gate from Nebuchadnezzar’s Babylon.

Back in the Berlin Central, the din is mercifully muffled in the leafy central park so we hung out there until we felt ready to tackle Kurfürstendamm. This long, busy boulevard didn’t really live up to its reputation as the nerve centre of modern Berlin. Frankly, the overpriced shops were a dreary disappointment and it lacked the colour and vitality of, say Munich or Prague. It says something that the most exciting thing on the ‘Damm was an orange poster on a bus shelter advertising Späss Kontrolle – Fanta!

*

The best driving weather since Greece made the otherwise uninspiring trip to Celle enjoyable. Celle lies on well-wooded, flat farming land north of Hanover and, like many of the camping grounds in Germany, the park occupies the shores of a lake – the five and a half acre Silbersee with its white sand beach. And like all the campgrounds we’ve visited so far, it features smug bonsai suburbs of established properties with BMWs and Audis in the driveways, dwarf gardens complete with gnomes, fairy lights, picket fences, garden sheds and topiary hedges; a miniature recreation of the houses they’ve left behind in Hamburg or Bremen, complete with bar and restaurant.

It’s our sixth straight night of camping, a brief stopover on the most direct route to Amsterdam.

I can’t leave Germany without sharing this final random factoid and it’s gospel, cross my heart. I’ve made something of a forced study of dunnies on this trip, from any available patch of floor in Egypt to the exciting bidet-style stool in Turkey to the Greek hole in the floor where you're expected to recycle the paper. The innovation in Deutschland dunny design is typically teutonic: the s-bend is in the front of the bowl while the drop zone, so to speak, is a shallow dish. Why, I hear you ask. Apparently, it is the daily habit of your health conscious German to examine the morning’s movement before flushing it away. Only a master race would dream that up.

Next Week: A momentary lapse of concentration in Amsterdam completely changes the mental landscape...