For the first three days of this week, I decided to take a trip to Bavaria, the next province to the east of Baden-Württemberg. I spent my first day of the trip in the city of Munich! The trip from Konstanz took just under 4 hours. After some train mishaps (i.e. getting on one that was going to the same place just ten minutes earlier than the one I had booked), I was in Munich!
My hostel was really close to the main train station, which also meant it was about a 15 minute walk from Marienplatz, the main square in Munich. I had a nice walk through the pedestrian shopping district to get there, which was really nice! So many old and beautiful buildings. Marienplatz is famous for the Neues Rathaus, or New Town Hall, and the Glockenspiel, the dancing clock. I admired the Rathaus quickly and then set off to see the rest of the Altstadt, since I planned to come back for the clock's 5 pm performance. I saw the famous Frauenkirche first, a huge brick church Munich is well-known for. Next up was the Residenz-the palace where several hundred years' worth of Bavarian royalty resided. It was well over 100 rooms, although some were closed. Parts of it were destroyed in WW2 but have since been rebuilt, so everything is opulent and beautiful. After the Residenz I went to the Neues Pinakothek, one of Munich's art museums, with their Impressionist collection. It was a really nice, small museum. Then I headed back to the main area of the Altstadt through the Hofgarten, a beautiful park behind the Residenz. I wandered around the Altstadt a bit, saw some more churches, including the oldest one in Munich (Michaelskirche, I think) and the Asamkirche, the most beautiful and ornate tiny little church I have ever seen. Bavaria is Catholic so the churches are pretty here. After all that, I headed back to the Glockenspiel for the adorable 5 pm performance of the clock! Then some Thai food for dinner and I was exhausted--got up very early to make my train!
Day 2 was a tour of Neuschwanstein Castle! I signed up for a day-long guided tour with a company Eric and I used in San Fran, because I was feeling lazy and didn't feel like looking up how to get there. It was also nice to have contact with other people. The tour took the train from Muenich to Füssen (2 hours) while the guide told us all about crazy King Ludwig II, who built Neuschwanstein. We arrived in Füssen (which means feet! what a funny name for a town) and took a bus to Schwangau (roughly, Swan land), where we had a brief lunch and admired the Hohenschwangau, an older Bavarian castle that is bright yellow. I spent most of the tour with a French Canadian girl who was also alone. After that the guide gave us a choice of a 25 minute, steep climb to the castle, in the intermittent, ever-present rain, or a bus. I took the bus to save my energy to see the gorge afterwards! So then we went to Marienbrücke, the famous bridge with the postcard shots of the castle--it was just as beautiful in person as on all the postcards. Next was the walk to the castle, where we had a guided tour. The castle was only partially finished at Ludwig's unexpected and mysterious death, so the tour is short but the finished rooms are so lovely. It makes Versailles look honestly a bit ostentatious and overdone. No pictures were allowed inside but obviously I snuck a few. The castle is dedicated to the works of Richard Wagner, the composer--he composed operas like Lohengrin, Tristan and Isolde, etc. It even includes a grotto. Ludwig was really into swans so there are swans everywhere. Most of the walls are murals showing scenes from various operas, and everything is carved. The throne room is complete except for the throne, which was never finished.
After the disappointingly short tour, our guide walked us down to the gorge below the castle. Ludwig really picked a breathtaking spot. Giant mountains, a beautiful waterfall...it was gorgeous. Then we took the train home, exhausted and wondering exactly how King Ludwig died....he was deposed under accusation of insanity, and taken to a sanitorium. On his second day there, he took a walk with his psychiatrist and never returned. Both their bodies were found in the lake, in waist-high water. The autopsy reported that the doctor had drowned, but Ludwig's results were never released. It was assumed that Ludwig had drowned the doctor and killed himself, except for one thing-the doctor's watch had stopped over an hour later than King Ludwig's. Mystery...
I ended up spending all of day 3 on my Dachau tour. I've spent most of my time in Germany kind of in awe of old buildings and castles and fairy tales, so I thought it was important to make this little journey to pay my respects, in a sense--both to that tiny bit of my own heritage, and just to that part of German history. Dachau was actually the first permanent concentration camp. The site, now a museum and memorial, is just outside the town of Dachau, which is a 25-minute metro ride from the center of Munich, then a bus ride to the site. Our tour guide was a bit of a Third Reich nerd (he said he had been very interested in the Nazi regime from the age of 6 or 7, which personally I found a little bit weird, but he didn't seem interested in a neo-Nazi kind of way, so I guess to each their own). He explained in detail the political and socioeconomic conditions that led to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis before bringing us into the camp/memorial. Most of the buildings were partially destroyed by American troops post-liberation to symbolically end the Nazi regime, but many are still standing and the rest were restored. Dachau was a camp for men only, and it was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz or Treblinka. Most extermination camps were placed in Poland and Eastern Europe to keep the German citizens unaware of the reality of the situation--Dachau is literally in the middle of a quiet Bavarian town. Before we walked in, our guide, Keith, pointed out the former guard buildings next door, used to train Nazis. Today they are used to train German riot police. This leads to the sounds of boots marching, gunshots being fired, the whole nine yards, which really does add a certain sense of...I guess, reality...to the visit. I'm not sure I think it's the most appropriate use for those facilities, but again, to each their own.
We then walked through the gates, which were the first to have the inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work makes you free). The original entrance processing center is now a museum, which Keith showed us around. It included a map of all the large and subsidiary concentration camps in Europe. I was surprised to see several quite nearby Konstanz, including Friedrichshafen and Radolfzell. As a visitor, the Bodensee area has seemed to me to be somewhat untouched by the Holocaust and the legacies of World War II. After the museum, we saw the reconstructed barracks, then the different religious memorials. Then we were shown the crematoriums and gas chamber. Dachau was not an extermination camp but the gas chamber was used for experiments and for murders once the soldiers started having psychological problems from shooting people all the time. Finally, we saw the ironically beautiful and peaceful wooded area where the ashes of the thousands of burned bodies were found. Visiting Dachau was emotional. It was strange to be standing on a spot where so many terrible things happened-where 200,000 people were imprisoned and as many as 40,000 were murdered.
I think what shocked me most was Keith's description of some of the weird and inappropriate things he has seen as a tour guide. They included stories of Asian tourists doing their typical grinning V-sign photograph in front of the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign; a small girl climbing on a machine used for torturing prisoners and grinning while her mother took a picture; and a few teenagers taking photographs in sexual positions on top of the mass graves. I guess people can be pretty callous sometimes. I can't decide if I made the right decision, taking a tour. On one hand, I feel like I could have seen everything much faster on my own with an audioguide and then had the time to do something else that day--while the tour was advertised as beginning at 10, we did not get going until 11 and didn't get back until after 4, so I couldn't really do anything else with my day. On the other hand, our guide was really knowledgeable, the people on the tour were really nice, and it was nice not to have to do something as bleak as that alone. It was also good, I think, to really have the time to take in the experience and process what I was seeing.
My overall impressions of Munich and Bavaria are really positive. I really love traveling in Germany--I have now seen much more of it than of France, actually, particularly with the long train and car journeys. Germany is really a wonderful country. I think Americans have a bad association because of WW2, and it was never on my top list of places to visit, but I absolutely love it. The more I see, the more I want to see. And there is still so much! Hamburg, Frankfurt, more of Berlin & Potsdam, Dresden, Cologne, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Tübingen....the list could go on. I HIGHLY recommend it to people traveling through Europe. It really is a magical country with so much to see.
After the disappointingly short tour, our guide walked us down to the gorge below the castle. Ludwig really picked a breathtaking spot. Giant mountains, a beautiful waterfall...it was gorgeous. Then we took the train home, exhausted and wondering exactly how King Ludwig died....he was deposed under accusation of insanity, and taken to a sanitorium. On his second day there, he took a walk with his psychiatrist and never returned. Both their bodies were found in the lake, in waist-high water. The autopsy reported that the doctor had drowned, but Ludwig's results were never released. It was assumed that Ludwig had drowned the doctor and killed himself, except for one thing-the doctor's watch had stopped over an hour later than King Ludwig's. Mystery...
I ended up spending all of day 3 on my Dachau tour. I've spent most of my time in Germany kind of in awe of old buildings and castles and fairy tales, so I thought it was important to make this little journey to pay my respects, in a sense--both to that tiny bit of my own heritage, and just to that part of German history. Dachau was actually the first permanent concentration camp. The site, now a museum and memorial, is just outside the town of Dachau, which is a 25-minute metro ride from the center of Munich, then a bus ride to the site. Our tour guide was a bit of a Third Reich nerd (he said he had been very interested in the Nazi regime from the age of 6 or 7, which personally I found a little bit weird, but he didn't seem interested in a neo-Nazi kind of way, so I guess to each their own). He explained in detail the political and socioeconomic conditions that led to the rise of Hitler and the Nazis before bringing us into the camp/memorial. Most of the buildings were partially destroyed by American troops post-liberation to symbolically end the Nazi regime, but many are still standing and the rest were restored. Dachau was a camp for men only, and it was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz or Treblinka. Most extermination camps were placed in Poland and Eastern Europe to keep the German citizens unaware of the reality of the situation--Dachau is literally in the middle of a quiet Bavarian town. Before we walked in, our guide, Keith, pointed out the former guard buildings next door, used to train Nazis. Today they are used to train German riot police. This leads to the sounds of boots marching, gunshots being fired, the whole nine yards, which really does add a certain sense of...I guess, reality...to the visit. I'm not sure I think it's the most appropriate use for those facilities, but again, to each their own.
We then walked through the gates, which were the first to have the inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work makes you free). The original entrance processing center is now a museum, which Keith showed us around. It included a map of all the large and subsidiary concentration camps in Europe. I was surprised to see several quite nearby Konstanz, including Friedrichshafen and Radolfzell. As a visitor, the Bodensee area has seemed to me to be somewhat untouched by the Holocaust and the legacies of World War II. After the museum, we saw the reconstructed barracks, then the different religious memorials. Then we were shown the crematoriums and gas chamber. Dachau was not an extermination camp but the gas chamber was used for experiments and for murders once the soldiers started having psychological problems from shooting people all the time. Finally, we saw the ironically beautiful and peaceful wooded area where the ashes of the thousands of burned bodies were found. Visiting Dachau was emotional. It was strange to be standing on a spot where so many terrible things happened-where 200,000 people were imprisoned and as many as 40,000 were murdered.
I think what shocked me most was Keith's description of some of the weird and inappropriate things he has seen as a tour guide. They included stories of Asian tourists doing their typical grinning V-sign photograph in front of the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign; a small girl climbing on a machine used for torturing prisoners and grinning while her mother took a picture; and a few teenagers taking photographs in sexual positions on top of the mass graves. I guess people can be pretty callous sometimes. I can't decide if I made the right decision, taking a tour. On one hand, I feel like I could have seen everything much faster on my own with an audioguide and then had the time to do something else that day--while the tour was advertised as beginning at 10, we did not get going until 11 and didn't get back until after 4, so I couldn't really do anything else with my day. On the other hand, our guide was really knowledgeable, the people on the tour were really nice, and it was nice not to have to do something as bleak as that alone. It was also good, I think, to really have the time to take in the experience and process what I was seeing.
My overall impressions of Munich and Bavaria are really positive. I really love traveling in Germany--I have now seen much more of it than of France, actually, particularly with the long train and car journeys. Germany is really a wonderful country. I think Americans have a bad association because of WW2, and it was never on my top list of places to visit, but I absolutely love it. The more I see, the more I want to see. And there is still so much! Hamburg, Frankfurt, more of Berlin & Potsdam, Dresden, Cologne, Stuttgart, Freiburg, Tübingen....the list could go on. I HIGHLY recommend it to people traveling through Europe. It really is a magical country with so much to see.
1 comment:
I really love to read your blog. It's really interesting to read about the experience of an American being in Germany who is visiting all the things I (as a German) have also visited before. You definetely know a lot things about German culture and their history (I guess more than a lot of Germans do^^). Keep going like this ;-)
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