Germany trip: Schweinfurt
I was born in Schweinfurt forty six years ago. My parents left for America soon after. (With me! of course.)

I grew up knowing a little German for baby dummies -- Kuh, ich bin fertig, and most impressively Herrschaftsbombenelementnochmal (cow / I'm done / uh-oh we're in for it now). Then one spring my folks got a set of records and a book and proceeded to teach us German, so we'd be able to say something when we went to Germany that summer. Oddly, our first sentence was a petty complaint: "Der Tee ist gut, aber die Tasse ist zu klein." -- "The tea is good, but the cup is too small." My brother and I would write down everything. It worked pretty well. We're still good at petty complaints.

Exotic Schweinfurt
Schweinfurt, Germany -- West Germany back then -- was about as different as my nine-year old brain could imagine a place to be from Oak Ridge, Tennessee. They had cars, but different ones. They had lots of little stores you had to go to -- one for bread, one for meat, one for ice cream and treats. There were church bells ringing all the time. Everything looked old and important. Everything was squeezed together -- so you could walk to places instead of having to drive. You returned bottles and their little wired-on caps, in boxes of sixteen. You didn't drink Coke, you drank Limonade (kind of like Sunkist soda), and if you were lucky you got a little bitty ice cube. No one ate corn on the cob or watermelon. And mainly there was this huge family I was suddenly part of, including kids my age, a grandpa with cherry trees to pick and beehives to care for, aunts and uncles around every corner.

World War II
Schweinfurt was and still is the site of a number of ball-bearing factories; during World War II this made it the target of repeated bombing by Allied air forces. The first raid was a 230 B-17 bomber attack on August 7, 1943 that damaged the city's factories. Because the bombers had no fighter escorts, many were shot down by German pilots; the attack cost a staggering 36 planes and 341 airmen. A second unescorted attack on October 13, 1943 was remembered as "Black Thursday" -- by the Americans: of 291 bombers that began the mission, 60 were lost along with 639 airmen.

The combination of poor tactics and great distance from Allied airfields gave Schweinfurt the distinction of costing about the same number of airmen their lives as Germans -- mostly civilian. Of the roughly 1100 Schweinfurters who died, 362 perished in Allied air attacks on February 24-25, 1944. According to one source, Schweinfurt was bombed 22 times with over 590,000 bombs. While production was temporarily affected, the need for ball bearings was so great that facilities were simply spread out and rebuilt.*

Whether this made the Schweinfurt missions fruitless or poor decisions is for historians to decide. The human toll was beyond doubt. While visiting the cemetery in Schweinfurt, I saw numerous graves alluding to the air attacks either directly, or by date and implication -- mothers and children buried together. That's not to say there weren't enthusiastic supporters of the Third Reich in town; my aunt showed me a photo of her husband's family home -- the one I was sitting in -- with long Nazi banners trailing from the windows. Sometimes I think simple pageantry seduced as many as ideology did.

Just as catastrophes like the Black Death or Thirty Years War of old were transmuted into dark fairy tales, so the ordeal of World War II has echoed down at least one generation: the "bombenelement" in that earliest of my German words meant "bomb element."**

Home
The word 'Schweinfurt' itself is as prosaic as it can possibly be: "swine ford," a shallow spot in the Main River for pig herds to cross. Its poet laureate Friedrich Rückert once half-seriously lamented something to the effect "You could have been Wineford, or Mainford, but no, you had to be Swineford." That's OK. It's a pleasant place to visit and to live. The industry may be struggling now, but people seem to be making a go of it. The city has one of the de rigeur pedestrian zones most German cities do, but with narrower streets that make the shopping zone seem like an outdoor mall. There are more Turkish people there now than I remembered, selling Turkish staples from trailers on the market place, or sitting on chairs out on the sidewalk -- a bit annoying to some older Germans not yet used to that.

It's my home away from home, with a dear aunt in town and a dear uncle nearby, with long gone grandparents and their Oberndorf house and cherry tree and beehives, with a Cramerstrasse courtyard we'd play soccer and ping-pong in, with a hospital I could show my little girl and say, "Yes, I was born there." And see her eyes get big and round as if that was important.


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* The World War II information in this post comes from an utterly fascinating "Third Reich in Ruins" web site maintained by Geoffrey Walden. The site features a number of photographic comparisons of Germany, including Schweinfurt and Würzburg then and now which are quite striking -- in many cases buildings and streets have been so well restored that there's a very ghostly quality about the wartime photos. Many of the "before" photos were taken by Mr. Walden's father Lt. Delbert Walden while stationed in Germany in 1945-1946. Via "Ruins," you can read an American pilot's account of Black Thursday here. For all that Schweinfurt was more of a legitimate military target, Würzburg fared much worse: some 3,000 to 5,000 people died in the fire-bombing of March 16, 1945. Just over a week earlier, U.S. forces had crossed the Rhine at Remagen. -- According to a note on his website, Mr. Walden is currently serving in the Middle East. I thank him for his service, and wish him good luck.
** I didn't know that as a boy -- all I knew was that it clearly meant "red alert," and that it was the longest and scariest word in human experience. It doesn't really mean anything; one literal translation would be "lordship's bomb element once again." For all I know it's only used in our family. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:00:00 PM -- |  

 
Germany trip: Bamberg

Having settled in in Schweinfurt, we decided to make a day trip to Bamberg, a beautiful, well preserved old city in Oberfranken (Upper Franconia) that straddles the Regnitz River. Centuries of riverfront engineering have bracketed the river with a small canyon of old German architecture, and criss-crossed it with a number of bridges.

Chamber of Commerce types like to say the city stretches across seven hills just like Rome, and has a riverfront like Venice, and in a pleasant, miniaturized German way, they're right. Like Wuerzburg, Bamberg was also a bishopric, and has more than its share of churches, monasteries, and nunneries. We began our day by driving up one of the hills, past the "Kaiserdom" ('emperor's cathedral') and bishop's residence to near the Michaelskirche, a church attached to a Benedictine monastery. The Michaelskirche boasts unusual ceiling decorations: knowledgeable worshipers gazing upwards can recognize hundreds (578, to be exact) of Biblical flowers and herbs painstakingly represented in patterns accenting the domed architecture of the church. We took the opportunity to light three remembrance candles for three dear departed uncles of mine.

We then made our way down the hill and through an orchard to the Altstadt (old town) below. It was after noon, and our destination was a restaurant on Dominikaner Strasse recommended by our useful Lonely Planet Bavaria guidebook. Old Bamberg has retained its winding, medieval street patterns (map), so just getting there was fun.

Besides being hungry, I was looking forward to trying a specialty of Bamberg: smoked "Schlenkerla" beer, which I figured I ought to try at the brewery's own restaurant. Actually, just about every restaurant along the way advertised "Aecht" ('echt' means real or original) Schlenkerla beer, so we could have gone to any of them instead. We wound up wishing we had; the restaurant was overrun, the service was curt and slow, and the place was not very well ventilated -- meaning we wound up getting ourselves more or less "smoked" as well by the cigarette smokers all around. But the food was great once we got it -- I had a local favorite, Schweinshaxn (pork knuckle) -- and the Schlenkerla was worth the wait, too.

We also saw an interesting bit of German anthropology, so to speak, at a neighboring table: a couple of young men had straight, well-defined scars on their cheeks -- a sign that they were part of a "schlagende" (hitting), a.k.a. "fechtende" (dueling) university fraternity. Initiation at such fraternities involves dueling with sabers until you have been cut on the cheek (Someone told me they do wear eye and body protection, but who knows.)*

Kaiserdom
After lunch we visited the cathedral. It's very old indeed, built in 1100, and is also notable for at least two famous works of art. The "Bamberger Reiter" is a work by an unknown 13th century artist. It seems likely the rider is a portrait, but of whom is unknown. The regal bearing and handsome, lifelike features of the rider are almost startling in the solemn cathedral, and seem like a medieval, equestrian "David" to me. As a whole, the sculpture seems to illustrate a hierarchy of life: heaven over man, man on horse, horse over plant and soil -- with plant life represented as a kind of "leaf man" peering out at you from the base of the sculpture, and heaven represented as a castle in the sky over the rider's head.**

Given the medieval times in which the sculpture was made, it's interesting that the sculpture depicts no hierarchy within mankind. Whether the rider is a particular king or a generic one, he stands for all humanity in the sculpture: there is no servant leading the horse or guarding the king. Mankind's fundamental place in the order of things is not subdivided between ruler and ruled.

The other art work I took a closer look at was the tomb of King Heinrich II and Queen Kunigunde, decorated with six alabaster reliefs, created by regional master sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider. They form a kind of quirky biography of the two royals, full of characters and action: a doctor removes the king's gallstone in one, the queen walks across hot coals to prove her virtue in another, an angel weighs the king's soul while a little devil fruitlessly tries to tip the scales in a third. The ordinary, fantastical, and odd occurrences of two lifetimes are made extraordinary and eternal by a sculptor who put as much effort into a commoner's face as the queen's or king's. (Needless to say, read someone else for a more expert evaluation of these works.)

Old town
We re-parked in an underground parking garage near the old center of town and resumed walking around. Like many old city centers in Germany, Bamberg's is now a pedestrian zone; this one is a particularly enjoyable network of bridges and winding streets and alleys faced with rococo or "Fachwerk" (exposed beam) houses.

The old city hall, or Rathaus, is built on a small island in the river, and is particularly picturesque -- or will be again once renovations are completed. Along this stretch of the river, the channel is fairly narrow so that the water rushes through in a torrent that hypnotized Maddie for a while just as it did me about thirty-five years ago. We wandered aimlessly but enjoyed ourselves and the sights, stopping once at a small antiquities shop and bookstore to pick up a few print reproductions to take home with us.

By then it was getting late. I had developed a cough I've tentatively blamed on (a) the smoky restaurant and (b) me foolishly not zipping up my coat throughout the fairly cool, raw day. We returned to our car, found our way back to the Autobahn, and sped home to Schweinfurt.


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* My impression is that this is an expression of German conservative traditionalist culture that I don't have much hope or desire of "getting." Student fraternities were at one time (mid-1800s) a force for reform in Germany, but at least the "fechtende" ones gradually became associated with the military and (ultra) right wing politics. I couldn't say whether that's still true, or whether this is kind of a "roots lite" for some German students today, who'll probably wind up being Walter Mittys once they settle down.
** A recent reinterpretation asserts that the unarmed rider is supposed to evoke the biblical prophecy of a "king of kings," and remind worshipers that crusades -- in full swing in that era -- were not by the sword alone.

The statue may also have provided a kind of chivalric inspiration for Claus Graf von Stauffenberg, the officer who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1944. Stauffenberg joined the elite "Bamberger Reiter" 17th cavalry regiment, and came to be called the "Bamberger Reiter" himself because of a perceived resemblance. Consider this element of the oath sworn by Stauffenberg's conspirators:

We want a people who remain rooted in the earth of the homeland and near to the natural powers, that finds their joy and their fulfilment in acting within the given circles of life and who overcome, in freedom and pride, the lower impulses of jealousy and ill will. We want leaders who, growing from all levels of the people, connected to the divine powers, walk before others with great wisdom, honor and sacrifice.

Stauffenberg's views here seem mystical and maybe even reactionary, but in his terms he was accusing Hitler of dishonoring Germany -- and he specifically meant the death camps. I think these and other words in this statement evoke the ordered world and sense of honor of the Bamberger Reiter. Ironically, Nazi propagandists also used the statue as a symbol of Aryan supremacy -- although the person portrayed may have been a Hungarian king.

UPDATE, 1/5/05: top photo changed to cathedral posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:00:00 PM -- |  

 
Germany trip: Würzburg
In retrospect, lingering over that nice breakfast in Harburg may have cost us: we took a later tour of the castle, and left Harburg later than we might have. Coupled with my mistake with an appointment time in Würzburg, we paid the price of racing past a number of equally worthwhile sights, including Dinkelsbühl and Rothenburg o.d. Tauber, two of the best preserved medieval towns anywhere. I hope we get there next time.

Once in the Würzburg area, the trip changed a bit to more of a visit with relatives Cricket and I hadn't seen in quite a while, and Maddie had for the most part never seen. We still got out and about, and I'll share some of those experiences.

Our first day was spent in Karlstadt near my aunt's home in Veitshöchheim. There's a castle ruin with a view of the Main river and the little town, which still has some of its medieval walls. We climbed up, and Maddie played knight with us and her new equipment. In the afternoon, we visited Würzburg and went shopping, and walked out on the Alte Brücke, a lovely old bridge crossing the Main river. Like Munich, Würzburg boasts a nice pedestrian zone in its old town; a nearby underground parking garage had plenty of room, but I imagine most people get there by street car or bus, since the town has an excellent public transportation system. The town's architecture is dominated by churches and Rococo architecture; it was a bishopric until 1802, and those bishops liked to spend money on stylish buildings.

The next day we visited the Marienfestung. The fortress was the scene of fierce fighting in its day, perhaps most notably during the "Peasant's War" that engulfed much of southern and central Germany in 1524-26. Peasants had to help build fortresses like the one in Würzburg as "Frondienst" -- compulsory labor -- in addition to enforced tithes on their harvests, and many took the Reformation as their cue to shake off these burdens. In Würzburg, Tilman Riemenschneider was one of those leading the fight. A German sculptor of the late 15th and early 16th century whose works in wood and alabaster have a Raphaelite beauty*, he was mayor of Würzburg during the revolt, and was imprisoned and tortured following the farmers' defeat. There were German revolutionary heroes, you just don't hear about them so much -- I suppose because they generally lost.**

Würzburg suffered terribly in World War II; despite not having much military significance beyond perhaps its railway station, it was bombed and burned on March 16, 1945 by Allied aircraft. A model of the town following the attack is displayed at a local museum, which writes that "the glow of the burning city was still seen by British pilots 230 km away" (about 140 miles). It's shouldn't be a surprise that no one walks away from a world war with completely clean hands, but it's still a terrible shame what happened to Würzburg, Dresden, and Hamburg, to name but a few of the cities devastated in World War II. (Without forgetting the similar fates of Coventry, Rotterdam, Warsaw, and Stalingrad, of course.)

Incredibly, one of the treasures of the art world survived the attack: a vast ceiling fresco*** by Giovanni Tiepolo in the ornate Bishop's Residence in the center of town, said to be the largest ceiling painting in the world. Much of the rest of that building -- one of several masterpieces by the Rococo architect Balthasar Neumann -- was reduced to kindling, but was painstakingly restored after the war. The "Residenz" is now a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Thankfully, Tiepolo's masterpiece remained largely undamaged. Its subject is almost embarrassing: the assembled continents of the world pay homage to... wait for it... Carl Philipp von Greifenclau, the ruler and bishop of Würzburg, whose portrait floats among the clouds. It's so over the top, so to speak, that I sometimes wonder if Tiepolo was making a bit of fun of his client. But the execution is enthralling -- a caravan from Asia, a fanciful Indian queen and cornucopia from America, portraits of contemporaries worked into the background, detail piled upon detail. Given that the whole thing has passed into the hands of the German people, I decided once again to overlook the vast misuse of resources that went into aggrandizing a minor 18th century bishop-prince. Not that I got a close look anyway: the fresco is currently obscured by a huge scaffolding as experts work to restore the painting.

That day a German-American women's club was holding a reception in the entrance hall. A German band gamely played jazz standards by Gershwin and Ellington as American officers walked in to join the event. Würzburg is one of the many German cities that will be affected by the planned reorganization of American overseas bases -- in fact, this is where the storied Big Red One has been headquartered since 1996; the division is now rotating units into Iraq. While it's surely secondary to military and budget considerations, the scene reminded me that something intangible will be lost, too, when these plans are carried out. For his part, the commanding general predicts that "the re-stationing is years away and will not impact any of us on this or the next tour."

But for a brief return before returning to America, our time in Würzburg was over. Next stops: Schweinfurt and Bamberg.


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* Various online exhibits: Mainfränkisches Museum Würzburg, National Gallery of Art, Artcyclopedia (various museums). Riemenschneider's works were characterized by often having a gentle S-shape, a high degree of realism, and being generally unadorned and unpainted. His opposition to the ruling bishops notwithstanding, most of his works are devotional.
** Interestingly, the word used in Austria for "Frondienst" turns out to be "robot." Also, according a German online encyclopedia entry, it's just a legend that Riemenschneider's hands were crushed as punishment for his participation in the revolt -- by some accounts an act of "mercy" sparing him from execution. On the other hand, Riemenschneider didn't seem to produce many (any?) more sculptures after around this time, so that the physical and/or psychological injuries he sustained in captivity may still be responsible for ending a great artist's career.
*** UPDATE, 10/26: Via flickr.com, here are a number of superb photos of Tiepolo's main Residenz fresco by "jen in deutschland."

posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:00:00 PM -- |  

 
Germany trip: Harburg
We left Munich late Monday afternoon, in a small but effective Ford KA we were driving north to Wuerzburg for one of my cousins. Our destination was the small town of Harburg, along the so-called "Romantische Strasse" (romantic road) leading past Munich through Augsburg to Wuerzburg.

Along the way, I got reacquainted with Autobahn driving; with the three of us and our luggage jammed aboard, our little car was no match for many of the speed demons, and I spent a good deal of my driving time checking the rear view mirror for onrushing BMWs and whatnot flicking their headlights at us. Once past Augsburg, the challenge changed to judging whether I could get around some truck before oncoming traffic approached.

But the occasional stresses of driving were repaid when we arrived at Harburg around dusk. We followed a steep winding road up to a small tollgate which we swung aside and closed behind us. I hadn't quite believed the inn we'd be staying in -- Fuerstliche Burgschenke Harburg (Princely Castle Inn Harburg) -- would literally be part of the castle. But to Maddie's and our everlasting delight it was.

We passed through an extremely narrow gate into a cobblestoned courtyard that -- but for the electric lighting -- looked much as it might have four or five hundred years ago. The staff had the night off, but they had offered by e-mail to leave a key for us to find and remarkably, everything went off without a hitch. We found a nice Gaststaette near the town marketplace for dinner.

The castle, which dates to at least 1150, was originally one of the principal fortresses of the Hohenstaufer, the rulers of the Holy Roman Empire at that time. It's now owned by the Wallersteins, a line of a local noble family, which runs this and a couple of other castles as paying or at least earning propositions for locals and tourists to visit and stay for dinner or the night. The rooms were small by American standards but cozy, modern and clean. The breakfast the next morning was wonderful and the staff was very nice; somewhat to my surprise, Maddie put away quite a bit of excellent German cold cuts, cheese, honey and assorted buns.

After buying plenty of souvenirs -- including a pretty good cardboard knight's helmet and thin wooden shield for Halloween -- we took a mid-day tour of the castle. In the court room, our guide read out some of the verdicts passed by the lord of the castle; one, pronounced upon two "quarrelsome women," called for them to be yoked together and led to the marketplace to be pelted with garbage. There were grimmer verdicts too: one woman, convicted of adultery, was sentenced to extremely hard labor breaking rocks until she miscarried the child.

During the Reformation the Harburg castle's owner chose Protestantism. The conversion affected the subjects as well, and the castle chapel had to be expanded to serve the village below. Harburg castle fell during the Thirty Years War, but was reconquered by the Swedes, who plundered but did not raze it.

The age of firearms had some effects on the castle's design. For example, iron bars were built into the walls for large bore muskets to be hooked to; this helped handle the huge recoil of those weapons. Spherical cavities in the turret walls held ~7 inch wooden balls with holes drilled through them, giving them the name "wooden eyes" (Holzaugen) -- and allowing defenders to point a musket through them. The trick was that once the musket was discharged and withdrawn, the wooden ball could be rotated to close the hole and protect the musketeer. I'd never heard of that.

The Harburg castle escaped the ravages of war and neglect almost unscathed, and its current owners deserve thanks for preserving it into the present day, and making it available to tourists like us. It could have been much, much worse: Michael Jackson wanted to buy the castle for himself back in 1998, but was rebuffed.


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posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:00:00 PM -- |