St Bartholomä - a place to see before you die
Pay attention as I’ve got a lot to get through. Since leaving Slovenia we’ve been on a bit of a Germanesque journey: Austrian lake; Salzburg; Königsee, Regensburg and finally Nürnburg. Actually as I write we are sat besides the Rhine just downstream from Rüdesheim watching the cloppiter-cloppiters[1] go by which, in my book, ages us between our late forties and mid-sixties; the Rhine is such a middle-aged destination. But that is another story.
I could spend all of my time waffling on about Nürnburg as it’s such an extraordinary city – surprisingly for reasons that aren’t well amplified in either the Green (small writing, lots of detail and black and white sketches – only for intellectuals, pleeeease) Guide or our only country guide by National Geographic (surprisingly thin on everything, but with some nice glossy pictures). But first let’s talk about Austria and the Austrians. Our short stay before Salzburg was on the Weiss See. This long and narrow lake sits somewhere in the middle of the country, surrounded by pine covered mountains and looks much like every other Austrian lake (of which there are hundreds) in that it is inordinately pretty, its banks are peppered by typical alpine chalets and guesthouses (all of which are adorned with geranium decorated balconies), and caters for tourists of all shapes and sizes. There’s watersports aplenty, paddle steamers, cable cars, cycle routes, trekking and walking routes and more cafe and küchen than you can shake a pointed Nordic Walking stick (the new fitness craze) at. As its name suggest I suppose the Weiss See claims some notoriety over other lakes by being a bit white in places. Legend speaks of lovers separated on either side of the lake, bad witches, Angels, fishermen and the moon dripping white tears into the water. Actually it’s the sand that lines the edges of the lake that gives it that white appearance, and I remained unconvinced that the moon had much to do with it. But it is a lovely place. The water is warm and inviting and a landscape artist would struggle to paint such a convivial backdrop. It’s pretty perfect.
And that’s the problem. Austria is perfect. Everywhere is tidy and well kempt. Nearly all Austrians live in delightful wooden houses on the side of one of their many lakes, unless they live in Vienna, Linz, Graz, Salzburg or Innsbruck where they live in sturdy city houses, or spacious apartments. A few live in a mountain chalet where the air is so clean your lungs struggle and object without their usual dose of impurities. They all have nice cars and dress smartly. There seems to be no immigration to speak of, so everyone is either Austrian (men: accordion playing, trilby hatted, red cheeked and contented; women: dutiful wife, flowered dress with frilly white blouse, large breasted, red-cheeked and contented) or a tourist. And as their country is so picture perfect they get a lot of tourists in both the summer and the winter. But look carefully. A good number of the tourists are Austrian. Indeed, how many Austrians have you seen holidaying abroad? Not many. And why should they when they live in a country where the discerning come in the summer to breathe without added chemicals, and ski in the winter without the plague of beer-swigging après-skiers and queuing amongst those where image is more important than ability.
The thing is I cannot name an Austrian internationally renown company, apart from Mozart – well the dreadful red and gold Mozart embossed chocolates that get everywhere at Christmas. How, therefore, can this country, which has had a chequered recent history, be so affluent? It doesn’t offer tax-free status nor do its banks ask no questions and, therefore, tell no lies. It has no coastline, and must have difficulty exporting, and so many big mountains that those suffering from vertigo will struggle to cross over one of the many alpine passes needed to gain access. Well of course we already have the answer – tourism. Its beauty is its income. And because they do it so well it will ever remain thus – unless, in my book, they get any smugger. And that’s a possibility. Austria is a self-satisfied country. We found everything a little expensive and the average Austrian just a little too pleased with himself. It’s not obvious, but it’s there just below the surface. It’s not that we didn’t feel welcome (God forbid, without tourists the Austrian economy would nose dive) we just didn’t always feel genuinely welcome. That’s all.
Moving on. Strip away Mozart and any reference to The Sound of Music and Salzburg
Salzburg - more than just the sound of music......
is still a fascinating city. There are plenty of large, onion-domed churches, grand buildings and a huge hilltop castle, all nestling next to the River Salzach. There’s old and new centrally placed palaces, a myriad of squares and a wealth of very expensive shops filling the ground floors of the tightly packed ancient streets. Music hits you at every turn, with very competent buskers knocking out some piece of classical music or other. We didn’t see any of it, but there’s an annual music festival which reverberates around the city allowing the great and the good to feel even greater and gooder. And, of course, Mozart was born here and, more important from a cultural perspective, they filmed the Sound of Music in and around the city. All of these things add up to a place worth visiting (even though progress is slowed by the multitude of tourists that lead, at times, to an unwelcome claustrophobic air).
But the best thing about Salzburg is its disposition. Think grass green sitting room carpet and then get your children to paint your walls like they were purply-blue mountains. Now lift the carpet and stick some footballs randomly about the place. Replace the carpet, put some rocks onto of the green footbally shaped things, snake a wide blue chord through the middle of the room and place Salzburg between any of the footballs and your newly laid river. Hey presto: extraordinary scene of lumps and bumps, rivers and a wonderful city framed by mountains. To get this view climb up to the castle, make an effort to visit the state rooms (they’re ok, but the accompanying display on the mountain role of the Austrian infantry in the First World War is exceptional) and then look over the parapet. Stunning.
We got to Nürnburg via Berchtesgaden and Regensburg. Situated on a tiny spit of Germany that, like a big toe, pushes unwelcomingly into Austria’s fleshy tummy, Berchtesgaden is notorious for two reasons: it protects Königsee, Germany’s most enchanting Alpine lake, from unwanted guests; and it was such a favourite of Hitler that he took as his summer retreat (known colloquially as The Eagle’s Nest) a building complex on top of one of the many local mountains. More of Hitler in a bit; a few words about Königsee. The Alps rise dramatically on Germany’s southern border. There is no foothill introduction. One minute you’re driving on the flat, south out of Munich; next you hit mountains big and pointy enough to ski off. Königsee manages to squeeze itself into a tiny gap in these mountains so that, on three sides, the gradient is so steep trees manfully fail to get a foothold. Halfway down the lake there’s a small flat area on one side where the sweetest of red and white chapels has been built. The only way to get to visit St Bartholomä (the said chapel) is to take one of the very regular electric tourist boats, or hire a row boat and row the five miles down this almost pencil thin lake to, what has got to be, one of the sites in Europe to see[2]. No other craft are allowed on the lake and rightly so; on a calm summer’s morning with your Captain playing his horn to demonstrate seven echoes off of mountainsides so close you can almost touch them, you do not want your senses interrupted with even the mere flapping of a sail.
We jumped off at St Bartholomä and made the not inconsiderable effort to hike to the spectacular ‘Ice Chapel’, the bottom of a weenie glacier that has a huge hole at its base caused by ice melt. We also walked from the end of Königsee to a smaller higher lake, Obersee, which is fed by a towering waterfall from the mountains above. Here, at what seemed to be one of the most unreachable places in Europe, we were able to buy a glass apflesaft and some fresh milk – truly delicious.
Obersee - at the end of a long walk to the very edge of Germany
Further northwest and Regensburg followed. An interesting old city on the Danube. Highlights include a Roman bridge, plenty of merchant town houses each with competing (mine’s bigger than yours) tower and one of the oldest sausage houses in Europe where, God love the Germans, you can order your bratwurst und brot as you have been able to for centuries.
Then Nürnburg. Now my recent European history is not too bad. At school most of us will have covered the rise of National Socialism, led by Hitler, and the focus of their rallies at Nürnburg. And I recently saw a very good TV programme presented by Stephen Fry as he looked at Wagner’s influence on opera. A small section of this was devoted to Hitler’s enthusiasm for Wagner and how his music was often used a backdrop to the rallies. Fry took us to Nürnburg’s Zepplinweisse, the outdoor stage for the huge political gatherings, and he could not force himself to stand where Hitler stood to make his undoubtedly inspiring speeches and review the masses. So we wanted to do the same. A quick scan through our guides and much is made of Nürnburg’s history as the unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire, with the city’s intact ancient walls, large cathedral and well preserved castle – and we wanted to see those as well. Bizarrely only passing reference was made to its National Socialist architecture, so it probably wasn’t worth seeing.
Well, how wrong could they be? The only caravan site in Nürnburg was outside the city walls and well located to start our city tour with a glimpse of the Zepplinweisse. We arrived late in the afternoon and found the site next to an extremely long (runway sized) old block-paved road that seemed to be an overflow car park for a huge, newish exhibition centre. Once we had settled we got on our bikes and followed our noses through a park and in the direction of the Zepplinweisse. From that point on, stunning (in a crass, exploitative sense) is the best word to describe the scene. What is not made clear (either by Fry or our guidebooks) is the enormity of the project that Hitler, through his chief architect Albert Speer, put in place in this suburb of Nürnburg. The Zepplinweisse, which lacks some of its impact since the huge Swastika was demolished by the Americans at the end of the war, and the flanking columns suffering the same fate under German hands for health and safety reasons a decade or so later, is a start of a monolith of scary proportions. Opposite is an open-ended concrete stadium (built for the main rallies and capable of holding 200,000 people) and directly in front is a wide march past area. If you have the courage to stand where Hitler stood – and you can, everything is just left open – you get a real sense of history and there’s a palpable electricity, even on a dull day, that fizzes through the site.
Deutschland, Deutschland............
There are simple information boards littered everywhere covering the past and the present (they currently use the stadium for sport and music events). They encourage you to tour, and there’s a lot to take in, for as well as the Zepplinweisse there’s a large lake and fairground (both in place before 1930 but subsequently exploited by Hitler), an even bigger open air stadium based on a previously erected World War I memorial, rail heads and a huge marching road which we came in on. But taking the biscuit was the enormous redbrick, five storey, horse-shoe shaped Nazi conference hall (Nürnburg Symphoniker). It was to be the largest in the world and was pretty much completed, less the roof which was to cover the centre of the horseshoe, although war prevented any major gatherings here. Albert Speer may have had big ideas, and we learnt that Hitler was a stickler for some of the architectural detail, but as this is a building which, at its best, can only be described as bog ugly, he clearly lacked any taste. But it is overwhelmingly huge, and, as part of a town-size complex devoted to National Socialism, built with some angular reference to the city’s cathedral (new, at one with old), it makes a point.
But it’s unequivocally the wrong point and that is the wonderful thing about what the Nürnburgers have achieved here. They haven’t demolished these ghastly structures, nor have they kept them pristine and made a Nazi theme park out of them. They have just let them stand for what they stood for, and the cracks in the pavement, and the obviously poor workmanship of some of the construction, add to the history lesson: this is what you get if you combine a difficult period of a nation’s history with an unchecked megalomaniac. It is an extraordinary spectacle.
Auschwitz revisited in Nürnburg
On our first day we didn’t have time to visit the Volksgfest museum, which is a relatively new feature in one of the wings of the Nürnburg Symphoniker, so we went back the next morning. Being allowed inside the crumbling red structure which in one corner has been expertly intertwined with metal and glass to make the museum an aesthetically pleasing but not overly friendly attraction (obviously the architect was no relation of good old Albert) is worth the effort in itself. The main exhibition, a history of the rise and fall of National Socialism is decent, if slightly overlong. However the temporary exhibition, which is downstairs, focuses on the wartime German railway system, is better still, with the main hall set aside as a tribute to concentration camp victims. Here a life-sized rail track, made with fluorescent rails leading to the Birkenau tower, with thousands of name cards of the dead littering the track, deliver a wholly moving visual metaphor for the final horrors of National Socialism. Go there tomorrow.
After that, although a little shell-shocked, we did Nürnburg old town. Its highlights are the near perfect, wooden roofed city walls and a pristine hill top castle that is just too well looked after to really reflect its ancient history. The cathedral is big and there are plenty of half-wooden houses and those lovely tall red roofs that the Germans do so well. There is also a series of extremely vulgar, but somehow beautiful bronze statues (by Jurgen Weber) that seem to litter the city centre depicting very naked (like meat and two veg naked) people, death and one with fountains sprinkling forth from women’s nipples. They add a touch of hilarity to an otherwise sombre city. And that melancholy is not caused by Nürnburg’s recent past. It’s caused by the building material (red sandstone) that everything old round here is built from. You can do extraordinarily intricate work in stone, with pretty spirals and realistic statues. But start with dark sandstone, which gets worse with age, and you have a dour building. Make them big, as they do in Nürnburg, and they just become dourer. That’s the way it is.
But it was informative and fun and left us just enough time to stop on the Rhine, where I am now, to act and feel middle aged. The Rhine is a lovely river, full of activity, with swirling water and precipitous cliffs. It reeks of sweet wine and sauerkraut and is adorned with pretty villages and snaking roads. But it’s a middle-aged destination. And it is at this point in my travel writing career that I realise I have transmogrified into my father. Oh dear…..
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