Four German cities!

BERLIN • HAMBURG • MUNICH • DRESDEN




At the end of last year we went to Germany http://www.germany-tourism.de/ — This actually it was my birthday and Christmas present: We flew into Berlin (living in an old renovated and fantastic East Berlin apartment), then we traveled via ICE train to my hometown Hamburg where we stayed for five days, and then we took another 7 ½ h trip via ICE to Munich. Each city was different, each city was inspiring and enlightening!

Berlin, 

The new Capital combines  East and West Berlin since the wall came down in 1989 and the East is now magnificently rebuilt. It is a hip city with lots of young people strolling around on many wide avenues and this reminded me a bit of New York. It appears to me that there seems to be little attempt to hide the worst decades in German history. After the "Wall" came down, the city placed its vanished Jews near the center of its collective consciousness, maybe to reclaim international status. You are easily able to see a full array of its crime scenes. There is the Holocaust Memorial (so very impressive it is walking through huge stone slabs that form a grid ‑ reminding me of a cemetery with mass graves or coffins, digging themselves into the ground and coming up again. Very intimidating. We visited the Holocaust Museum designed by Liberman with a very confusing lay-out of; stood quietly at the place where the book burning took place, visited the newly rebuilt beautiful Synagogue (last time I saw it was all rubble). Oh, what a great huge city it is with magnificent buildings, great museums on the Museumsinsel  (museum island) not far from Alexanderplatz, the Brandenburger Tor, Unter den Linden and so many other famous sites.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Hamburg 

Well, every time I come back I like my hometown more. It’s a conservative, commercial and dignified city, and a very cultural place; made into a city in the year 800. An important seaport on the Elbe River, with old storage houses, a beautiful old quarter, big fine mansions, a huge lake in the center of town, and canals and waterways that all go into the Elbe river, it’s called the "Venice of the North" and rightly so. It’s rich and very attractive. This town was completely flattened, the biggest first fire storm devastated it completely in July 1943, burned it down for days and flattened it leaving behind a most horrible scene of human misery.  This attack killed 38,000 people and since this was not yet the end of the war many more attacks followed. But Hamburg was rebuilt long ago and is a great Northern beauty!

Munich

in Bavaria is a completely different city with a different style of houses, many of them stately and well preserved, some of them are "cute". This city had also major air raids leaving behind parts of Munich  erased and homeless and dead people. The third largest city after Berlin + Hamburg; it is a very “personal” city with a widespread park, the Englischer Garten, in the middle of town.  Everybody knows Munich for its beer gardens and the Octoberfest in the Hofbraeuhaus, something I was not interested in visiting. But you cannot help it, beer is served all over in large mugs that you think you never can finish, but you can! As in all the other cities at this time of the year you find the Christmas Markets where gifts, crafts and food is sold, and of course the “Glühwein” — hot spiced wine. It comes in pretty mugs to be returned against the two Euros that had to be pledged at purchase. People sit around in the streets, or hover over high tables drinking their beer and wine, talking, and munching delicious food from early morning to late night. I did not see a single paper or styrofoam cup in all of Germany, everybody is very serious about recycling. In the streets, garbage cans in different colors stand around like proud soldiers marked: white glass, green glass, brown glass, paper, plastic. And people use it.

Since we had  only three days in Munich we had to use our time well; the first day we went sightseeing, but were also sitting in beautiful cafes drinking wine or beer and eating good food. We walked around to catch as many historical sites as possible, first taking one of these sightseeing hop-on hop off buses and than walking around until we couldn't do it anymore.  On the second day we took a trip by train to Dachau, the concentration camp near Garmisch (and a very sobering trip of course but we were glad that we included it). On the third day,  we ventured into the Alps and visited Ludwig II’s Neuschwanstein Castle, a fantasy castle high in the mountains. And it also involved some walking up there. Great!           

I talked to many people in Germany; i.e. the cab driver who came from Vietnam and told me that he lived there for 10 years, had three kids in school and did not have to pay for their education. A small exception was his oldest son who will go to the University for 500 Euros per semester. Just one example of social services in Germany. Everybody has health insurance, imagine, you can go to the dentist whenever you “please”. There is lots of complaining also, the taxes are high and so is unemployment. But you are paid for a full year or longer once you loose your job, vacation time starts with six weeks, there is an extra salary in summer (to pay for your vacation!) and a bonus at Christmas time. It all did not at all sound bad to me. You travel by train, bus, subway, and trolley easily and we did not need a car at all. 

Dresden

We did not visit Dresden. I had been there a good ten years ago and I think this city belongs into this group. I recently opened the New York Magazine and discovered this great article about the new Dresden! This city was flattened by the Allies in 1945 and devastated by the most horrible fire storm that lasted many days. Dresden was located in East Germany and the government was too poor to rebuild more than just a few of the historic buildings. But in the past two decades after the fall of the Wall most of the city center — the great churches, the Semper Oper, the Albertinum Museum, the Zwinger, the royal palace  — have been restored and Dresden on the Elbe is now again a real Baroque fantasia. My last visit was before the wall came down and discovered then that the famous Frauenkirche and the whole historical city was still in ruins. To my astonishment everything is rebuilt now and breathtakingly beautifully restored. The Frauenkirche with its great dome stands there as if nothing ever happened. The façade incorporates some of the burned bricks of the original church and that gives it a strange appearance. The cupola’s Biblical frescos are reproduced so bright that they looked cartoonish — so some people say  — but the rebuilding of the Frauenkirche was important. I probably will like it a lot once I go there!

I had read that of Dresden’s prewar Jewish population of 6,000 only 198 survived, but Dresden’s Jews are hardly remembered here! A new synagogue has been rebuilt but in a contemporary style. That's it — in contrast to Berlin! But it is a great place with all these old "new" landmark towers, the "Schloss", the cobblestones!

I read many books about the holocaust and the subsequent destruction of Germany and the following books left a lasting impression on me: On the Natural History of Destruction by G.W. Sebald, The Fire, The Bombing of Germany 1940-45, Nossack’s The End, or the Victor Klemperer diaries from 1933-45, I Bear Witness. Klemperer was a literature professor married to an “Aryan” woman and this helped him to survive. His very readable diaries are also available in English in nine volumes.
Just in case you are interested.

To see these cities now in their full glory makes it hard to imagine the complete destruction that occured not so long ago. It all looks so perfectly normal now, the whole country is perfectly restored, life has revived splendidly, the infrastructure is great and a thousand times better than it is in the US. One hundred thirtyone towns were attacked and a million tons of bombs were dropped. People must have had an enormous will to overcome obstacles to start over again. Was this only possible by instantly forgetting what had happened because it was too painful to think about it? Some people say so. I remember when I started school that the teachers did not know how to deal with all of the past, so the whole topic was just skipped. But I hear from my friends who went to school a few years later that instructions about this period are very intensive and not at all avoided.  And I always will remember that in the case of Germany the "reconstruction" was only accomplished with the great help of the Americans — the Marshall Plan, the Air Lifts.

I of course got carried away here; all I had in mind was to write about the three visits to Berlin, Hamburg, Munich and ended up with four cities! It was a good trip, short and memorable forever.