Germany GermanyEli spoke at the Fifth Saarbrücken Conference on Foreign Language Teaching at the end of October this year. We spent a few days before and after the conference in Germany.
Here's a one minute sampling of train travel in Germany.
Nürnberg, or Nuremberg in English, is an ancient town, first noted in the records in 1050 A.D. It was 90% destroyed in WWII bombings, but the jigsaw rubble was subsequently put back together again. From the huge churches to the city walls, I'd say they did an excellent job of reconstruction.
Here is Eli as we were walking back from the Albrecht Dürer Haus to our hotel near the Hauptmarkt (main market square).
Here is a shot of Albrecht's place. It's now a museum of sorts, and you can see reconstructions of his workshop and the tools he would have used for wood block and copper plate prints. I've been a fan of Dürer for a long time, mainly for his watercolors. He is regarded as the German Leonardo di Vinci.
Albrecht Dürer, in the bronze, if not in the flesh.
Here are some streets shots of Nürnberg. The Hauptmarkt and a couple of blocks south of it.
This was probably our favorite German restaurant of the whole trip, half a block from the hotel.
the Pegnitz river runs through the city.
The vendors in the main market square (Hauptmarkt) shutting down on a Saturday night. The large church is Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady).
Here is the Schönen Brunnen (Beautiful Fountain) monument in the Hauptmarkt, and a detail from a section of it.
Here's a another fountain, Tugendbrunnen, just off the side of the square in the street scene video below. This one was actually founting. As the guidebook says: "The "Fountain of Virtue" dates back to the Renaissance in 1589. Six virtues (faith, love, hope, courage, moderation, and patience) embody their trait as chubby cherubs are caught in flight overhead.""
A short street-scene video:
The faint accordian music you hear in the background of the above video clip was provided by this woman. She was pretty good.
Here's a shady character hanging out by the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.
The museum was really good. A lot of fascinating artifacts. Nuremberg is not a big town, and this is one of the main attractions cited in the guide books. It was not at all crowded, though. When we told the taxi driver where we wanted to go, he asked us for a street address. Failing to get one from us, he had to look up the address on his iPhone.
Here are just a few interesting items from the Germanisches Nationalmuseum.
Tile stoves were a technological innovation in the 1400's and are still popular today, evidently. Several were represented in the museum.
In an age when few were literate, a bas-relief was worth more than a thousand words. These "booklets," about the size of a mass market paperback, were carved out of ivory (and one enhanced with gold-leaf). They could be consulted to remind the faithful of biblical stories.
Heavy armor, medieval style
The lances these knights carried were so heavy that supports for them were built into the armor.
I thought this wood carving was pretty impressive.
Angels, anyone?
Saarbrücken is not a major town. In fact, you can't take a direct train from Frankfurt to Saarbrücken -- you have to switch over to a local commuter train in Mannheim. [Correction: turns out you can take a direct train, just not at the time we wanted to.] The train trip was going to take longer than we originally had hoped, and we had a conference dinner to attend at 7:00 pm, so it was a little tight.
We had about 7 minutes to get from the track our Frankfurt train arrived at to the track for the commuter train. So, we got our suitcases ready before the train stopped, and hopped to it. Unfortunately, in my haste, I took a wrong turn, and we went up the stairs to the wrong track.
We hurried on in search of the right track, and boarded the train there just before it left the station.
Once we got situated, I checked the monitor in the back of the car. It listed all the stops, and the time we were going to get there. Saarbrücken was not on the list. "This is the wrong train," I said. "Are you sure?" Eli said. I checked my watch, and our train wasn't even supposed to leave the station for another couple of minutes. "Yeah, I'm sure. This is the wrong train."
We disembarked at the first stop and asked a guy on the platform. I showed him our ticket and asked if this was the right train. "No," he said. "The train you want is the next one coming in."
So, we got on the right train on the second try.
The conference was in this buiding.
Brücken means "bridges." The Saar is a river. Put the two together.
The heart of Berlin: the Brandenburg Gate
If you look closely, you'll see a strange visitor there.
Remember when the German army marched through the Arch d' Triumph in Paris in WWII?
There was a precedent.
Here's what Neil MacGregor says in Germany: Memories of a Nation:
The Brandenburg Gate stands at the western end of the long avenue Unter den Linden (Under the Lime Trees), which, rather like the Champs-Elysées in Paris, runs from the edge of the city down to its very heart.
At the end of the avenue, closing the vista, was the Stadtschloss, the palace of the Hohenzollern kings. Some time after the Gate was built, a bronze figure of Victory, her chariot drawn by four horses, was placed on top, giving it the appearance of a triumphal arch. The first person actually to use it for a triumphal entry was not, however, the King of Prussia, but Napoleon Bonaparte.
After the defeat of Austria at the Battle of Austerlitz in December 1805, the only German state still offering serious resistance to the invader was Prussia. But on 14 October of the following year, Napoleon humiliatingly routed the Prussian army at the battles of Jena and Auerstädt. Two weeks later, on 27 October 1806, the French emperor entered Berlin in triumph, leading his troops through the Brandenburg Gate, marching them down Unter den Linden towards the palace of the king. The royal family fled to the eastern city of Königsberg (now Kaliningrad), where they began to plan Prussia's survival and recovery. Berlin was abandoned to French occupation. Napoleon, eager to demonstrate that his authority was now absolute and the Prussian king powerless in his own capital, removed the bronze quadriga from the top of the Gate and carried it away as a trophy, to be exhibited as war booty in Paris. For eight years the Brandenburg Gate was without its crowning sculpture.
.... In 1813, Prussian and Russian troops together forced Napoleon out of Berlin, and pursued him and his army all the way to Paris. In 1814, to scenes of public jubilation, the quadriga returned to the Brandenburg Gate. It was, however, modified before being reinstated. In the bronze chariot you see today, the statue of Victory is accompanied by the Prussian eagle, and her lance proudly bears the Iron Cross, the decoration awarded by the King of Prussia to those who had fought with valour against the French invader.
Just a bloc from the hotel was the famous Bebleplatz.
Here again is Neil MacGregor:
On 10 May 1933, just over three months after Hitler was appointed German Chancellor, a group of Nazi students -- egged on by Joseph Goebbels, the Minister for Popular Enlightenment and Propaganda -- organized a bonfire of books that were considered "un-German" -- incompatible with Nazi ideals. Similar bonfires were lit at the same time in university towns across Germany. ...
The bonfire was held on what is now Bebelplatz, a square in the centre of Berlin, and in the middle of Bebelplatz there is now a memorial: a large glass plate set in the cobbles. Through it, far below street level, one can see rows of bookshelves, bare, white and empty, enough to accommodate the roughly 20,000 books burnt that day. The conflagration was an arresting, unforgettable opening to the Nazi campaign to redefine what was and was not German, the start of a process designed to purify all German culture and rid the Nazi state of art that was deemed threatening -- or, to use their word, entartet, "degenerate." It is an event which lives in the German memory as a moment of high shame. Beside the memorial on the Bebelplatz is inscribed Heine's famous and prophetic remark of 1821: "This was merely a prelude: where they burn books, they end up burning people too."
Berlin was just a beautiful city.
Here is Fredrich dem Grossen, or Frederick the Great, mounted in the middle of Unter den Linden.
There were several fascinating museums on Berlin's Museumsinsel, Museum Island. We especially liked the Neues Museum and the Pergamon Museum.
The 19th century was a golden age of archeology. Heinrich Schliemann, for example, was obsessed with Homer's Troy and eventually (1868) discovered it. Here are some artifacts from Troy.
We didn't get to see much of Troy, though. The plaque in the museum explained:
Schliemann discovered a total of 17 treasures of jewellery, weapons, and vessels. He ascribed the most importaint find, comprising a total of 8,830 objects to the legendary King Priam himself. Schliemann had the treasure take secretly to Athens, resulting in legal proceedings and his being required to pay a compensation of 10,000 gold francs to the Ottoman Empire. He in fact handed over three times this sum, which meant that the finds became legally his property.
In 1945, the bulk of the Trojan treasures were taken as booty to the former Soviet Union, where most of them are held to this day in breach of international law.
One fascinating exhibit included excavations from Babylon. Here is a model of a main enterance to the city.
And a partial reconstruction in the museum.
Again, per a plaque in the museum:
Built during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II (604- 562 BC)
The Procession Street of Babylon which served as the northern enterance to the city, and during the New Year festival as a cultic route, ran through the Ishtar gate leading through the inner city to the Marduk sanctuary and ending at the bridge across the Eurphrates.
Only the 250 m long section running between the high walls of the palace and the fortifications was thoroughly excavated by the German archeological mission 1899 - 1917....
Within this part, a 180 m long section on both walls can be proven to have been decorated on opposite sides with colored reliefs of lions, the sacred animal of the goddess Ishtar. In the museum, only a relatively short section of the wall, 30 m long and 8 m wide, was reconstructed using the original fragments. The original width of the processional street was 20 - 24 m.
We took the train out of the Berlin Main Station, Hauptbahnhof, to get back to the airport in Frankfurt.
After the experience of buying train tickets in the Frankfurt main station, we were anxious to avoid buying tickets in the main Berlin station. We asked at the hotel if there was someplace smaller and closer to buy the tickets and we were directed to a small train stop a couple blocks from the hotel. This was one of the only 3 or 4 situations on the trip where we had to negotiate our way with no English.
A long train ride to Frankfurt, a night in an airport hotel, and the next day we were homeward bound.
I talked to Rich on the phone after we got back and said that we changed planes in Iceland. He said, "So, Iceland is the green one, and Greenland is the icy one, right?" Yep, pretty much. (How Greenland got its name.) In parting, here are a couple of shots of Iceland and Greenland taken from the window of the airplane.
Here's where the plane was when those two shots were taken.
On the ground at Sea-Tac with Mt. Rainier looking on from a distance of about 50 miles.
4 hours of a November Seattle morning, condensed into a minute and a half.