Until my visit to Munich, all I had seen of Germany on the ground was its airports, which I have transited many times over the years. From the air, Germany was mountains, greenery, farm fields, rivers, highways, and red-tiled roofs. From my childhood it was dwarves, dark and tangled forests, child-eating ogres, witches, candy houses, colorful beersteins, castles, and magic spells. A four-and-a-half-hour train ride from Wiener World, Munich in particular drew me because of its outstanding art galleries, beer halls, and Nazi past. In addition to having a chance to blend and integrate all my earlier impressions, I would be able to move in a single day from the sublime to the raucous to the horrible. While Linda was back in the States for the birthday celebration for her amazing, wonderful mother, and while I had built-in cat-sitters in the form of my visiting dear friend and ex-wife and her friend Dave, the time was right.
Despite the gray skies, cool temperatures, and occasional showers, Munich was jumping--more than Vienna's inner city, I thought. Vienna has a large, bustling pedestrian zone in its center, but Munich's seemed even larger and more crowded. The mix of people seemed different, too, with many more youth--lots of backpackers--and large numbers of Arabs and Africans. People-watching alone could have filled my days and evenings in the city. However, church visits and then a beer hall occupied my first afternoon. The next day I devoted to art galleries, and the next to a tour of Dachau and walks through city parks and a view of the Isar River.
The great art in Munich was far beyond what I had expected. I found four surprisingly rich art galleries with works from medieval to Renaissance to modern. I spent the entire day in the galleries strolling and gazing until my back, calves, and arches would no longer let me, and I began to envy the mobile handicapped on what may have been a day that the galleries had specially designated for them. In one museum more than a dozen people in wheelchairs rolled by, the rubber wheels on the wooden floors sounding like duct tape being stripped off a roll--an atonal symphony that complemented the modern art in particular. Although I normally do not spend nearly so much time with modern art as I do with each of the earlier periods, I did come across a number of recent works that I found myself getting lost in. Chief among those was Alex Katz's "Cityscape," a scene of a forest at night, silhouettes of tangled branches and trees faintly touched by white, like snow, and amorphous blobs of light--what might have been streetlights in the woods. The image of city-wilderness vaguely evoked fear of the unknown, of what is the wilderness in our civilized environment. Or perhaps it was just my awareness that I was in the city where Hitler had incubated his ideas....
Two evenings I had fine dining in the Augustiner and Hofbräu beer halls. The first was marginally saner than the second, which had more tour groups and more noise, and which is more well known because it is where Hitler got his start, orating to the masses. The beer halls were fun: wooden plank tables like picnic tables, some large enough to accommodate at least a dozen persons, were tightly arranged throughout plain, well-lit, cavernous rooms; the main decorations were deer antlers and heads of other ruminants large and small, suggesting that the halls had their origins in ancient hunting lodges--man caves, where in days gone by an orator might appeal to primitive passions. Strangers sat with other strangers, singly and in groups. The conversation volume was high, as was the air of conviviality, and the clatter of tableware and 1-liter beer mugs added to the lively cacophony. The menus listed mostly sausage and other pork delights, potatoes, sauerkraut, and dumplings; drinkers outnumbered diners by more than two to one. Although no one was orating hate speech, a table with a dozen drunken, fist-banging, table-slapping, chanting, shouting Brits managed to drive out a Japanese tour group seated nearby.
Although nothing compares with the Baroque churches of Rome, Munich has some fine ones. The most fun of the lot for me was the a church erected by the Asam brothers, who were architects and church builders. They made their own church like a showroom for prospective customers, covering every square centimeter with a bizarre array of cupids and gold pediments, of statuary, entablature, painting, fluting, and curlicues. A Baroque orgasm--with even a supine corpse on display in a glass box on the altar.
Dachau. I doubt that I shall ever get beyond cognitive numbness in my struggle to understand how Nazi Germany's leaders managed to enroll so many people in perpetrating--and others in pretending to ignore--the Holocaust. My decision to take a tour of Dachau, just outside Munich, did not bring me much further in my effort to grasp the event. Although much of what is now present is reconstructed, it is ample to evoke the enormity. I missed the chance to read the numerous posters displaying quotations from SS officers, townspeople, and survivors because our guide--a young man who seemed passionate about learning and teaching the history of the Hitler years--spent most of the tour bloviating about his own understanding of morality, religion, and human nature. At the end of the tour, as he puffed on his cigarette, with no sense of bemusement or irony he pointed out that smoking was permitted in all the outside areas of the camp except in front of the crematorium. His tutorial lasted so long that we missed our train back to Munich, and we returned to the city illegally using local public transportation. I wished that he would instead have used a beer hall for his oration so that I might have learned something more of Dachau.
Despite the gray skies, cool temperatures, and occasional showers, Munich was jumping--more than Vienna's inner city, I thought. Vienna has a large, bustling pedestrian zone in its center, but Munich's seemed even larger and more crowded. The mix of people seemed different, too, with many more youth--lots of backpackers--and large numbers of Arabs and Africans. People-watching alone could have filled my days and evenings in the city. However, church visits and then a beer hall occupied my first afternoon. The next day I devoted to art galleries, and the next to a tour of Dachau and walks through city parks and a view of the Isar River.
The great art in Munich was far beyond what I had expected. I found four surprisingly rich art galleries with works from medieval to Renaissance to modern. I spent the entire day in the galleries strolling and gazing until my back, calves, and arches would no longer let me, and I began to envy the mobile handicapped on what may have been a day that the galleries had specially designated for them. In one museum more than a dozen people in wheelchairs rolled by, the rubber wheels on the wooden floors sounding like duct tape being stripped off a roll--an atonal symphony that complemented the modern art in particular. Although I normally do not spend nearly so much time with modern art as I do with each of the earlier periods, I did come across a number of recent works that I found myself getting lost in. Chief among those was Alex Katz's "Cityscape," a scene of a forest at night, silhouettes of tangled branches and trees faintly touched by white, like snow, and amorphous blobs of light--what might have been streetlights in the woods. The image of city-wilderness vaguely evoked fear of the unknown, of what is the wilderness in our civilized environment. Or perhaps it was just my awareness that I was in the city where Hitler had incubated his ideas....
Two evenings I had fine dining in the Augustiner and Hofbräu beer halls. The first was marginally saner than the second, which had more tour groups and more noise, and which is more well known because it is where Hitler got his start, orating to the masses. The beer halls were fun: wooden plank tables like picnic tables, some large enough to accommodate at least a dozen persons, were tightly arranged throughout plain, well-lit, cavernous rooms; the main decorations were deer antlers and heads of other ruminants large and small, suggesting that the halls had their origins in ancient hunting lodges--man caves, where in days gone by an orator might appeal to primitive passions. Strangers sat with other strangers, singly and in groups. The conversation volume was high, as was the air of conviviality, and the clatter of tableware and 1-liter beer mugs added to the lively cacophony. The menus listed mostly sausage and other pork delights, potatoes, sauerkraut, and dumplings; drinkers outnumbered diners by more than two to one. Although no one was orating hate speech, a table with a dozen drunken, fist-banging, table-slapping, chanting, shouting Brits managed to drive out a Japanese tour group seated nearby.
Although nothing compares with the Baroque churches of Rome, Munich has some fine ones. The most fun of the lot for me was the a church erected by the Asam brothers, who were architects and church builders. They made their own church like a showroom for prospective customers, covering every square centimeter with a bizarre array of cupids and gold pediments, of statuary, entablature, painting, fluting, and curlicues. A Baroque orgasm--with even a supine corpse on display in a glass box on the altar.
Dachau. I doubt that I shall ever get beyond cognitive numbness in my struggle to understand how Nazi Germany's leaders managed to enroll so many people in perpetrating--and others in pretending to ignore--the Holocaust. My decision to take a tour of Dachau, just outside Munich, did not bring me much further in my effort to grasp the event. Although much of what is now present is reconstructed, it is ample to evoke the enormity. I missed the chance to read the numerous posters displaying quotations from SS officers, townspeople, and survivors because our guide--a young man who seemed passionate about learning and teaching the history of the Hitler years--spent most of the tour bloviating about his own understanding of morality, religion, and human nature. At the end of the tour, as he puffed on his cigarette, with no sense of bemusement or irony he pointed out that smoking was permitted in all the outside areas of the camp except in front of the crematorium. His tutorial lasted so long that we missed our train back to Munich, and we returned to the city illegally using local public transportation. I wished that he would instead have used a beer hall for his oration so that I might have learned something more of Dachau.
The next morning I was back on the train to Vienna, heading past mountains, greenery, farm fields, rivers, highways, and red-tiled roofs--and the dwarves, dark and tangled forests, child-eating ogres, witches, candy houses, colorful beersteins, and castles.
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