24 June 2016
I woke up with the same breathless feeling in my belly that I get when it’s Christmas or my Birthday – ‘today we are going to Munich!’
We left the hotel early and got the train to the Munchen Hbf (Hauptbahnhof), I left the train laughing at a man whose sigh sounded like the billow of a steam engine. Munich’s Hbf reminded me of London Liverpool Street Station, but cleaner and more organised.
We took the S bahn (Stadtschnellbahn, or city rapid railway) to Nat’s home. Her house is very airy and bright and clean, with touches of warmth and personality, like how she keeps her father’s shoes in the hallway as a deterrent to burglars, and the decorative letters ‘L O V E’ above the fridge, which she has rearranged into ‘VOEL’ – the first four letters of her surname! Nat told me a German word – Erholung, a feeling of rejuvenation and recovery, a feeling she has upon returning to a place that has taken on the strange mantle of home.
We walked to REWE, and picked up a few things, like salad for lunch and Kartofel Weckerl – potato bread. It tastes like a more sophisticated and well thought through version of a chip butty.
I promptly and undeniably fell in love.
We put our groceries back at home, and went for a tour of Munich, getting caught in a train delay (we sat across from a passenger who looked so frustrated that we christened him ‘angsty guy’), but still managed to join the tour as it listened to the 43 chiming bells and watched the 32 moving life-sized figures of the Rathaus-Glockenspiel in Marienplatz, dating from 1908. It enacts two 16th century tales – the marriage of Duke Wilhelm V to Renata of Lorraine, complete with a jousting ceremony in their honour, and the Schäfflertanz (coopers' dance), a dance that symbolises the loyalty and support of the coopers to their duke despite the plague of 1517.
Munich is often bypassed for Berlin in the North when it comes to culture and history (largely because of the well-known Berlin Wall), but that’s because Munich does not proclaim loudly about the wealth of heritage it has. The Bavarians seem a humble, practical people who see history as ‘what has happened’. It remains with them, as part of daily life, woven into buildings, culture and festivals, but you won’t see tourist signs pointing you to the place where Hitler tried to over throw the government or a plaque describing the beginnings of Oktoberfest, since those locations and festivals are still in use today, adapted seamlessly into their culture. In fact, one of the most incredible and courageous stories I’d heard over the whole trip was in Munich, but the city only remembers it with a small strip of golden cobblestones amidst the black ones, easily passed over as you walk down the street, Viscardigasse.
What happened at Viscardigasse was this: In 1923, when Hitler led his abortive Beer Hall Putsch (which began in the Old Town Hall which still stands in Munich), it ended in a skirmish beside Felderrnhalle, where Hitler was arrested and 16 Nazi marchers died. Following his rise to power, Hitler ordered that anyone passing by Feldherrnhalle should perform the Hitlergruß (Nazi salute), stationing officers there to ensure compliance. To avoid honouring the deaths of Nazis or glorifying Hitler’s power, Munich residents would take a longer route through Viscardigasse alley, ensuring they would not pass Felderrnhalle. Even after Hitler, realising how people were defying him, stationed another guard in Viscardigasse, people continued to use it, at the expense of their safety.
Munich has many other quirky fables and traditions – like the story of the maypole. Each town or important place has a maypole, which is blue and white in the colours of Bavaria (called ‘the heavens of Bavaria’) and is decorated with what the place is best known for (which in the case of Munich, is lots of beer). The prevailing understanding in Munich is that if you steal another town’s maypole, they must throw you a big beer party in order to get it back. One night, the maypole from the aeroport went missing. Alarmed, and anticipating a security threat, the aeroport called the police immediately, and told them the situation. Then heard silence, then stifled laughter from the other end of the line, and discovered that it was none other than the police who had stolen their maypole!
Other interesting things Munich has in its history include:
- King Ludwig I (above), a womaniser who chose an exotic dancer over his throne, and founder of the Oktoberfest which began as a party held in honour of his Queen and was so popular that it became a festival that outlived him.
-During Oktoberfest, 1/3 of all beer made in the year is consumed!
-Beer was recognised as a basic food group, like carbohydrates or proteins, until the early 1900s
-In the Hofbrauhaus (above), the largest brewery/beer hall in Munich, it used to be very difficult to find a seat (it still is). If you needed to use the bathroom, which in the past meant going outside of the building and peeing in the street, you’d have to leave your seat and your mug of beer, and when you returned the likelihood was that someone else would be sitting in your seat and drinking out of your mug of beer! This inevitably led to lots of brawls. To ‘solve the problem’ the brewery installed troughs beneath the tables, for the men to take a casual pee, all from the comfort of their seats. But this led to splashing and more brawls. I didn’t quite catch how they really solved the problem in the end – but there are definitely toilets in the building now!
-A beer glass became a holy relic. In 1876, a thunderstorm made the golden cross on the spire of the Church of St Peter (Munich’s oldest church, built in 1150) fall off. No one in the church was brave enough to climb up at replace it, and so the church people went to a nearby Beer Hall, offered free beer all night to the man who would put it back up. One very drunk man slurred ‘I’ll do it!’, and, beer glass in one hand and golden cross in the other, climbed to the top of the spire. He fixed the cross back onto the spire, raised his beer glass in victory – and dropped it! The glass fell, but didn’t smash on the pavement below, which was regarded as a miracle, and the glass became a holy relic!
-Munich’s name comes from the German word for monk, and one of its symbols is a ‘monk child’ (above), which looks rather creepy to be honest.
After the tour, we went back to St Peters Church (the beer glass relic one) to climb it’s tower and see Munich from above. I am beginning to see why Nat loves her city so. Sometimes city views from above are disappointing, but Munich, with the intricate dark gothic mayor house at Marienplatz and the red roofed homes in the distance is both intimate and homely as well as grand. Before having lunch back in Nat’s home, we stop in a shop that has cards that have moving pictures when you tilt them, clocks that look like cars or bicycles and all other strange and wonderful scientific things, which adds to my impression that Germany is a country that is highly technically advanced.
We drove to a strawberry farm a little west of Munich, called Erdbeeren (but you pronounce it more like Aired-behn) Wolf. The sun was out, the fields were ripe and dripping with strawberries, and the owner of the strawberry fields, upon hearing we were there to pick strawberries, said in mock astonishment ‘No way!’
We got a basket, and joined the other gleaners in the fields. We quickly learnt from the other gleaners that one big part of picking strawberries – is eating strawberries! The strawberries were lovely and sweet, and brought me back to childhood, where wheat stalks would tower over my head and the clover was cups of sweetness to suck and to pick a strawberry was to find a ruby in the dirt, its gem juice on my mud-stained fingers. With a basket full of strawberries, we weighed and paid, and then drove to Schloss Nymphenburg.
The gardens of Schloss Nymphenburg are magical, with statues of mythical gods along he path in white, and white swans and geese of kinds I’d never seen before, flowers blooming and all so wonderful that the beauty of the castle itself was almost forgotten to me! Schloss Nymphenburg is the birthplace of King Ludwig II, a dreamer who went on the build another fairy tale castle, the beautiful Schloss Neuschwanstein. We sat on a bench, near a guy who reminded us so much of Lajoc from Naples, and watched as the sprinklers came on, watering the parched ground and making rainbows in the sunlight.
Back in Nat’s place, we made the most of its homeliness by doing laundry, making our own dinners (not museli this time!) of sweet potatoes and vegetables, and watching Jumanji while eating granola and cornflakes drenched in sweet hazelnut milk.
25 June 2016
Before breakfast, we went for a run round Hirshgarten, the deer garden and beer garden right behind Nat’s place. I can now say I’ve been in the oldest beer hall and the largest beer garden in Munich – and still haven’t touched a drop of the stuff! We also met some deer, which were unalarmed at our presence, and snuffled up the grass I passed through the fence.
Back in her place, we indulged in banana nice cream, which neither of us had had for a long time. Strawberry, maple peanut butter, and vanilla flavoured nice cream, pure bliss. We put our granola on top as well as other nice things Nat keeps in her cupboard, making our bowls as beautiful as possible. Then we took some pictures of them, and ate them before they melted. Our second bowls weren’t as eye-inspiring, but were just as tasty!
We drove to Dachau concentration camp memorial site next (not without stopping for more kartofel weckerl) We stepped through the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ (Work sets you free) metal gates into a glaring courtyard. It is bigger than I anticipated (although I must admit I had no way of conceiving a concentration camp in my head at all) and most of the huts that the prisoners lived in have been torn down, only their foundations left as a skeleton reminder of their past.
We rented an audio-guide, and I listened to the recounted experience of someone who was present at the camp liberation. ‘And for what? For what reason?’ she said, angrily, a question that resounded in my head. I was so angry, so sad, seeing the crematorium where they burnt the dead, with sometimes up to 6 people in an oven at a time. The air in there felt so still and heavy, but just outside the window were white, feathery seedlings drifting through the air, wafting, floating, and we both stood there. ‘They look like their souls,’ Nat said.
Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence.
We went into a church built for remembrance, built without any right angles, and anti-thesis to the harsh, cruel nature and symbol of the Nazi order and the corners of the buildings of the rest of the camp. I felt like I needed to pray, and so I sat down and slipped my off my shoulder, the string of the audioguide off from around my neck.
I needed to pray for the souls of the place, the healing of the German people and the people affected by the war and the healing of humanity, which did allow and still does allow such bestial acts of cruelty. I needed to pray for my own heart, which has been unkind and judgmental and unloving, the same seeds of sin that grew into the ugly weeds of fascism. My heart broke when I prayed – first because it all seemed to overwhelming; man’s cruelty and degeneracy, and then it broke at the love of God for us. This crazy love which weeds out our spoiled hearts, which listens and gives us hope, which holds forgiveness deeper than the ocean. Written on the wall of the church were these words in German:
From the depths I have cried out to you, O Lord;
Lord, hear my voice. Let your ears be attentive
to the voice of my supplication.
If you, Lord, were to mark iniquities, who, O Lord, shall stand?
But with you is forgiveness, that you may be revered. I trust in the Lord;
My soul trusts in his word.
My soul waits for the Lord,
more than watchmen wait for the dawn. More than watchmen wait for the dawn, let Israel hope in the Lord.
For with the Lord there is mercy, and with him is plenteous redemption.
The Museum at Dachau was full of stories, and full also of the unspoken understanding that there were so many stories left unsaid, irretrievable. Dachau, though built to hold 6000 prisoners, held around 32,000 by 1945, with 400 men squeezed into bunks meant for 50. They came from 26 countries, men and women, Jews and political opponents and homosexuals and priests, gypsies and foreigners and Jehovah’s witnesses and conscientious objectors… So many of them, and yet they were told, when they entered, ‘You are without rights, dishonourable and defenceless. You’re a pile of shit and that is how you’re going to be treated.’
So many humans. So many colours. They keep triggering inside me. They harass my memory. I see them tall in their heaps, all mounted on top of each other. There is air like plastic, a horizon like setting glue. – The Book Thief
I keep using phrases from books to describe what I saw, how I felt, because it is difficult for me to come up with the words on my own and I need the crutches of fiction and feeling to help. The prisoners of Dachau also used literature to help preserve themselves – ‘more than anything it was poetry that was capable of giving back to the prisoners the sensitivity and remaining humanity that they sought to preserve’.
We drove away from Dachau towards Starnbergersee. Dachau had been blue skies and sun, but as we neared Starnbergersee, we saw dark clouds louring, ahead of us, hanging in the air with their bellies out like cloud bath tubs. It was so windy when we got out of the car that within 5 minutes both of us had got something in our eye! ‘This is actually quite scary,’ Nat said, and I agreed. It was almost like a Studio Ghibli film where a theme park turns into a spirit world… We walked for a while until we felt the first splashes of rain, whereupon we ran back to the car, getting in safely just before it began bucketing down.
We drove home along the highway, the cars in front of us flicking plumes of rain water up, and stopped by REWE for last minute groceries. There, we encountered a group of rowdy Polish football fans, who shouted and whooped through the store. ‘Idiots,’ our cashier said softly to us, glancing at them as the chanted and bought more beer than they evidently needed.
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