Astray in Europe
or: A Couple of Naïfs Take a Trip
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“Here, the visitor finds nothing but rock and bronze -- hard and black as war itself.” |
ON the next morning, when we pulled the drapes to view our panorama of Munich's office and apartment buildings, lowery skies greeted us. But the light still flooded through the huge window of our sixth floor room and gave us a spark. We needed it because we were in our third week of travel, and the effort was beginning to wear on us.
On this day, we would take our second guided walking tour, this time focusing on the Nazi era. Spending a day with the Nazis wasn't something we had particularly planned to do, but of all the hundreds of things a tourist can do in Munich, this tour happened to be the one that seemed right for us at this time. And it turned out to be both interesting and enlightening, if somewhat depressing since it focused on a very ugly time.
The tour would start at 3:00 o'clock, so in the mean time, we hoped to tick a few chores off our list of things that had to be done. Most importantly, we needed to reserve train seats both to Frankfurt for the next day and from there to Calais a couple of days later. We expected to take a night train for the long hop to Calais because we wanted to save the daylight hours for sightseeing. The timing would be fairly critical because we hoped to arrive in Calais on the day our Eurailpasses would expire. If we ran over, we would have to pay for any distance we traveled after midnight of that day. Therefore, we needed to make our reservations as far in advance as we could so as to get the schedule we wanted.
Another chore was to disburden ourselves of guidebooks and maps of Rome, ticket stubs, receipts, souvenir gifts, etc., by sending another "care package," as we called them, to ourselves at home. Of less immediate urgency, but still important, was the need to buy some gifts. At this stage -- more than halfway through our trip -- we had bought very few. Finally, time permitting, we hoped to visit a cybercafé and check our email.
We dumped the stuff we wanted to ship into a plastic bag, and after another hearty breakfast in the hotel breakfast room, set out for a post office we had trail-marked on our first day in Munich. On the way, we stopped at an ATM to replenish the cash I had lost to the Roman pickpocket. (See Chapter 6). The ATMs in France and Rome had limited us to 250 euros per visit, but the Germans weren't so parsimonious. They allowed 500, and since I was tired of worrying about running short and quite sure I wouldn't lose any more big bills (Minnie would have to carry them because bills of 50 euros and higher were too wide for my money clip), I punched for the max. Minnie wasn't really too cool with that. She reminded me that we had only a few more days in Euro country, so we needed to minimize the cash we were carrying. Too late, though. I had already pressed the button.
Minnie patiently folded the wad of fifties into her purse, and we continued to the post office, which at a little before 9:00 o'clock was not very busy. As we expected, there was a showcase full of shipping supplies for sale. We chose a box that seemed to be about the right size for our purposes, and approached the nearest free clerk to ask for one. After confirming with her that we could conduct our business in English, I started to explain which box we wanted. She interrupted me somewhat gruffly to tell me to identify it by code number. So I returned to the display case, found the number, and with this magic token was able to move her to fetch a folded up version of the box from a back room.
I asked her if we could pack it and ship it right there. We had done this in France, and the French postal clerk had been very forthcoming and helpful. He even had helped us pack our stuff and sealed the box for us. This German clerk was less effusive. With a disapproving frown, she handed me a form to fill out, and as I struggled with that, Minnie started putting the box together. Unable to read the German instructions, she didn't get it quite as plumb as the clerk deemed necessary. "Ne, ne, ne!" the clerk said, eloquently expressing both her impatience and the advanced state of the ennui that must have been afflicting her that gloomy morning. She took the box and, with a few quick manipulations, had it assembled all true and square. We dumped our precious paper trail and other detritus into it; she sealed it up; and we coughed up 29 euros and change. As we left we were more than confident that while the package might go through some Byzantine protocols, it would leave Germany precisely on schedule.
With the package mailed, we went gift shopping along Neuhauserstrasse, through the Karlsplatz, and toward the Marienplatz. Since shopping, even in exotic foreign boutiques, quickly drains both of us physically and spiritually, we tried to pace ourselves. We recharged physically by drinking plenty of water and spiritually by resting near every fountain in the discreet warmth of the coy Teutonic sun. By noon we had managed to pick up a few compact items that would fit into our luggage, were nice but not too expensive, and (we hoped) would please our kids, grandkids, and friends.
Fountain in Neuhauserstrasse.
We returned to the hotel to deposit our purchases, then went to the station to make train reservations. The lines at the ticket windows were short, the wait brief, and there was no "take-a-number" system. The clerk at our window was a charmingly plump and blonde young lady who spoke excellent English. We told her our plans, and as I handed her our Eurailpass, I pointed out that we absolutely had to arrive in Calais on July 14 because that was the last day the passes would be valid. She punched her keyboard and studied her monitor and issued our tickets to Frankfurt. That would be a pretty straightforward three-and-half-hour jaunt. But the night train to Calais was a different matter altogether. The clerk reported it would take twenty hours. We were appalled. The very idea of twenty hours in the cramped quarters of a night train made our backs ache. Besides, the trip from Paris to Rome, which was twice as far, had taken only about fifteen hours. And Rome to Munich, which was even further, had taken about twelve. Seeing by our expressions that we weren't hearing what we wanted to hear, the clerk did some more keyboarding. "The daytime schedule will get you there in ten hours," she said. We were puzzled, and the clerk sympathetically allowed as how the scheduling did seem a bit odd. But she had no explanation for it. Our choice was simple. At least the day trip would be in First Class.
With our tickets in hand, we went to the back of the station, found the tour company's office, paid our 20 euros (including two for the subway), and took our seats in the big waiting area as we had done the day before (see Chapter 7). Minnie picked up a newspaper that had been left on a seat, and we were looking at the pictures and trying to decipher the headlines when a young woman sat down next to her and asked if she read German. Minnie said she didn't, but she could tell from the pictures what kind of paper this one was. (It looked like the German edition of The National Enquirer.) The young woman said she had been on a bike tour with this tour company the day before. She said it was the first time she had ridden a bike in a big city, and it was "exciting" trying to manage the bike in traffic and keep up with the tour. She recommended it, but sadly, neither of us had been on a bike in several decades, and the little wisdom we had accumulated in that time included a notion that a broken bone, or even a significant contusion would probably complicate the second half of our trip. (As it was, when we got to England, I narrowly missed a serious injury, albeit not related to bicycles.)
Soon a small group consisting of a New Zealander about our age who expressed some surprise at seeing Americans traveling in Europe so soon after the twin-towers attack, a couple of college-age English girls, a family (parents, two boys eight or ten) possibly Canadian, and a couple of other individuals had assembled. Jason gave us basically the same spiel as the day before, led us through the subway system to the Marienplatz, and from there walked us to the Hofbräuhaus. The low clouds had begun to dribble a little rain, so he pulled a half dozen disposable plastic raincoats from his backpack, and with apologies for not having more, sold them at a euro each. Everyone was very polite and courtly, so children and elderly ladies got first dibs, and Minnie ended up with one.
Jason explained that after WW I, this beer garden was the place where Munich's radical community assembled to consume beer and rant political jargon at each other. By 1923 Hitler had become famous as the best rabble rouser in the whole Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers Party, the Nazis). In November of that year, public anger about the ruinous state of the German economy was intense. So one day the combination of Hitler's slick rhetoric and his delusional theories about the causes of Germany's problems got the boys at the beer hall so riled that they took to the streets. Led by the gang of thugs Hitler called his Sturmabteilung ("storm troopers," aka the SA, or more familiarly, the Brownshirts), they charged into the street believing they were about to take over the Bavarian government.
This was the "Beer Hall Putsch" of November 8-9, 1923. A unit of the Bavarian police confronted the mob; tensions rose; shots were fired; and the Nazis fled. Left in the street were the bodies of fifteen Nazis, four Bavarian cops, and one innocent bystander. Hitler jumped into a waiting car and ducked into a prepared hideaway, but he was soon sniffed out and clapped into the slammer for the next few months.
That was the good news. The bad news was he whiled away the idle hours writing Mein Kampf (the title can be variously translated: My Struggle, My Fight, My Battle, etc.) in which he congealed his mad delusions into what soon would become Nazi dogma. The book was so long and the style so clunky that few people outside Germany (and evidently not many inside) read it. But those who have read it since, including some of today's radical right-wing kooks who take it as some sort of latter day revelation, say it's a pretty straightforward schema of Nazi fascism as it played out after 1923.
From the Hofbräuhaus we walked to the Bavarian State Chancellery, which is at the eastern edge of the Hofgarten in the rebuilt remains of a building that once housed the Bavarian Army Museum. (We had visited the Hofgarten the previous day on Jason's guided tour of Munich's cultural resources. See Chapter 7.) All that's left of the former museum is a domed section from which long wings once extended on each side. The wings were completely destroyed and the center section seriously damaged by Allied bombing in 1944 and 1945. The building wasn't restored and put to its present use till 1993. Actually, only the center portion was restored. The wings were replaced with glass-and-steel structures that look like gigantic greenhouses.
Some who claim to know about esthetics and such say this design symbolizes the openness of the government business going on inside. The official Chancellery web site (LINK) effuses: "The panoramic lift in a glass cylinder also stands for circumspection, far-sightedness and transparency." (By "cylinder," the writer probably means the rounded roofs of the greenhouses.) We thought there was something strange about jamming two barrel-topped, three-story greenhouses into the ribs of a domed neo-Renaissance edifice.
Jason talks about the Staatskanzlei behind him. You can see where WW II shrapnel took some chips out of the columns.
Jason -- common-sense son of the Illinois prairie that he was -- directed our attention to more practical matters. He talked about how air conditioning in the "greenhouses" is achieved mainly by natural means with a system of windows designed by the Munich Technical University Department of Thermodynamics. The lighting system, on the other hand, is very high-tech and designed to take advantage of natural light while rendering it glare-free. At night, a system of mirrors, reflectors, and whatnot keeps light in and prevents the glass structures from glowing on the outside like star-ship warp drives. Jason urged us to return and spend some time in the building because both the architecture and the collection of paintings and sculptures it houses are well worth the effort.
However, the only sculptures he actually showed us on this tour were two monuments in front of the Chancellery that had survived from the military museum era, and one relatively small block of black marble at the opposite end of the little park. One of the former was a 1911 equestrian statue of Duke Otto I (c. 1117-1183), founder of the Wittelsbach dynasty (see Chapter 7). The other was a war memorial erected in 1928 and updated after 1945.
Duke Otto I watches over the Munich war memorial.
Jason turned our attention to the latter, and if he hadn't done so, we could easily have missed it. From where we stood at the fetlock of Otto's horse only the top of the monument just a few yards away was visible. As we approached, however, we saw that it looked like a low pile of large blocks of brownish marble. Six of the blocks appeared to be spaced side by side, and five more on top seemed to cover the gaps between the lower blocks. They were in the center of a sunken, concrete-paved court and looked like a bunch of gigantic burial vaults stored in the back lot of a funeral home.
Munich war memorial.
Concrete steps gave access to the court, and we saw that the blocks actually formed a roof over a bunker-like lower level that could be entered via another short flight of steps between two of the blocks of marble. The interior was perhaps 12 by 18 feet, maybe a little more. The floor, like the court outside, was concrete; the low ceiling -- the underside of the massive marble blocks over us -- seemed to press with the weight of eternity. Except for a ball of crumpled paper in one corner, everything was square, smooth, hard, and clean. In the center, a life-size bronze sculpture of a WW I infantryman lay on a knee-high block of marble. The pose was similar to a medieval tomb effigy where the dead knight, or king, or whatever, lies on his back, usually in armor, often wearing a crown, his hands on his chest firmly grasping the hilt of a down-pointing sword. However, this WW I hero slept in a trench-coat, his "crown" a steel helmet. His "sword" was a rifle, the butt between his feet, the muzzle held with limp hands on his chest.
Interior of monument to Munich's war victims.
There was no white marble, and there were no plaques with lists of victorious battles or names of generals. No eternal flame. No honor guard. No flags. No reminders of Glory and Honor. The wreath that once formed a kind of halo over the soldier's head and the flowers that in 1945 bestrewed the image (see 1945 photo) are long gone. Here, the visitor finds nothing but rock and bronze -- hard and black as war itself.
1945 photo taken by a GI.
Copyright © 2000-2004: Geoffrey R. Walden. Used with permission.
On one wall, a few words, hardly noticeable, are carved into the stone with no frame or any art to call attention to them. They form a short statement honoring the dead of WW I.
"Dedicated by the Munich District of the Bavarian Association of Veterans to the city's 13,000 fallen heroes: 1914-1918"
On the opposite wall, similarly carved, an even more austere acknowledgement that there was much pain and suffering in WW II. Jason pointed out that here the wording carefully avoids references to heroism, his implication being that Munich understandably wants to downplay that dark patch in its history.
"To the memory of the 99,000 killed, 11,000 missing, and 66,000 victims of the air war over the city of Munich 1939-1945"
He didn't say anything (and we didn't think to ask at the time) about the implication that all of the 176,000 people there memorialized were killed, rendered missing, or otherwise victimized by bombing ("luftkrieg," presumably Allied). Nor did he note the little spin on the dates, "1939-1945." This implied that the bombing started in 1939 and ended when the war ended in 1945. In fact, however, Munich's first taste of the barbaric tactic of indiscriminate bombing (which, of course, was invented by Goering's Luftwaffe) was not in 1939, but in late 1944. The Allies were unable to bomb any German cities till 1942, and then they could attack only the portion of the industrialized north that was within range of British air bases. Prior to that, all victims of Luftkrieg lived outside of Germany: in Spain, North Africa, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Denmark, Norway, Holland, Belgium, France, England, Russia, etc. In 1939 (and in earlier and later years) Munich's dead and missing were Jewish professional people and shopkeepers brutalized by Hitler's thugs while most of the rest of the community stood by, afraid or indifferent.
Our next stop was a monument to a handful of young people who were not indifferent and who overcame their fear. This was a group of university students who called themselves "The White Rose." (No one knows why.) They are memorialized by the block of black marble mentioned above, which is at the opposite end of the Hofgarten from the war memorial. This subdued and inconspicuous monument is engraved on one side with a line of block letters reading "Zum erinnern zum gedenken" ("To Recall and to Commemorate"), and under that is a reproduction of a handwritten letter by one of the members of the group. These students offered the only organized resistance to Hitler at that time by mounting a leaflet campaign for a brief period in 1942-43. As naive and foolish as they were courageous, they were caught when at high noon one day two of them fluttered handfuls of secretly printed anti-Nazi leaflets from a balcony high in the atrium of a classroom building. The Gestapo (Hitler's secret police) summarily "tried" (i.e., tortured) them, and executed them in the afternoon of the morning they were arrested.
"To Recall and to Commemorate." Monument to the few who actively opposed the Nazis.
We next walked to the nearby Odeonsplatz. At one end of this large, barren public square -- which we also had visited on Jason's cultural tour the day before -- stands the Feldherrnhalle. This was where the Bavarian police brought the "Beer Hall Putsch" to its bloody end. Jason described the action, and said that after they gained control of Germany, the Nazis made the huge concrete structure their "Alamo" (although they certainly did not use that word), a place of honor for the "martyrs" who had shed their blood that the Third Reich might live. Every November from 1933 until 1944 when American bombers leveled the city's center, they packed the square with helmeted, jack-booted storm troopers, made speeches, lit symbolic torches, and saluted the Blutfahne (blood flag). (A flag bearing the swastika that supposedly had been stained by the blood of the "martyrs." Today's latter-day Nazis still venerate it, and since no one knows where it is, mythologize it as a kind of perverse "holy grail.")
Nothing now remains of the bronze plaques, engraved marble, heroic statuary, and triumphal wreaths once so dear to Hitler and his putchists. Only a few rusting bolt-ends protruding from the shrapnel-marked stone show where the Nazi gewgaws once were flaunted. Those, and -- embedded in the sidewalk next to it -- the inconspicuous twenty-inch-square plaque (photo in Chapter 7) bearing the names of the four policemen who were killed in the fracas.
In this painting from the 1930's, Der Führer salutes during a ceremony at the Feldherrnhalle. Ironically, he's standing about on the spot where today, Munich has placed its only official recognizance of that civil disturbance: a plaque honoring the four policemen who were killed putting it down. Copyright © 2000: Randall Bytwerk. Used with permission.
Next, we walked a couple of blocks along Briennerstrasse to the Platz der Opfer des Nationalsozialismus (Victims of National Socialism Square) where, on a small patch of lawn in a thriving upscale business district, there is a discreet monument to all victims of the Nazi madness. It's a stubby shaft of dark gray marble with a cage of the same marble at the top. Inside the cage, Jason said, is an eternal flame. From where we stood, we could see a saucer-shaped object that could have been a lamp, but no flame was apparent. The cage is supposed to symbolize a prison cell, the flame humankind's eternal longing for freedom from oppression.
Monument to victims of the Nazis
Nearby was a small marble slab that memorializes 50,000 Gypsies murdered by the Nazis. I don't know if they were included in, or in addition to, the 176,000 dead, missing, and victims.
As Jason was telling us all this, an elderly woman wearing a navy blue raincoat and carrying a black umbrella came along the paved walkway where we were standing and made a wide detour around us, eyes down, through the wet grass. Had she wished, she could easily have passed us without getting her shoes wet. Jason commented that the Germans aren't very fond of this square, these monuments, or the fact that some people make a point of calling attention to them. NOTE
As we moved on along Briennerstrasse, Jason called our attention to the Bavarian Landesbank building on the corner of Türkenstrasse. The bank is on land where once stood a 19th century structure called the Wittelsbach Villa. After WW I, the Villa became the headquarters of the Bavarian revolutionary government, but in 1933 the Gestapo took it over and made it the most dreaded place in Munich. That was where, for the next fifteen years, thousands of citizens were tortured and either killed or shipped to concentration camps. And that was where the members of The White Rose died. (Dachau concentration camp is just a few miles from Munich and a popular tourist attraction, but we weren't up to that.)
Farther along was a surviving building where in 1938 an organization of physicians opened the "House of German Doctors." The emphasis on "German" proclaimed the medical group's status as a "cleansed" organization. That is, it included no Jewish doctors. By that time Jews had been prohibited from practicing medicine.
A long block further west brought us to a large traffic roundabout with a 100-foot obelisk in the center that looked like a small version of the Washington Monument. Although the obelisk predates the Nazis (it was erected in 1833 in honor of Bavarian soldiers killed in Napoleon's Russian campaign), it marks one side of a four-block area that was another center of the Nazi cult.
Our tour ended near the center of this area in front of the Staatliche Hochschule für Musik (Public University of Music), which is in the former "Brown House," Hitler's personal office building. In this building England's Prime Minister Chamberlain signed the infamous treaty of 1938 which was supposed to bring "peace in our time," but which actually gave Hitler free reign to invade the Balkans and open the drain into which the whole world soon would be sucked. On the other side of a broad boulevard was another large building of similar style, also a former Nazi office building, now the Glyptothek. A few degrees to its left we could see part of the ceremonial gate called the Propylaen, and turning another few degrees to the left, the Antikensammlungen. The first and last are now two of the world's finest museums of European antiquity. All are in the neoclassical style of architecture with enormous Doric columns, limited ornamentation, no arches, and massive entablatures. Although they predate Hitler's reign, they were taken over by the Nazis who used them to symbolize their concept of themselves. They thought the allusion to classical Rome gave substance to their notion of the power and permanence of the Third Reich.
The Propylaen
Most of the buildings were built (we were but mildly surprised to learn) by Ludwig II in the mid 1800s, and the area looks now much like it did then. But in Hitler's time, Ludwig's grassy spaces were covered with granite paving stones, and when the mood was on him, Hitler would fill the place with masses of gray-uniformed, steel-helmeted troops and make patriotic speeches. He would inspire the young men to yearn for the glory of the "martyred" putchists for whom he had built two "Honor Temples," one on each side of the broad central avenue. In these sepulchers were entombed the fifteen heroes (plus the one innocent bystander who accidentally slipped into Hitler's Valhalla). With the "temples" for a backdrop, Hitler could rant for hours about his "Thousand Year Reich" while no doubt the soldiers kept themselves awake with whispered jokes.
Königsplatz in the Nazi era. The "Honor Temples" are the two smaller structures in the center. The building on the extreme left was the Brown House, now the Public University of Music. Copyright © 2000: Randall Bytwerk. Used with permission
After the Allied invasion of southern Italy in late 1943, Munich was within bomber range, and because of its symbolic significance, Königsplatz was an important target. Very likely Minnie's brother, Harry, now resting in the American cemetery in Italy, flew in the belly of one of the B-24s that pounded this place.
Although only the barely noticeable, moss-covered foundations of the "temples" remain, Ludwig's robust buildings still stand despite the American "block-busters." And they have been put to good use. Besides the music school, the Antikensammlugen, and the Glyptothek, also nearby are the Galerie im Lenbachhaus and the Kunstbau der Galerie im Lenbachhaus, a two-part museum of contemporary art.
Not in use, but still preserved simply because it would cost too much to remove it, is a massive system of subterranean chambers and passageways. According to Jason, the Nazis built and equipped it to continue operations even if the city's civil infrastructure were eradicated. It had self-contained electrical, heating, and plumbing systems; food and water storage facilities; and all else that was needed for Hitler's minions to carry on their grim business. Today, entrance to these catacombs has been completely cut off.
It was now 5:30, and we were dog tired. We asked Jason for directions and consulted our map, then walked the four or five blocks back to the Hauptbahnhof in an early dusk under threatening skies. Our route went through the Alter Botanischer Garten (Old, or Former Botanical Garden), which turned out to be a rather nice little park with many trees, shrubs, flowers, and of course, a beer garden. But since it had been raining off and on all day, the trees dripped water on us and the beer garden was deserted even though the rain had stopped.
We stopped at the train station to buy sandwiches and water, but no wine because we thought we had a bottle in our room. It had been in the room when we arrived with a price tag of 4.50 euros, and we had put it in the fridge to chill. The bottle was dark green and shaped like a white-wine bottle. The idea had flickered in the backs of our minds that it was odd that the hotel hadn't thought to chill it, but neither of us had tried to decipher the label. We realized that at that price, it could hardly have been a gran cru, especially since it had a screw-on cap. But at home, we often make do with cheap wine with screw-on caps and didn't think much about it. We had tucked the bottle into the fridge as an emergency backup.
This rainy evening, our third and last in Munich, was close enough to an emergency to warrant opening it. I fetched it from the fridge and with a practiced hand twisted the cap off as beads of condensation formed on its chilly surface. As I poured a bit into each of our plastic toothbrush cups, we noticed how crystal clear the deliciously gurgling liquid was. It was as clear as mountain spring water, which, by taste and careful scrutiny of the label, we determined it did indeed proclaim itself to be. So there we were, all set for a little picnic, and no wine. There was beer in the fridge, but we weren't in the mood for beer, especially at hotel prices. With no better option, I got dressed (we had changed from our damp clothes to pajamas) and trudged back to the Bahnhof to buy some real wine. Fortunately, by this time we had found a short-cut, so I was back in only a few minutes. We ate and drank and turned in, satisfied with another good day. As for the cybercafé, that would have to await another opportunity.