Chapter 27: 16 days in Germany

Every single one of these blog posts feels like it’s surely the last one, now. When I started writing it, I was quite convinced it would follow the pattern of every other writing project I’ve ever attempted. A burst of early enthusiasm might produce one or two good pieces of writing, but sooner or later one would prove difficult. The words wouldn’t come, I’d start finding other things to do instead, putting it off until the next day, then the next day, then the day after until eventually having to concede that I wasn’t going to finish what I started.

I was pretty careful to foreshadow that I wouldn’t keep it up – I thought that getting out of France without throwing in the towel would be a good result – but a couple of things happened. For one, far more people are reading this than I ever expected to be interested in what one friend described as the “nerdiest, soberest Contiki tour ever”. I honestly assumed it would be read by about half a dozen people, but some posts are getting ten times as many views, which is an excellent incentive to keep writing, and injects a hint of conspicuousness to any failure to finish, too. 

If I might get away with a note of self-congratulations, I think I had a good run of form that followed me from Paris to perhaps as far as Rome, though it’s been patchy at best since. And writing is much easier when you’re bursting with things to say, whereas this second half of the trip has been more uneventful. It’s not that I actively *want* to get caught up in bus chases or wind up in hospital again, but both were much better blog fodder than anything I’ve had lately.  I’m not giving myself too many opportunities, admittedly: my activity level at this late stage isn’t exactly high.

Finishing has become important, though, and not only for fear of that conspicuous failure. I’ve somehow gotten into the last quarter of this holiday without stopping writing, and I don’t want to be George R.R. Martin: HBO isn’t going to swoop in with a TV show to pick up the story where I left off, so I’m on my own. More importantly, I want to finish for the sake of having finished, even if I end up falling over the line. So I’m going to cheat: what might have been two ‘chapters’ – good lord, what was I thinking when I called the first one a chapter? As if a travel blog isn’t self-indulgent enough – will instead be one. Just like Game of Thrones, sub-plots will be dropped, characters written out and dialogue slashed in the interests of just getting the damn thing over and done with. Maybe the one after this will be better, or maybe not, but at least there’s a chance it’ll be written if I can finish this one first.

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From Berlin I headed south to Nuremberg. It was – kinda – the imperial capital of the old Holy Roman Empire and, unlike most of Germany it – sorta/kinda – still has its historic city centre. Nuremberg got carpet-bombed just like every other major German city during the war, but they painstakingly rebuilt all the most important buildings:

I’d considered not heading out to Nuremberg’s most famous ‘attraction’, the remnants of the Nazi rally grounds, at all. I haven’t been to all that many other Nazi sites, just Auschwitz and the Topography of Terror museum in Berlin, and both are essentially monuments to victims. Nuremberg, by contrast, is where the Nazis went to celebrate, and to go there felt slightly different, an act of remembrance not for the Holocaust but for its perpetrators. They came to Nuremberg for their annual party conventions, enormous rallies for hundreds of thousands of people that stretched out for eight days, filled with war games, parades and appearances by party leaders. It all looked a little bit like this:

Nevertheless, curiosity got the better of me, and it was a jarring moment when I first saw the Kongresshalle, the largest surviving Nazi-era building anywhere in Germany:

It was intended to house the Nazi Party congress meetings, and like the rest of the precinct it was never finished: it was to be double the height it had reached before construction ground to a halt, and it’s already so big that the finished product would have looked ridiculous, frankly. After the war it sat empty for decades, with the Nuremberg city council having bigger issues to worry about than what to do with the Nazi cuckoo in its nest. The parade grounds were left to rot until the 1970s, when the West German government placed them under heritage protection for the purpose of “democratic appropriation”. One wing of the Kongresshalle is now a museum, and another houses the Nuremberg symphony orchestra. The rest of the building is used for storage by the council. The ‘Great Road’, which was intended for processions, is now a car park. The foundations for another planned building started to fill with water, so they turned them into a lake. The Zeppelinfield, where the main rallies were staged, is a rugby pitch. It’s a better approach than tearing everything down, I think: take buildings that were supposed to be home to something extraordinary, and make them ordinary. The more mundane the fate, the better.

There’s one spot that still feels very much out of the ordinary, though. The podium at the Zeppelinfield from which speeches were given is still standing, albeit much damaged. It’s fenced off, but there’s a hole in the fence and so I climbed up, standing at the very spot where Adolf Hitler stood and spewed his hatred. Remember those ‘close to history’ moments I described in the Roman Forum, and in Lenin’s old office? I had another one, but this was disorienting, uncomfortable. Those aren’t footsteps I wanted to be standing in. There were some kids there too, playing rap music, and although I don’t like rap I was glad of their presence, playing what would have been banned as ‘degenerate’ music. They were, probably unwittingly, engaging in a little bit of ‘democratic appropriation’ of their own.

I had my – hopefully – last encounter with the Nazi legacy a couple of days later at the Munich Zoo. It’s a gorgeous zoo, but it’s probably the only major one in the world where the most interesting species are… well… horses and cows. The zoo’s director during the 1930s, Heinz Heck and his brother, who ran Berlin Zoo, had a pet project to ‘recreate’ the aurochs, the extinct wild ancestor of domestic cattle, and the tarpan, the extinct ancestor of the horse. Their idea was to ‘breed back’, pairing animals to try to develop breeds that had the same physical features of the extinct species, and Munich still has a small herd of each, as a sort of living historical curiosity.

It was a crackpot idea, and deeply infected by Nazi ideology. Both Heck brothers were committed Nazis, and the aurochs and tarpans were intended to become part of the Third Reich’s fairy tale ‘restoration’ of a pre-modern Germany, with pure Aryan Germans to be joined by pure German horses and pure German cows. The Daily Mail calls them ‘Nazi animals’, which is a touch unfair: as far as I know Munich’s horses and cows have no political views whatsoever.

I got what will probably be my last little burst of hot weather whilst in Munich. The zoo is right beside the river, it was a public holiday and it was 30 degrees – heat wave territory in sun-deprived Europe – so the river banks were choked with people making the most of the closest thing they have to a beach within 500km. Not so bad, as far as beach-replacement therapies go, but the river is fairly sedate and surfing is out of the question. No matter, there’s always the Englischer Garten instead:

There were about ten of them, and there was only space for one to surf at any one time, so the rest had to climb up on the concrete edge of the channel and wait their turn. They seemed to last an average of about five seconds each, so the wait wasn’t all that long. I’ve always wondered why Europeans get into such raptures about Australian beaches. Now I’ve seen people riding surfboards in a stormwater drain, and I understand it just a little.

I didn’t quite warm to Munich, despite it being an objectively wonderful city. I spent almost an entire day in the Deutsches Museum, which is dedicated to industry and technology, covering everything from paper-making to power generation to programming. It’s like a five-storey guide to how stuff works, aimed at children and humanities students alike (I was both, at various times), and I enjoyed it, but I couldn’t help but feel that I was missing the point of being in Munich a little. I didn’t go into any of the beer halls, because I don’t like beer, I only drink alcohol socially and I was in Munich on my own. More than anywhere else I’ve been so far, it might be somewhere that you need to experience with other people, and I guess I’ll have to come back to find out.

If I do ever get out on the town in Munich I’ll have to do my best to conceal my nationality, as an aside. I met a man from Munich last year in Tokyo (can it possibly have been only last year?), from whom I learned two things. One was that German newspapers referred to Tony Abbott as “the Berlusconi of the South”, and the other is that Australians have a reputation in Munich for being the least able of all tourists to hold their booze. Apparently they do their best during Oktoberfest to channel all the Aussies towards the same tent, which the locals then avoid like the plague. Square that with our national self-image as best you can.

From Munich I headed northwest, hopping from Stuttgart (hotel room with bath!) to Frankfurt and on to Düsseldorf for the purpose of zoo stopovers (Germany does zoos like Melbourne does coffee: very seriously and very prolifically). As I flitted from city to city one of the few constants were election campaign corflutes. They’re treated with about as much respect as ours:

That second one, with the bespoke swastika. Has anybody checked whether Michaelia Cash has dual German citizenship? Asking for a friend. Meanwhile, the (neo-Nazi) Alternative for Germany party want it known, lest you were wondering, that they prefer (‘stand for’) bikinis over burqas. That’s good to know, fellas. Now piss off.

Düsseldorf was intended to be a base for a week of zoo-going – if Germany is to zoos as Melbourne is to coffee, then the Ruhr area is Lygon Street – though I ultimately only went to three. Luckily Düsseldorf is a great place to hang about listlessly for a few days. Relatively few tourists come here, but the old town is as full of bars and restaurants as Munich is, just priced for locals. Most of the food is not only cheap, but good, though I declined to try the cheddar cheese shit:

I even got a ‘we love Australians’ discount – my first, after 168 days! – in a pasta place. The bloke in charge had studied in Sydney for three years, and was thrilled – to the tune of 20% off – that an Aussie tourist had washed up in his restaurant. He hadn’t actually picked my accent, though, first guessing that I was English. Fewer and fewer people have recognised me as Australian, lately, and it’ll be interesting to see when I’m home whether people think my accent has changed at all. 

I spent my last afternoon in Düsseldorf at the K21 contemporary art gallery. Not usually my thing, but a dorm mate had recommended it with some half-remembered description of having climbed on nets hanging from the roof, and I didn’t have anything better to do, so I went and climbed on mets hanging from the roof:

Apparently this contraption was inspired by a spider web, and by going and climbing on a spider web we would feel more empathy for spiders or something. I don’t know: there was a sign that explained what it was about but I got as far as the word ‘praxis’ and stopped reading. Once up there – I had to change into grippy shoes, which made sense, and overalls, which made no sense at all – I fumbled around for about ten minutes, trying not to look down at the 20 metre drop below and not at all enjoying myself, until I was allowed to climb down again. Not much one for spiderwebs.

I was now in a contemporary art gallery, which meant looking at contemporary art, and one more tussle with overly-officious German museum staff. Visitors to K21 are expected to wear those paper wrist bands you get at concerts and the like, lest they be over-run with people sneaking in without paying (this seems rather unlikely to me, but perhaps such lawlessness is rife among German contemporary art enthusiasts). I despise the things, which inevitably involve painful hair removal when taking them off, so I stuck it in my pocket instead, but this was more than Düsseldorf art officialdom could take. Twice I was bailed up by staff demanding not only to see my wristband but that I put it on, now, before I go anywhere near the esoteric installation in their custody. Fortunately for my stubborn streak the thing had gotten ripped in my pocket, and couldn’t be made to stay on my wrist, but that didn’t stop one bloke from arresting me for a full five minutes while he tried.

Once I was finally permitted to go, with an ‘I’m-watching-you-sonny’ glare, it was time to interpret myself some art. I have no idea about this one:

This one appears to be a work in progress:

But the meaning here is obvious enough. Gentrification has come to Düsseldorf, and goon of fortune is out: if you want to drink wine around the Hills Hoist you’ll need a glass.

I spent the rest of my last weekend in Germany doing more or less what I might have done that weekend in Melbourne: eating Vegemite on toast and watching several games of footy as the finals draw was being determined. There’s a month to go, and I’m still exploring, making as much of this opportunity as my energy levels allow. But I’ve got half an eye on home, too.