daytrip: treffpunkt treffurt

We ventured a little further north along Thüringen’s by-ways following the Werra River valley past the Wartburg and the Rennsteig and wholly eschewing the Autobahn for a casual trip connecting each intervening town’s and village’s main street and arrived at the town of Treffurt, commissioned by Charlemagne in the eighth century to protect pilgrims to the abbey of Bad Langensalz.
Meaning three-crossings (where one can ford the river), the settlement was surrounded by a bend in the Werra completely except for a narrow isthmus connecting it to the rest of the interior and lies immediately on the Hessen border. The high castle of Normannstein dominates the town, completed around the year 1000, and was the garrison for a contingent of local knights for over six centuries until falling into ruin from neglect—its strategic advantage having been expended, and rehabilitated from the late nineteenth century until the 1970s, it served as a gastronomical prestige project. The restaurant due to its proximity to the border with West Germany became a staging-ground for several escapes and was essentially closed until the German reunification.
Refreshment concessions have been the saving grace of many castles and fortresses. Intersecting with the German Route of Cross-Timbered Houses (die Deutsche Fachwerkstraße, previously), the Altstadt of Treffurt below had many fine examples of the style, including the well-preserved and stylistically significant old Rathaus.
On the return trip, Eisennach seemed a bit daunting with finding a parking space and it seemed there was quite a lot of visitors hiking up towards the Wartburg, so instead we went back to a spa town called Bad Salzungen, a place that had been extracting salt since the 1300s.  A stork was brooding on the rooftop near the thorn chambers (Gradientwerk) were the evaporation takes place and the minerals can be gathered and saw the nesting bird was being monitored with her own webcam, so H tuned in and we had sort of a meta-experience seeing the mother stork up close and from a distance at the same time. Travelling along the side roads, we got a better idea of the lay of the land and passed several places to stop and explore next time around.

ostheim vor der rhön

Taking advantage of the fine weather, H and I spent the afternoon enjoying the atmosphere of nearby Ostheim vor der Rhön (previously, here and here), first scrambling up and down the alleyways of the town’s landmark fortified church (Kirchenburg, previously here and here).

The complex’s maze of multiple warehouses and root-cellars for provisions plus a munitions dump and a powder tower made it a bastion for the people of the area to retreat to in times of strife and hopefully outlast a siege.
Historically, Ostheim was not aligned with the Catholic church that was the predominant influence in Bavaria and in fact existed as an exclave of the Protestant dukes of Henneberg, formally from 1920 to 1947 an outcropping of the state of Thüringen not geographically connected.

For simplicity’s sake, as was done for the Palatine territories on the Hessen side of the Rhein, Ostheim and the surrounding villages were made part of Bavaria as the American zone of occupation.
In order to maintain this island of independence throughout turbulent times is testament to the fortress’ imperviousness. Afterwards we took a stroll along the promenade of the river Streu, punctuated with footbridges and water-wheels that were once upon a time engines to drive various sorts of mills.
Finally, we ascended into the foothills of the Rhön to the Lichtenburg, the picturesque ruins of a high castle, a defensive garrison for a contingent of knights, from the eleventh century before returning home.

sperrzone oder deutsche-deutsche grenze

We owe the expanse of forest in part at least to being on the former border that separated East and West Germany (previously here, here and assuredly elsewhere) and the Grünes Band Deutschland (the German Green Belt) conserved by environmental organisations to form a natural reserve linked along the former Iron Curtain, forming a quite exceptional no man’s land of undisturbed species and habitats.
Today all that remains is a trail marker and a slight gradient change. On the Thüringen side, there’s carriage way for patrol vehicles that runs parallel to the corridor and a small memorial to two casualties of the intervening minefield during an escape attempt in 1965.
The first stages of the partition of Germany from 1945 to 1952 was also referred to as the “Green Border” before fortifications were established and movement strictly controlled but authorities on both sides soon realised that they needed to increase security measures in order to stem the flow of economic refugees in the eyes of the West and “spies, diversionists, terrorists and smugglers” according to the East.

daytrip: hochrhön

We had the chance to do a bit of local exploring near our home and we found the ruin (die Mauerschädel as it’s singularly known) of a fortified church built around the year 1000 and abandoned about three centuries later during the height of the plague (Pest) in the fields behind the village of Filke, the inter-German border separating Bavaria from East Germany once passing through the nave of the structure.
In the 1970s, the whole of the structure was ceded to Bavaria for security purposes. Though the outbreak of the plague is considered the likely culprit for its eventual abandonment, another anachronistic suggestion is that once bulwarks of the region, Filke and other surrounding settlements that essentially became ghost-towns before being eventually repopulated sacrificed themselves to the marauding tribes of the Huns, able to Christianise the scouting parties only to be later betrayed and massacred. A maiden in white is said to haunt the grounds, but that is a relatively recent embellishment.
Afterward, we took another detour to see some marshland in a nature reserve (the whole region is a nature reserve, really, but there are also specially designated areas that are protected from traffic and development) but the trails didn’t really get very near and the scrub separating it from the path was intimidating. H and I did however get the chance to explore the deep woodlands and encountered some deer that bounded past us before we could react.
More our pace, however, we found an assortment of mushrooms and toadstools that we resolved to learn about and come back to the clearing where they seemed to thrive.
The forest directly behind our house are baronial lands, still in the same family, and we wouldn’t want to be accused of poaching.

dichtum und wahrheit

We had the chance recently to scamper around Weimar for a return visit and take in the sites, for myself at least, with a fuller sense of appreciation, recognising how since the residence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe overlapping with that of Friedrich Schiller, the town became a focus of pilgrimage for intelligentsia and academics.
The iconic statue by Ernst Friedrich August Rietschel, position before the court theatre and venue for many of Schiller’s plays under the direction of Goethe, is rather a quirky curiosity on its own, representing the cult-like elevation of the two figures, aligned with the town’s (and its independent avatar’s) tradition of patronage. Notwithstanding the republican experiment, the Bauhaus movement, and musical significance (plus all the other things to see and do), the bespoke and iconic monument to the two writers, scientists and collectors is a symbol of Thuringia and has been faithfully copied in America and China many times over. The gigantic likenesses place the two at equal height, though Goethe was quite a bit shorter in stature, and both offer their laurels for inspiration.

beautiful briny

Over the weekend, H and I returned to the old gas-works of Leipzig that's been converted in a holodeck of sorts called the Panometer, which is a favourite venue for the artist and activist Yadegar Asisi.
This time, we dove, were im- mersed in the world of Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, lead to the panoramic viewing-gallery with an informative display addressing the biodiversity housed in these coral shoals of the fragility of this treasured ecosystem. 
The exhibit (click on the pictures to enlarge) was informative without being gloomy, of course.
I think the most humbling and provocative aspect of it all, however, was how being in such a huge space made bigger by the stagecraft of the flats really gave one the feeling of venturing there and an idea of the macrocosm and microcosm in details that were highlighted while trying to take it all in and still asserting one’s presence without being lost in the moment.

daytrip: the rosenau

H and I were in Rödental by Coburg and made a stop at the nearby Schloß Rosenau, referred to apparently in English—as we were about to learn through a litany of intimate connections, as the Rosenau. Owned for centuries by the Knights of Rosenau, the estate passed into the House of Saxe-Gotha after the last impoverished owner became weighted down by more debts incurred by a wonderfully eccentric ornithological hobby that entailed teaching native finches to sing like English pipits and self-publishing a treatise on it. The duke and duchess bore and raised the future Prince Albert in this castle—who would go on to become the husband (consort) of Queen Victoria. The couple lived in and reigned from mostly Windsor of course, but returned often to the Rosenau and the palace in Coburg.
After the outbreak of World War I made the British royal family much more reticent about admitting to their German connections, the property stood empty. As the Russian Revolution displaced other relations, however, the surviving line of the Romanov family and titular empress of the realm—with her ladies in waiting—was allowed to live there in exile, and in relative peace and comfort, having converted the library into an Orthodox chapel, until her death in 1938. Today, the castle and grounds are maintained as a state park and museum, and we’ll surely visit again for a tour and to see the gardens and their follies—ruins, grottoes and an artificial waterfall, in full glory. I knew some of this history beforehand, but it will forever strike me as incredulous that such events took place right down the road and garner little attention or fanfare.

asylsuchenden

With massive overcrowding in shelters and resources already under great strain, it ought not to be a surprise that tensions among refugees encamped are rising and tragically, there will be more violent flashpoints.
There was an incident in nearby by Suhl, that awful and uncivil as it was, that has been, I believe, wrongly classified as a hate-crime (a bias-based incident, to wit) whereas—with no excuse or solution forthcoming, the stress of the moment and environment did not allow for much pre-meditation—though putting a Quran in the toilet is not exactly blind passion either. Discomfort and fear is no excuse for bad conduct that’s making a bad situation far worse, but the leap to intolerance, rather than reflecting on finding ways to improve the stability of the homelands one is leaving or that some people just are jerks or that riots are bound to break out and there might be ways to mitigate them, is pressuring officials to call for segregating the Balkan refugees from the Syrians and the Afghans. Given the lack of shelter and support, separation does not seem like a feasible solution, and it rings to me a bit disingenuous if not paradoxical since integration and broadmindedness are being thrust at both guest and host but pandering to the prejudices of the few are spoiling the response and reception.

© and so say we all

Featured on the ever-excellent Boing Boing, writer Glenn Fleishman explores the fascinating and unexpected struggle over copyrights, ownership and lapsed licenses through the lens of the infamous and unnaturally long-lived legal wrangling of the Sisters Hill and the Happy Birthday song.
Perpetuated by the descendants in hopes of securing royalties for each instance that the song appears in television or film—for which it’s conspicuously absent and usually replaced with a rousing and somewhat incongruous chorus of “For he’s a jolly good fellow,” the unsettled lawsuits have really overshadowed the professional lives and scholarship of the pioneering Patty and Mildred Hill, who were respectively, at a time when most women did not have vocations, an early childhood educational theorist and an ethnomusicologist. Patty even worked with German pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel, whose wooden unit blocks (Fröbelgaben) we all know, and helped to introduce the concept of these educational toys to the States. For a white girl, Mildred really had some soul and championed so called black music as a national treasure to be cherished. Later the sisters collaborated on musical compositions for school children, eventually producing the celebratory tune. No one is trying to rob their children and grandchildren of a birthright but this singular case (another type of block or brick, Lego, is maybe something comparable) illustrates a lot of the tricks behind creative-controls and the integrity of invention.

rennsteig oder überquerte

Over the weekend, H and I took an albeit short but rejuvenating camping excursion to the Rennsteig—ridge-trekking—National Park in the highland of the forests of Thüringen.
Normally, we’ve blasted past this area on our way towards Leipzig and Saxony, although we’ve taken a few occasions to visit the promontory castle the Wartburg and a few other locations in the region beforehand, tunnelling through the mountains in one of the longest enclosed stretches of Autobahn that goes through the mountains in Germany—whereas only the passes were navigable before this engineering project.

This time, however, we paused at the head of the trail in a conservatory called Hohe Sonne to take a hike through the so-called Drachenschluct—the dragons’ gorge, a narrow path that winds through the rocky outcroppings that tower above. It was only an infinitesimally small fraction of the trails through the woods that link up with the international path from the Balkans to Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, the pilgrimage route of Saint James (Jakob).
Afterwards, we toured around some of the villages, which were pretty distinctive places, within the park and visited the ruins of a fortress above the Werra valley known as Brandenburg, whose campus represents on the largest keeps in Middle Germany. It was fun to imagine what it might have been like intact.
Slowly we made our way back to the campsite we had found hugging the little lake (See) of Altenburg, just south of Eisenach and the entrance to the park. It was relaxing to finally get settled and sleep out-of-doors, even if it was only for the night and we aren’t exactly roughing it. The next day, we had a late start but we were still able to do a little exploring with the balance of Sunday and drove to Gotha.
This city, birthplace not only of many the royal houses of Europe and the commercial, services-sector boom that followed the Industrial Revelation—spinning straw into gold, as it were, with insurance and finance, was a beautiful but surprisingly quiet place—the sort of quiet that I am sure is not altogether constant or pervasive but tends to go, subdued, with those places whose history needs to be studied and teased out.
Below the patio of Schloss Freidenstein, one of the largest Baroque compounds of Europe and residence for the dukes of Saxe-Gotha, cascading down to the market square and the ancient Rathaus is a water-feature, whose fanciness is testimony to the water supply problems that the city in almost the geographic centre of Germany and the point nemo of any natural sources for plumbing.   A canal was dug of some twenty-five kilometres to form an aqueduct to channel fresh water into the city—surely not a feat to be memorialised by Roman standards but certainly a reminder of how much was lost in terms of the civilising arts when Rome went away—and allowed the city to thrive

daytrip: schmalkaden oder good knight, sir ywain

With the promise of nice weather and a reliably immaterial flea-market as passable excuses, we drove a bit north into Thüringen and took a tour of the town of Schmalkalden—a place we’d seen before but it had been a few years and revisiting these nearby places always makes me appreciate the history that the familiar, the accessible are quick to overshadow.
The medieval Altstadt displays some of the finest examples of Fachwerk (half-timbered) architecture in the region, and the place had a nice penchant for story-telling murals and wall-art that really tied together much of the historical context for us in the end.
The per- sonage of Martin Luther—beside the image of the Landgrave of Hessen, Philip I with a video game-control, was meant to depict the founding of the so-called Schmalkaldic League, a free-association of Protestant princes founded here under the auspices of Luther’s Reformation, first for religious reasons and later for political pretexts, to afford members with an overlord aside from the Holy Roman Empire. In fact, the county of Schmalkalden (presently Landkreis Schmalken-Meiningen) endured as an exclave of Prussian Hessen for over four centuries until WWII. It was the area’s status as a rail-hub that made it a target during the war.
And while I am not sure what the motivation was for the bat, this graffiti reflects another of the town’s celebrated treasures: Arthurian author Hartmann von Aue (a tributary of the Werra flowing near Schmalkalden) chronicled the tales of the Knight Ywain in the early eleventh century, the exploits of this errant-scholar influencing later, continental treatments of the Matter of Britain, including Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parcival and the later adaptations of Richard Wagner.
Having this legacy associated with the literature and the legend surely is sufficient on its own, but these writings are also illustrated—uniquely and in some of the oldest, surviving secular sgraffito in Germany. The original illustrations were committed, around a century after von Aue’s active career, to the vaulted ceilings of the wine-cellars of the town’s chamber of commerce, since cordoned off from the public for preservation but were faithfully reproduced (for the benefit of the public) beneath the castle that dominates the city.

Wilhelmsburg, an auxillary residence of those afore-mentioned high counts, is somewhat singular as its Renaissance façade is essentially unaltered from the time of its construction and is a tidy time-capsule of the era. Afterwards, on the way home, we took a slight detour and saw the so-named Johanniterburg of the village of Kühndorf nearby—the short form of the Bailiwick of Brandenburg of the Chivalric Order of Saint John of the Hospital at Jerusalem—which is, testament to the Schmalkaldic League, the only surviving stronghold of the direct inheritors of the line of the Knights Hospitaller, this venerable and extant cadet branch being the protestant thrust of the knights.
It’s amazing how concentrated and noddingly near history can manifest itself, and I’d encourage all of you to take a little time and reconsider one’s hometown, old haunts and what’s in the vicinity from the periscope of a curious historian.

quod numquam

Though the popular myth that no one expected the Spanish Inquisition has been dispelled for the most part, it’s a pretty fun thing to proclaim and the phrase might have its origins in another Church culture struggle. In 1875 on this day, Pope Pious IX issued the encyclical called Quod Numquam, “What we never Expected” to Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and Prussian King Wilhelm I during the height of what was known as the Kulturkampf, the systematic dissolution of Church holdings in Protestant territories and discriminatory measures taken against the congregation, including the forced exile of priests and bishops. What was never expected was that the House of Prussia might turn its back on Catholicism, and though no on the level of the Crusades, clerics ignited a holy war to sue for the freedom of religious worship.

vertreibung oder flüchtlingsthematik

A small village near Weimar, the city that hosted Goethe and Schiller, Bauhaus and the Weimar Republic, is facing some sharp criticism over its suggestion to house refugees in the officers' barracks of the Buchenwald Concentration Camp. There unspeakable horrors associated with the memories of this place, and ironically it seems that our memory has become quite a feeble and atrophied thing. The immigration question is a complex one, but so is Germany’s relation to its past—much more so. Do Germans yet have guilt to discharge from the first half of the twentieth century? Surely, as do many of us—but does this make them to feel grudgingly obligated to accept more and more evacuees? That’s harder to answer—as with the Wirtschaftswunder that characterized Germany’s rebuilding and recovery after the wars ended was made possible to a very large extent through its guest worker programme, many also argue that Germany needs an infusion of a young population to sustain its present and retiring work-force and that Germany on balance benefits from immigration. I also feel that we are prone to lose our perspective as well: we’re welcoming in these people who’ve mostly been on the run from poverty and violence.
Mostly—and I think we choose to focus on those exceptions and malingerers. We also forget that while the sites of former concentration camps are sacred places, they were not recognized and consecrated as such right away and were regarded very differently depending on whether one found himself in East or West. Buchenwald was used by the Soviets initially as an internment camp for Nazi prisoners-of-war—although political-dissidents were also held there; Dachau and other locations in West Germany was first used to contain Germany’s own refugee crisis. Some fourteen million ethnic Germans were forcibly expelled from territories either ill-gotten and taken back (like Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania and Yugoslavia), lands that had been historically German, like much of Prussia that went to Poland and the Soviet Union, for centuries and other European cities where they were no longer welcome, like Amsterdam, were resettled in a Germany in ruins. Not only did the expelled Germany have to leave everything behind, they also faced the prospect of starting all over in a homeland that maybe was not at all familiar to them—their families perhaps living abroad for generations, spoke differently, had strange mannerisms, didn’t eat proper German food and were failing to integrate—and try to live among a population that if not outright hostile to the refugees were themselves struggling and barely had enough to provide for themselves, to say nothing for these newcomers. In the 1950s, once these crises had somewhat subsided, the regimes of the two Germanys took different positions on how the past was to be remembered. East Germany was quicker to turn Buchenwald and other sites into memorials and strongly encouraged people to visit, especially school-children, to face the incomprehensible and dread past. Whereas, in the West, the subject remained uncomfortable and while not going ignored or unexplored, talk was taboo for a long time and it really was not until Reunification that the public became more willing to confront their autobiographies.  Perhaps empathy is yet harder to face.

touchstones oder sonderweg

The years from 1806 to 1815 marked some of the darkest times for the kingdom and more peculiar holdings of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, as armies of Napoleon ravaged the lands, spanning from the surrender of most of the nobility, the summoning of the secular and ecclesiastical powers of the realm to pledge allegiance to the conquering French in Vienna, until Waterloo, and called into question the survival of Germany as a coherent culture. Retreating to the ancestral city of Königsburg (the modern-day Russian exclave of Kaliningrad) on the Baltic, the royal house of Prussia, the only major kingdom that did not capitulate to the French—and for that saw their lands redistributed and further reparations that exacted too much, the duke instituted many measures to build solidarity, patriotic privation and sacrifice and gave his subjects a waft of equality and egalitarianism which sustained the people through victory and the rebuild and the reorganisation that seemed to be deferred for nearly a generation.
Democratic reforms elsewhere in Europe—including France, culminated in 1848 in Frankfurt am Main with a Constitutional Convention, which rejected the decimated gerrymandering of the former Empire, from some three-hundred fifty quasi-independent states to a confederation of a mere thirty-seven, as not being representative of the people. This revolution, though uniting and healing and never quite killed, did rather die on the vine, with Prussia and other regional powers tossing out democratic ideals, feeling that they had served their purpose and were in the environment of security and renewed prosperity were dangerous and subversive.
In the two years, however, that a united and republican Germany prevailed—not to be taken up again until after the defeat and horrors of World War I in the short-lived Weimar Republic—convened under the auspices of the Bauhaus Movement, in an opera house like the Frankfurt summit in a church, a few trappings and symbols that were destined to return were popularised:
the German tri-colour of gold, black and red (supposedly inspired by the uniforms that a group of resistance fighters worn during the Napoleonic Wars) and without the insignia of any particular royal-holding but rather of the people was briefly flown, and the German national anthem was sung. “Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles,” was not a lyric of dominance but rather a plea for an end to Kleinstaaterei and internal division, though now replaced with the excusable and admirable trinity of Einigheit und Recht und Freiheit (Unity, Rule of Law and Freedom) originally extolled in the third verse.  These events were not an abortive revolution but rather sentiments that came before their times.  One other premature development came about this same year, with social scientists and agitators Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels first publishing a thin pamphlet in Köln called the Manifesto of the Communist Party (Manifest der kommunistischen Partei) which described all of history as class-struggles, but this too garnered little attention at the time.

sylvan

H and I must make it a point to explore the extensive, almost primordial forests this year. Though not contiguous, unlike the ancient forests that must have covered the whole of Europe long ago and fossilised in the city named Pforzheim (from the Latin Porta Hercynia, the gateway to the Black Forest which must have extended without much interruption to the ends of the Earth) there is besides the Kellerwald, the Bavarian Wood plus reserves throughout the country, covering more than one third of the land. This protected space is not of course historic in range but does represent more wooded areas than Germany had a century ago. The majority of the forests in Germany are composed of beech and oak, which enjoy a certain reverence for the people, which does not outstrip conservancy with a unifying identity but rather went astride. The Teutoburg Forest was where Arminius (Hermann the Cherusker, the name of a street adjacent to where I stay in Wiesbaden) beat back Roman incursions and kept the land in a sense unconquered, and after the Napoleonic Wars that ultimately meant the demise of the Holy and Roman Empire of the German Nation, a towering monument to that battle was erected, facing down France to the west. The proving ground of the forest, where one if careless can still find himself irretrievably lost, was also an essential factor in for the Brothers Grimm whose folklore that was championed as German identity, those stories that were told by mothers to children generation after generation regardless of where frontiers were or who was in charge.
The mysterious and dangerous wood was the only place where good might triumph over evil, the brothers observed long after trees were considered as sacred markers but yet subconsciousness ones and that character was made a recurring one. In any case, I suppose Germany’s caretaking and conservation would have greatly impressed the warriors and the myth-makers as much as the environmentalists and important to acknowledge it as a part of one’s collective identity in all its aspects.