EUROPE 2015 ISSUE III

Castles on the Rhine

A two week, organised river cruise is like nothing we have done before.  The best part, you can unpack and live in your own space for two full weeks.  The downside, you’re not in control of the where and when of your adventures.  It’s just the smallest bit unsatisfying.  Perhaps it is because our time is so short in each location, or that the history of this area is so convoluted and intertwined, never mind totally unfamiliar to me.  It may be the language barrier, although for the most part our tour guides have had excellent English.   Guess the biggest frustration has been our tours.  They need to appeal to everyone and as a consequence they have been more than a little superficial and lacking in detail about life in this part of the world.  

The focus has been on the age of the buildings, what style of church are we viewing or who lived here.  No real discussion of the politics and or economics of where we are.  Just what it is, is hard to say, but it may be just the sameness of all these tiny river communities (not in a bad way) or the fact that one super exuberant Baroque, Catholic Church begins to look much like another.  

But I get ahead of myself, there’s still the trip down the middle Rhine with it castles and the Lorelei rock where sailors were lured to their death by the siren song of a young girl.  We probably sailed past some of the more dramatic

structures while we slept but once we enter the gorge there are nonstop ruins of castles and fortresses for miles.    The mountains, they are too steep to be called hills, come down to the river’s edge with acres of vineyard terraced in to their sides.  It is green and lush, but not nearly as lush as the Austrian countryside to come.  The towns, or perhaps villages would be a better description, seem barely more than a street deep, and cling to the edge of the river.  Each has its requisite onion domed Catholic Church and fortress/castle looming on the heights. How they actually built anything on some of those peaks and slopes is a mystery to me, but they did.

Some of the towns on the north or is it east side of the river,  seem to have roads accessing more development back behind them. On the other hand, the opposite bank seems trapped between the river and the mountains.  A narrow band of development fronts the river, with terraces of grapes further up the slope.  In some areas a train line shares the limited flat space and there seems to be a roadway that runs along the bank. There are no bridges on this stretch of the Rhine, do you think they had tourists and cruise ships in mind?  So you want to cross the river to visit a friend or do a bit of shopping . . .  Never 

fear, you will find small car ferries that ply their way across the river carrying everything from small delivery trucks to mopeds and I assume pedestrians.  There is no opportunity to moor at any of these little settlements so we don't learn much more.

From here it is a progression of medieval cities, Miltenberg,

Wurzburg, Bamberg, Nuremberg, Regensburg, Passau . . . and a succession of baroque churches and quaint town squares, ornate city halls and decimated Jewish communities. The sausages change as we move down the rivers . . . . smoky, spicy, brown, white. Not to be forgotten, the mustards change as well. They do of course have to go with changing sausage which means they have gone from sweet and spicy to a hot Dijon style to plain old American style. 
Sausages change, mustards change and the beers change as well.  Guess that should be no great surprise, if I just think about all of our micro-breweries at home.  Here each city seems to have its own speciality and at least one major brewery that serves that particular city.  Our strangest experience was the smoky beer in Wurzburg, I think.  Having decided we needed to taste it we went looking for one of the two pubs purported to have it.  It was a cute little place all dark wood and Bavarian costumes on the staff (they really wear that stuff . . . dirndl skirts and

lederhosen, I mean) and plenty of folks with big pint mugs of beer sitting in the sunshine.  The smoke flavor comes from roasting the hops, which we were told was typical of all beers early on.  The atmosphere was delightful, what’s to complain about, vacation, sunshine and an ice cold beer. . . oh so very wrong.  Beer is supposed to taste like beer, not a barbecued sausage!!!  Wrong, wrong, wrong. 

Octoberfest

When it comes to beer the "Star of David" hanging outside the establishment is a good thing.  You see them suspended

from the sign and they purport to be the official symbol of the brewers guild which goes back to the early 1500s.  The symbol itself is older, dating in to the late 1300s.  There are six points to the star and six parts to brewing beer . . . water, hops (preferably not roasted) grain, malt, yeast and the brewer.  
As days pile up one city fades in to the next, and we have taken to referring to them as Berg-Burg.  “Remember that place where the city hall was on the island with all the bright colored buildings, or the place where we bought Lebkuchen and ate chopped pork sandwiches.”   You might have an opportunity to get it right, assuming of course you can remember a few specifics of each community.  Using the German language you can back in to it, if there is a mountainside it is probably something-bErg; while if there is a fortress/castle it is most likely something-else-bUrg.

Next stop Nuremberg (I see no mountains), a city on the Rhine-Maine-Danube Canal, in the German state of Bavaria and the administrative region of Franconia.  All these descriptors seem of utmost importance to the Germans, to me they are just more words to fill up the page of my blog.  We opted for the optional tour to the “documentation center” and some of the infrastructure left over from the Second World War.  The documentation center is really a museum showing the rise of Hitler and his impact on European history and of course the various Jewish populations that fell under his control.  Given that it is in Germany and designed as an educational facility they have done some outstanding work at making it accessible to English speakers. 

Nuremberg held great significance during the Hitler’s regime.  Because of the city's position in the center of Germany, the Nazi Party chose it as the site of huge Nazi Party conventions – the Nuremberg Rallies. The rallies were held from 1927 until 1938. After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 the Nuremberg rallies became huge Nazi propaganda events. Most of the films of goose stepping Nazis and the straight armed salutes were staged (quite literally) and filmed here as intimidation devices.  We saw a number of ruins that were constructed solely for these assemblies, many of which were never finished. The saving grace they are now used as venues for car racing and rock concerts.