Nuremberg

June 21, 2007

On the way home

Yes, I know, I have been terribly lax in keeping up the blog, but I am catching up right now…..

I would not see another familiar person for the next 3 weeks. It got lonely at times, but luckily I met very nice people almost everywhere I went, and had plenty of things to see and do. I have found a good deal of strength in knowing that I can travel alone, without feeling too lonely, and it has made me realize how independent I can be. At the same time, being in foreign countries with no one to share one’s thoughts with can be trying. I think if I were to travel again I would do it with more people, or else go alone for a shorter period of time. Three weeks is a long time to be alone.

That being said, I really enjoyed the opportunity to do all of the dorky things that I would never be able to drag another person to, and being by myself forced me to be outgoing in opening up conversations with perfect strangers. They helped me find many of the things I did which I found so rewarding.

I arrived in Nuremburg completely tired from the previous night, and still feeling the effects of the cold. I arrived in the town and immediately went to the tourist office—my map of the city was horrible and I needed to know how to get to my hostel, a place according to my guidebook that had been created out of the royal stables and was a stone’s throw from the huge castle in the old part of the city. I was pretty excited. But when I asked at the tourist office I found that the best (and what looked like only) way to access the hostel was to walk through the entire old part of the town. I slung my bags on my back and set out through the streets. It was actually quite a lovely walk—all of the buildings I passed had their old world charm, and the streets twisted and turned, going over a river and past the high spires of gothic churches along the way. I entered a huge market square, full to the brim with brightly striped tents and booths selling all kinds of fruits and vegetables and a range of flowers in bright colors. My bag bounced along behind me, protesting the cobblestoned streets the entire way. I went past an ornate gold statue set up in the corner of the plaza—a lacework of spires and statuettes working their way up to a sharp point that met about 10 or 15 feet overhead. And then, as I rounded the corner, I could see the masonry of the castle rise before me, and to the side a solidly built stone building with rows upon rows of small windows rising up the sides and even into the roof, projecting in a ton of tiny gables.

I had finally reached the hostel, and as beautiful as the walk was I was sick of bouncing my bag along the rough streets and tired from my long train ride and it was all I could do to go through the formalities of checking in and getting my sheets before throwing my things down on the floor and collapsing into bed on the top bunk of a room on the 7th floor of the hostel. It looked like the place was huge and when I asked at the front desk my suspicions were confirmed—the hostel contained some 360 beds and most of them looked like they were occupied with high school age kids. Or younger.

I woke up to find some German girls sharing my room. They were polite enough, but they spoke very little English and all that I managed to find out about them was that they were studying for exams to take in the local music school. But the sun was going down already and I had to get food—grocery stores and such tend to close very early by American standards so I gathered up my things and headed out to the main market square that I had seen on the walk into the city. I arrived right before the vendors closed, and in my hungered state I bought tons of fruit and vegetables—ripe strawberries, cherries, tomatoes, cucumbers and some apples. The grocery store was still open also and so I went in to get some protein to add to my salad, and they easily accommodated me with a nice sausage salad. The dinner I had that night was quite delicious.

I also went for a walk thorugh the gardens of the castle—in the shadow of the high turreted walls neatly manicured hedges and sculpted trees stood among artfully arranged flowers. It was a beautiful place, and from one angle I could see the whole of the red-roofed city spread out below the castle, punctuated here and there by the spires of a few massive gothic churches. This was one of the prettiest cities I had seen so far, in addition to Weimar. I walked around for a while, bags of food in hand, and then I ran across an internet café—luckily, because I was still trying to arrange a meeting with Calatrava (the architect who designed the Athens Olympic Facilities) in Zurich and I needed both to communicate with my contact and make travel arrangements for my trip. I knew nothing about Switzerland so far and had to find a place to sleep and things to do. I made contact with my parents, which was always welcome, and then took a meandering route back to the castle and to my hostel.

The guide book had warned me about the hostel when I booked—it had explicitly said that June and July defined the phrase “overrun with schoolchildren” and it definitely was not wrong. I had never quite realized how annoying they are having been one so recently, but now I quite saw why adults rolled their eyes at class field trips and the like. I was feeling sick and all I wanted to do was sleep and these kids were running up and down the halls like it they were racing tracks. The hostel even had quiet hours, but all that it meant was that the kids took the noise outside, and the sound permeated the walls and came right into the room. I think if I had been feeling better I would not have been so frustrated, but I solved the problem by popping The Bourne Identity into my laptop computer, catching up some more on my increasingly neglected blog, and going to bed early.

I think all of the rest was actually really good for me, because I woke up feeling much better in the morning. I wanted to go to the Nazi Party Parade grounds, so I woke up fairly early and went down to breakfast. I was greeted with a long line toward the cafeteria style line, complete with rolls and to my joy yogurt and cereal, and an assortment of jams. But I had to wait at least 10 minutes to get to the food itself; the hordes of younger people were chattering away in front of me in the lunch line. That was when I discovered one of the worst parts of traveling alone—breakfast. That is virtually one of the only times of the day when everyone at the hostel is around at the same time, and the ones who are traveling alone sit in their little islands of silence, looking down at the food in front of them, while everyone else chatters about. I missed all of the kids on the trip—we always used breakfast time to invest in some serious complaining—either about the coffee, or the profusion of bread, or about the upcoming day. It was some serious bonding time, and now sitting alone with my bowl of cereal and yogurt, I wished for someone to complain to.

But I got over it quickly enough, and took the train out to the Nazi Party Parade grounds. These were established by Hitler and Albert Speer in preparation for a massive complex that would include broad thoroughfares and giant buildings intended to cower and intimidate the masses in addition to indoctrinating them into the Nazi ideology. I emerged from the metro however, and all I saw looked like a huge park—green lawns and a nice lake. Walking farther I got to the museum area, which I stopped in first. The building was actually set into one of the few buildings completed on site—a red amphitheater that looked like it borrowed many of its architectural elements from the COlosseum. One corner of it had been renovated to hold the museum and it had a huge metal jagged projection emerging from the corner, that morphed into a stairs and covered walkway leading inward. It looked more like something that belonged on a glacier than anything else, and contrasted greatly with the orthogonal regularity of the original structure, a theme that seems to echo in many of the post-nazi architecture. Anything that the Nazi architecture was, the post-Nazi is not—its modern, made with metal, features jagged or curved edges or glass, and seeks not to intimidate, but to welcome. Such an aesthetic difference is no doubt intentional—the dome on the Reichstag as a perfect example, and I found it incredibly interesting that much of it echoed the progressive voice of the Bauhaus which was silenced with the ascension of Hitler. Post war architecture echoed pre-war modernism, not only because of the aesthetic differences, but because the ideology behind the Bauhaus was so different from that of the Nazis too.

Anyway, the museum contained a number of exhibits, and I got an audioguide and took notes on some of the architectural planning of the complex. Nuremburg, it turns out, had been a site for Nazi gatherings well before the parade ground had been built, but Hitler had selected it as the “most German” of cities and deliberately linked the new rally grounds with the old castle, which had been the site of the imperial government. Such linkages were not only constructed through Nazi propaganda, they were also furthered through the construction of a huge road that would lead from the center of the old town (ie the castle) out toward the new buildings of the parade ground. Hitler and Speer’s plans were ambitious, and with the onset of the war many of them were not completed.

What remained, however, was the Zeppelin field, the administrative building which now housed the museum, and a section of the huge road. The museum showed old clips and videos, and it was chilling to see so many hands enthusiastically raised in the Nazi salute, gigantic swastikas waving in the wind, and the happy burning of thousands of books. Sometimes the old images and the new ones were superimposed, showing just what had happened to the place. The museum also told me that the Zeppelin field was modeled after the Great Altar at Pergamon, which I had seen both in Turkey and in Berlin. It was up to me to confirm this fact.

After walking through the museum, I took a long walk around the parade grounds themselves. I exited the museum and took a walk by the lake. The sun was up, and the sky was a brilliant shade of blue, with puffy white clouds. It was a beautiful walk by the lake.

After a while, I came to the huge road constructed by Albert Speer—it was as wide as a 4 lane highway, and completely paved in white square flagstones. It stretched into the forest and then out into the more modern part of the city, where in the distance I could see the gleam of some high rise buildings. Then, rounding the corner, I could look back on the administration itself—a huge three tiered structure with arches and columns embedded in its walls. It really did look like something that had been imported from Rome and given a 20th century veneer, and with the blue sky and the water creating a reflecting pool, it looked twice as massive. I could really see why the Nazi architecture was so intimidating—it dominated by sheer size and reptetition, the uniform placement of walls or columns that made the building look like it went on forever. And then I turned up into the Zeppelin field.

I could only see the Zeppelinfield from the outside, it was a regular square with a set of stands built up in a hill shape, broken at regular intervals by access doors allowing one to see inside of the parade ground. Walking around the outside of it gave me a real appreciation for its enormity—it was truly huge, and I felt dwarfed even standing on the outside. But I continued around, running into a World Cup stadium that was unfortunately closed. It jutted off of one corner of the Zeppelinfield and I was not sure as to whether or not it was a recent addition—the Nazis tended to conjoin sports and parades anyway, and the concept of a “fit” German society always included the notion of athletic fitness. But I couldn’t be sure, the entire thing was built up in an exterior of steel poles in a metal cage supporting the seats, and without some documentation on that stadium itself there was no way to know.

I rounded another corner and came to the speaking platform—this huge part of the Zeppelinfield had been set up like a big U—the short arms of the U reaching forward to enclose the sides, extended by the bleachers on either end. The bottom of the U made up what was modeled on the Pergamon Altar—a broad flight of steps leading to a tall monolithic collonade, most of which was now missing. I would have liked to get closer to it, but for some reason there was a ton of construction going on in the area, and I could only peek in from the break where the ends of the U met the rest of the stands. It looked huge though, dwarfing the heavy machinery that occupied the interior. Then I kept walking, to the back side of the speaking platform where I saw some scattered half pipes and other evidence of the work of some resident skateboarders.

Finally, I walked back to the subway to head to the hostel for my lunch break. Ever since Berlin I had been trying to give myself enough time to recover from the extertions of the day. Brian’s enjoinder to “take a nap once in a while” had finally been heard, and I only stopped briefly at the main train station to reserve my ticket for Zurich the next day before coming back to the peace and quiet that I wanted.

On the walk back through the old town, I passed by the huge gothic cathedrals that dominated one of the main squares and decided to stop in. The outside was fully encrusted with all kinds of ornate sculpture—over the pointed arch doorways, running up the columns, and the roof, around the rose window, and up to the towers as they melted away into the sky. The inside was quite a bit more austere—none of the loud gold ornament that I had seen in so many of the Roman churches. The walls looked almost bare, with all of the emphasis on the flat walls and the slightly darker ribs that drew themselves up from the columns and thrust into the x’s that crisscrossed their way down the vault of the roof and turned into crazy polygons down near the apse, where they flew back down again and made their way around the chapels set into the walls. The windows were where the works of art resided—huge pieces of stained glass set with pictures of the saints and the lives of Mary. They were fabulous—painted in some places and leaded in others, and the intricate detail of these echoed the lace tracery on the outside of the building.

There were other things inside of the cathedral also—hanging at the intersection of the two arms of the church was a huge sculpture done in wood. It showed a ring of flowers around a central scene of the Madonna and an angel, delicately carved and painted in wood, and suspended above the central vault high overhead. All of the carving was magnificent, and it looked so fragile up there, when in fact I am sure if it were taken down to regular height it would seem huge and imposing. But from this lower vantage point, all I could do was stare in wonder (which I am sure was the whole point). All around the exterior of the church, on ground level were a series of painted or sculptured altarpieces; folding triptychs painted in gold foil and in that characteristic Northern Renaissance style with its stiffer figures, slightly unrealistic perspective, and dark colors. It all had a much more somber tone, in contrast to the Mediterranean color and exuberance of the Italian works. Each of the altars was unique and interesting in its own way, and walking around them I could see a number of different panels that could be folded or unfolded according to the desired image. But I was growing tired, so I returned to the peace and quiet of the hostel at midday.

My room was deserted, and that was the way I wanted it. I fixed myself a lunch with some of the fruit and veggies and peanut butter that I had snagged at the grocery store, and watched the rest of the Bourne Identity, which I should note, happens to take place in Zurich. I had seen Gladiator in Rome, and 300 just before heading off to Thermopayle, it only seemed appropriate that I do the same for Switzerland.

I had headed in at the perfect time, because just as I was finishing my lunch the skies opened up and it started to rain—not a heavy rain, but a light one, just enough to discourage me from trying to wander around outside. So I finished my movie and did some putzing around the hostel before I decided that it was really about time to see the inside of the castle that was right next door. Even though it was still lightly sprinkling, I quickly walked across the courtyard and into one huge arched doorway, to another courtyard filled with the timbered and stuccoed buildings clustered on the inside of the great walls of the castle. And then, on the far side of that courtyard to the heart of the old castle, where the buildings rose up to a great height overhead and the windows and staircases looked down onto the courtyard that I was standing in. It was really cool to be standing in a fully functional castle—everything looked just like it would have hundreds of years ago, with the exception of the small sign indicating the presence of a museum and the planterboxes hanging out of the windows festooned with bright magenta flowers.

I knew that there was a tour of the interior, but the cashier told me that it would not occur for another hour or so, and invited me upstairs to see the museum. At that point I was kind of growing tired of museums, but this one looked interesting enough so I ventured inside, my feet creaking on the wide wooden boards. The lower floor contained some models of the castle complex, and engravings and photographs, and then when I moved into the back rooms things really started getting interesting. I saw a full body suit of plate armor, a diminuative looking knight covered in panels of curved steel, with a claustrophobic looking helmet. And then farther, there was an exhibition on the evolution of horsemanship in Europe. The exhibit had a number of bits, stirrups, and saddles, ranging in complexity from a simple bar across the horse’s mouth to a huge contraption with spirals and stars wheeling around the outside of the horse’s face, which looked like it was largely for show and not really to control the animal at all.

Then I moved up a creaky staircase and things really started getting interesting. The upper two levels of the museum were filled with exhibitions on medieval weaponry and armor, ranging from chain mail to plate armor to swords, cannon, guns, and knives. The little girl in me who used to love playing with her legos was absolutely thrilled, and I stared at the weapons and armor in a fascination similar to that of a teenage boy. It was interesting to see how the styles of the armor and the weapons changed over time, and how elaborate some of the helmets got. They looked terribly uncomfortable—just enough slits to see and breathe through, and in some instances it looked as though the visor snapped or locked into place. To imagine fighting someone with no periphery vision and very little hearing seemed slightly crazy to me, and I could not imagine the strength it would take to wield some of the 4 and 5 foot long swords with a full suit of armor. Clearly, it must have been rather difficult, yet it was something that was considered standard practice for the knights. This was like wearing the most constrictive and heavy football uniform and then trying to swing an equally cumbersome baseball bat. Not fun.

The guns too looked huge and unwieldy—and some of the engravings showed the men—by then dressed in what looked like a uniform from The Three Musketeers rather than A Knight’s Tale using crutch like props to hold up the barrels of their guns, which were taller than they were. In the early years, the accuracy of these guns must have been questionable, and taking the time and effort to carry a 6 or 7 foot gun must have been a mark of prestige. Technologically, it seems as though everything gets smaller and
faster—such is the case with guns and computers. Just the change in a few hundred years was immense, and seeing all of the suits of armor brought to mind scenes from King Arthur and the like. I emerged from the museum with thoughts of jousting tournaments and kings and ladies in waiting dancing in my head.

I emerged just in time for the tour to start, and joined by a number of Italian and Spanish tourists. Unfortunately, as soon as the tour began we realized that it was only conducted in German (go figure). So I did as I had done before, followed at the back of the group and watched and listened for the words that I could recognize. The inside of the castle was just as cool as the outside—we stepped into a chapel, a simple whitewashed interior with arched vaulting overhead and the heraldic images of the king carved into the rafters overhead, and a lower level for the worship of the women. Then we went into a great hall—a huge space with wide wooden boards on the floor and huge beams spanning the ceiling, almost completely bare except for the presence of one or two tapestries on the wall. We continued to several other rooms, some of which contained the traces of what looked like colorful frescoes, the ceiling painted with the heraldic eagle and traces of gold leaf all along the walls in a pattern of floral designs. Some of the furniture was original—big dark wood pieces with inlay in a variety of wood types.

Then we emerged from the darkness of the interior of the castle and the tour guide gestured for us to follow him to the Deep Well. We went out of the innermost courtyard and walked back the way I had come, to a small building that was indicated by a placard on the wall by the door as being one of the oldest places in the whole castle complex. It was the deep well, which ran some 47 meters down into the rock. The tour guide had a chandelier full of candles that he lowered down into the blackness, and we saw the slick sides of the shaft illuminated as it went down, and down, and down, the group of us hanging over the sides to watch it as it descended. And then, even more unbelievably, he took a bucket of water and poured it over the sides and into the well, and we waited for it to hit the water… some 5 or 6 seconds later. The time delay made the whole group of us gasp aloud. The tour guide grinned at us and at our amazement, and we all looked down again to where we could see the faint glimmer of the candles so far down below us. It was incredible to see.

And with that, we were realeased into the fading light of the afternoon. I spent most of the rest of it relaxing—I took another trip past the market, fixed myself a picnic in the room, and did the last bit of emailing, discovering at the window of the dorm room a strong wireless signal so I skyped my parents and downloaded some Desperate Housewives. It was incredibly relaxing, but I was ready to get going…. On to Zurich!