Mainz All Mine

 The first few days of travel are key. That's when themese start to emerge, where traditions are made. We were in Berlin's Tiergarten, at the base of the Siegesäule  a.k.a. the Victory Column that is topped with the golden angel I wrote about elsewhere . "You want to go up to the top?" I can't remember who asked the question first. The answer was 'yes'. And with a can-do, "all for one" spirit, we dutifully paid our 4 euros and ascended the spiral steps to an amazing view above the park.  Far in the distance, the dome of the Reichstag popped up above the trees. We looked down the Strasse des 17. Junis at the Brandenberg Gate. Berlin lay at our feet. Only Victory herself was above us. This began a tradition we would follow faithfully throughout the trip. A few days later, after our walk down Unter den Linden, we climbed to the top of the cathedral to have a look around (Photo: the view of the Altes Museum and the Lustgarten from the cathedral dome)...

  A Poem In a green garden Once the provenance of Dukes And royal riffraff-- Its lawns mowed, flowers planted For Wurttemburg's elect Today children play, Workers nosh on sack lunches Stuttgar lives and breathes Its former potentates' Gardens for all men-- Common luxuries.

I grew up in the middle of a large forest in southeastern Ohio on a low, flat hill called "Tick Ridge." Perhaps it's all the lonely days I spent alone, populating the woods with creatures of my imagination, that explains my fascination with timeless tales. Grimm's fairy tales were an early interest, but so were the tales of King Arthur. Written in medieval Britain, based loosely on characters 500-800 years older still, the stories populate the forests of England with knights errant, strange, magical ponds, dragons, and other amazing characters. At the center of all the action (until the final battle) stands Camelot: a fantastic castle at whose heart lies the Round Table. While many locations around Britain lay claim to being the place on which the stories are based, Camelot is a castle of the readers' mind, and it will always be that way. At the same time that Chretien de Troyes and, later, Thomas Malory, were fleshing out the tales of Lancelot, Guinevire, and Ar...

I don't know of any culture where grilling isn't a "thing." I have been in the Republic of Georgia, where a pig or goat was butchered right near the spot where its meat was grilled. I remember the looks of pride on the grillers' (men) faces as they showed their carefully spiraled skewers. I have, of course, been to many cookouts in the US, both at friends' houses and at remote locations like a lake. Veggies are crisper, burgers are tastier, everything tastes yummier--summerier--when it's grilled. But nothing quite matches the German Grillparty . Germans are serious folks, and that comes out in their grilling. The most common type of grill I've seen is the suspended grill (see photo below from a grill party in 2019). A bed of coals will be laid out with a grill dangling over it. The cooks bring the marinted meat and get to work. Sometimes the grill is cone-shaped with a higher metal ring to keep the cooked meats warm until they are ready to eat.  German...

Since I first learned of its existence, the Deutsches Auswanderhaus (Museum of German Emigration) has been at the top of my list of things to see in Germany. This year, knowing it would be my last running an exchange program, I knew I must pay a visit. The Corpus Christi holiday weekend gave me a perfect opportunity. Since I could remember, my dad has told me that his grandfather and grandmother had been born in Germany. The names of their home towns have stayed in the family: the village of Diedelsheim (between Karlsruhe and Pforzheim) for my great-grandfather, and the city of Ulm for my great-grandmother. I visited both cities during my first trip to Germany in 1990, and have revisited several times over the years. I had also studied my grandparents’ lives after they immigrated to the United States: both migrated around 1895 and worked menial jobs until 1905, the year that they married and my great-grandfather opened a grocery store/ deli in the Bronx. (In his application for US cit...

I spent the weekend before Midsummer in Bremen This was my first visit to a northern city in Germany that was more than a pass-through. I would definitely love to come back to Bremen. With a population of more than 500,000 , Bremen matches such American cities as New Haven, CT; Fresno, CA; and Akron, OH. It's history as a proud, independent city and member of the Hanseatic League --a Medieval alliance of free trading cities throughout the North and Baltic Seas, give it a historical and fiscal advantage. Being a a city in the north, Bremen mixes a number of influences: Scandinavian and Dutch. For example, I overheard a lot of conversations in both Dutch and Danish during my two-day visit, and–in the inner city at least–there are more bikes than pedestrians on the street. The red-, brown-  and black-brick architecture is also a departure from the smooth, colored, plastered buildings of the South, which I am more used to seeing. The church towers, too, tend to have steep, flat, metale...

Even before I left for Germany, this summer was going to be noted by my consumption of Haribo Sour Strips .  I had had such a stressful spring semester of teaching, juggling my job with a night class, a foreign exchange, and huge personal challenges, one day I stopped at Dollar General for some comfort food. That was my first taste, which led to an addiction. Of course, Germany is the home of Haribo . The sour strips they sell here are missing the blue raspberry taste, but they include “Cola”--at least in Berlin.  It seems, though, that while there are always sour gummies to be found, they aren’t always the same. At the local Lidl in Ingelheim am Rhein, where I like to pick up an after-school pretzel they have fruit-shaped sour chews. A few times when I got the urge, the candies have had mixed flavors: cola with apple, say, or peach with purple. Those are always reallly fun to taste. And in Bremen, where I picked up this bag, the sour gummies were “pasta” shaped. I don't reall...

I like cities that know what they are. And the village of Oberwesel (with a population of 3,000 just 1 km from the famous Loreley Rock in the Rhine) knows what it is. Here's the display in front of the town hall.  "Wine-city Oberwesel," it reads on the side of the 50L cup. The black, imperial eagle harkens back to the Hohenstaufen family that ruled the Holy Roman Empire at the time it was established around 1200 . Oberwesel is flanked by two postcard-perfect thine towns: St. Goar to the north and Bacharach to the south. There are a handful of wine bars in the main street, and there is a city museum . The reason I first came to Oberwesel, and the reason I keep coming back, is because of the Rhine Castle trail, which winds its way through town and up to Schönberg Castle . The trail starts by the Liebfrauenkirche, and climbs steeply. The view is worth the trek. There is a restaurant and castle museum there as well. I really enjoyed my visit to the museum in 2019 (it was clos...

On a bright, June Sunday,  my friend, Katharina and her partner, Marcel, took me to see Frankfurt. While I had been in and out of the Frankfurt airport half a dozen times–and I had transferred at a Frankfurt train station even more–I had never actually toured the city itself. It had lodged in my mind as a cluster of distant skyscrapers on the horizon as I ventured through Germany. Turns out I had missed a real gem. I’ll relate my time in Frankfurt by telling of three towers. Tower 1: Main Tower Our first stop, after a fine German breakfast of scrambled eggs and Brotchen, was Frankfurt’s Main Tower, a glass and steel cylinder that dominates the skyline. The elevator zipped us up to the observation deck. A dial at the door tracked our speed and elevation. The doors opened at 190 meters. A couple more flights of stairs took us to the observation deck, closer to 200 meters.  Frankfurt is the financial hub of Germany–and it vies with London for the most significant financial center...

I've told this story a number of times to students as we rode a ship up the Rhine. Here's my take on the age-old tale--JD On a hill above the town of Oberwesel stands a castle known as Schönberg. It's not a surprising name, for the castle, translated as "beautiful mountain," indeed looks down on one of the most beautiful scenes in the world: the Middle Rhine Valley! In this setting, every hilltop is beautiful, and many hilltops feature castles. Oberwesel's castle doesn't owe its name to its setting, however. It gained its name long ago when its owner died unexpectantly, leaving behind him seven sad daughters, each one as beautiful as a summer sunrise. The seven daughters grew up in the castle; their only father was the Rhine. Each morning they would run out of one of the castle's seven doors and roam the countryside together. They picked berries and found honeycomb in the dark gulleys and shadowed streams that rushed down the hillsides. They returned f...

 OK. There's hubris and there's trying to explain the history of Franco-German border relations in one blog post. The place that spurred the question of the title was the Niederwald Memorial in Rudesheim, Germany, a 38-meter statue that looks out over the Rhine. In yet another post on the topic, I had pondered the angels of Germany, both on the Rhine and in the capital city .  But I had never gotten to the statue of Germania that reigns above the angel of war and the angel of peace. Germania appears here as a strong woman, stout with strong arms: a working woman, not a woman of the court. Her gaze is stern, unlike the Statue of Liberty (which stands twice as high), she signals warning, not welcome.  Her right arm holds up a jeweled crown--on her head she wears a wreath of oak leaves, symbols of the heroism she embodies . Her left hand grips a longsword. If you look closely, there is also an olive branch held along with the sword's pommel in her left hand. On her chest ...

Whose Rhine is it? It's a simple question--an easy one to get wrong, and kings, emperors and dictators have spilled enough blood over the centuries in answer to that question to fill the damned river with blood, from Basel to Rotterdam. From my reading of history, there are two wrong answers to the question: 1. It is the northwestern border of France. 2. It is a German river. Yet these answers have been applied over and over again. Much to the destruction and re-destruction of towns like Mainz along the river, and to the deaths of soldiers from far and near. Let's look at a few examples. Lessons from History The first to see the Rhine as a northern border were the Romans, who fortified cities on the west bank of the river like Cologne, Koblenz, and Mainz. The lands to the east were a rich source of trade, but after an attempt to push the borders of the empire to the Elbe resulted in a disasterous defeate in the Teutoburg Forest in AD 9, the Rhine became a border, and it stayed ...