Germany

From Dubai I flew into Germany. To describe it more accurately: from a warm and sunny Dubai I flew into a cold and dark Germany. Luckily my visit here hasn't been at all cold, dark and gloomy - just the weather. As it gets closer and closer to Christmas the days get shorter and shorter. The sun sets at about 4:00 in the afternoon at the moment, I'm not looking forward to that aspect of Ireland, which is further north than Germany and thus will have even less daylight hours.

 

Anyway, I flew into Munich in the south. On the first day I went to Dachau (pronounced Da-how) concentration camp. I had been there before when I went to Oktoberfest but, being Oktoberfest, I had been drinking the night before and was too tired to appreciate the memorial that the camp has been turned into.

 

I spent about 6 hours at the site, totally absorbed in the displays there. In the morning I got an audio guide and walked around the grounds of the first concentration camp that the Nazi's set up. It was a very sobering experience to listen to the stories of the violence and inhumanity that the prisoners were subjected to. I saw the parade ground where prisoners were punished in front of each other, the barracks where 250 people were forced to live in rooms designed for about 50, the watchtowers and barbed wire that kept the inmates trapped inside and the gas chamber and crematorium where people were murdered and their bodies burnt.

 

After that there was a video presentation about the camp. It showed images from the camp, the most disturbing were those of piles of dead bodies waiting to be cremated. After the video I walked through the musem housed in one of the former buildings of the camp. This was really interesting. It explained the social and economic conditions in Germany after WW1 that allowed someone like Hitler to come to power and assume total control of the country. It explained the history of the Dachau camp (it was set up in 1933, long before WW2 started) and the role it played as a model for further concentration camps. It also talked about the experiments that the 'doctors' at the camp carried out on the inmates.

I think we should appreciate that Germany has allowed the site to become the memorial that it is and hasn't tried to cover up the atrocities that were committed there. As it says in the camp the way to prevent something like this happening again is to educate people about what happened.
 

I spent the next day walking around Munich city looking at the sights. At the moment there are Christmas markets all throughout Germany which are really cool and I spent a bit of time in the ones at Munich. They sell everything to do with Christmas - lots of decorations for trees (Mum - you would love some of the stalls they have!), lots of German food and this thing called 'gluwein' (glow wine) which is wine which is served hot. I thought it tasted pretty disgusting but lots of people seem to enjoy drinking it.

 

That evening I went out with Mona, Mary (Germans that I met at Oktoberfest) and one of their friends. We went to (drum roll...) Ned Kellys - a 'traditional' Australian bar!! Of course, the only traditional Aussie beer they had was Fosters so, after having one of those we went back to the heaps tastier German beers on the menu.

 

Mona had a few days off work so she decided to come backpacking with me for a little while. It was very handy to have my own personal translator for a few days!

 

So from Munich we caught a very speedy looking German train to Leipzig. Leipzig is in the former East Germany and is a really nice and picturesque little town. We went to a museum about the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) which explained how Germany was divided between the allied powers (England, France, America and Soviet Union) after WW2. With the Soviet Union forming communist East Germany and the others forming capitalist West Germany. It talked about the conditions in the lead up to the Berlin wall being built and also the conditions leading to it being torn down later on.

 

We went to a church where the composer Yohann Sebastian Bach had been the director of music. His body is buried inside and there is a big statue of him out the front.

 

That day Mona convinced me to try 'Leibkuchen' - a German Christmas sweet. It's similar to gingerbread but also has nuts inside it, it was pretty tasty.

 

In the evening we got caught riding the tram without a ticket and each got a €40 fine. Since then I've made sure I've had a valid ticket whenever I've been on public transport.

 

The next day we caught a train to Berlin. Berlin was really cool! The first night we went to a pub which had a tropical island theme and the floor was covered in sand which was wierd.

 

The next day was a massive day of sight seeing. We started by walking along one of the longest remaining sections of the Berlin wall. This section has been turned into a gallery for the graffiti that people painted after the wall was torn down. Then we went to the Brandenburger Tor (Brandenburg Gate), this is a famous momument in Berlin and was one of a few important monuments/buildings to survive the bombings of Berlin relatively intact. It is so famous that it's what the Germans have on the back of their euro coins. We also saw the Reichstag, the German parliament building.

 

Then we moved on to the Holocaust memorial. This is a strange memorial in that it doesn't have any symbolic meaning, rather you are supposed to walk through the concrete pillars (see pictures) and imagine for yourself what you think it means. On an underground level there is a tribute to some of the 6 million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, including some excerpts from various journals kept by Jewish people writing about their feelings as they faced almost certain death.

 

In the evening we went to Checkpoint Charlie - the famous border crossing between East and West Berlin. There isn't much remaining, just a small replica hut but nearby there is an interesting museum about various successful and unsuccessful escape attempts.

 

The next day Mona had to go back to Munich and work so we just had a look at some of the Christmas markets in Berlin before she had to go and I was on my own again.

 

I went on a walking tour around Berlin. It went to some of the places I had already been but it was good to hear more about the history from the guide. It did go to some places I hadn't been yet: I saw the 'Kaiser-Wilheml-Gedächtniskirche', a church that was damaged in WW2 and has been left unrestored to show the damage caused by war. I saw the university at which Albert Einstein taught before he emigrated to America. I also the the 'Bebelplatz', the square in which the Nazi's burnt 20,000 books by Jewish and other 'undesirable' authors. We also stood above the bunker in which Hitler committed suicide at the end of WW2. The roof and walls are so thick that the government wasn't able to destroy it so just had to fill it with dirt.

 

From Berlin I travelled up to Hamburg in the north of Germany. I went and checked out the Reeperbahn, Hamburgs equivalent of Amsterdam. Unofrtuantely it's not as asmospheric as Amsterdam so I didn't stay too long. I went to a wax works museum which was ok, some of the models were really realistic (others less so...). I also went to this really strange shop called Harrys. It's full of goods that are supposedly brought to the shop by sailers from all over the world. The shop is full (so full that I couldn't turn around at times because my backpack would have knocked things over) of stuff, a lot of it seemed to be carved wooden figures that looked like they were from Africa though there was one room full of dead animals in various poses.

 

Today is my last full day in Germany, I am flying to Dublin tomorrow, and it's miserable. I walked around the city for a while this morning but it is freezing cold and raining so I gave up. I decided to use the time to write this post because it is just too cold to be outside. The bad news is that I'm guessing that this is what Dublin weather is going to be like so I don't know how I am going to cope with that!!

 

I will put up some photos from Germany in the next couple of days.