6 November, Friday.
We had an early flight, as usual, and so we passed out promptly on the plane and woke up in the beautiful land of Muenchen! The view as we swooped in to land was of green hills dotted with little Sound of Music looking houses (yes, I know it was in Austria, but they look similar!) and it was flat! After months of hilly Italy, it was a comforting reminder of home. As soon as we got into the airport, we took a train to Hauptbanhof station and dropped our bags at our hostel, then speeded to Marianplatz on the S-bann. First impression of Munich trains? Orderly. Clean. On time. People walked onto the escalator and filed into neat lines on the right if they were standing, and walked briskly up the left side if they were walking. I almost died of joy. Anyway, we hit Marienplatz and hooked up with the NewMunich free tour lead by Sonja, a delightful American-born student with a keen grasp of German and a sharp tongue. As the world’s largest glockenspiel started its tinny song, which has been rendered unrecognizable by virtue of being centuries out of tune, she gave a witty verbal explication of the little figures as they grated around the track (“And lo, Bavaria has defeated France! Every day for 208 years! That must be a record.”) and the little Bavarian knight dehorsed the little Lothingrian knight. Rather than waiting around for the cuckoo bird to emerge and croak a weak note, Sonja described a much more interesting version involving a rain of beer and then pantomimed the real spectacle before leading us into the courtyard of the Rathaus for a breezy history of Munich. We learned that it was founded around a monastery and suffered greatly by “that Austrian painter.”
We then rushed ahead to beat the Spanish (aka get in front of the Spanish tour group) but sadly were second to the Devil’s Footprint, a mysterious footprint in the Frauenkirche (church of our lady). Supposedly, the Devil saw the beautiful church being built and saw how dark it was when he entered, which made him hopeful. He told the architect that he would make him famous but he must not put any more windows in the church, for he wanted it to be dark and gloomy so that the people would worship him there. The architect agreed. When the church was finished, the Devil came back and saw how bright and beautiful it was. He confronted the architect, who told him frankly that he had not put any more windows in; when the Devil had visited the first time, all the windows were already in place, but they had been covered up to protect them from the construction. The Devil was so angry that he stomped his foot in the ground, and the print remains to this day. In actuality, Sonja says, the footprint is the architect’s, but that doesn’t stop thousands of people from measuring up their feet to see if they have the same shoe size as the Devil.
From there, we took a brief spin past some of the other buildings in the area. In one, a cannonball is stuck in the tower; when it was being rebuilt after the war, a man gave the workers the cannonball, which had stuck there before the building was destroyed, and told them that it belonged up there. Another was a beautiful church rebuilt by beer money, naturally, with a little memorial of a menorah in the ceiling tiles to commemorate the Jews who helped reconstruct it. We walked past many of the subtle memorials, of which there are many dozen, which quietly commemorate the victims of World War II; a sign to mark the site of an old successful department store of a Jewish owner, a golden line painted into the stones of Dodger’s Alley, where people would walk to avoid saluting a memorial that falsified in Hitler’s favor the story of a failed revolt, and many more. Unlike Berlin, where the massive memorial has become the place for people to sit on and stick gum to, Munich hopes with its memorials that people will see them and have questions, and perhaps through finding the information on their own, they will actually remember it. We walked after to the Viktualenmarkt, where sits Munich’s maypole. Every town in Germany has one and it is used both to display the trades of the city and for ambitious people to climb. If one town steals another town’s maypole, they can force that town to throw them a party. In the past, this once led to a massacre when the offended town refused to throw the festival. The tradition has not died. Even in 1995, the airport security found the airport maypole missing. Terrified that someone was able to steal such a huge structure out of the supposedly secure airport, they called the city police. There was laughter on the other end of the line. The police, having admitted to stealing the maypole, demanded that airport security throw them a party, and their demands were honored. We learned also of King Ludwig I, who instituted Oktoberfest when his wife demanded more than a measly field as her wedding present and wanted a party as well, and his grandson Ludwig II, who was mysteriously too friendly with Richard Wagner and mysteriously found dead in a lake after being diagnosed mad by a psychiatrist who had never met him, and who incidentally was found dead at the same time in the same lake.
After joke time with Sonja during our break, we recovered her pet (the Ukranian woman in the huge fluffy white hood) and headed past a large church with eight clocks on its tower, where a sign on the door cryptically forbids placing your hands in your pockets. When Sonja asked the old priest what this meant, the priest told her grumpily, “The devil is in your pants and God is watching.” Eep. After, we took a rest in Dodger’s Alley for the story of Hitler’s rise to power, from his earliest days as a traitor and a small-time revolter to the Beer Hall Putzch and the failed revolution that lead to the creation of Dodger’s Alley. The monument that drove so many people down this street was a plaque to the people who had died during this revolution, including three completely unrelated bystanders whom the Nazis styled as pro-Nazi heroes. And what did they claim of Hitler, who had run in terror from the revolt and stole an ambulance to escape? Oh, he just saw a fallen little girl and knew that he could drive her to the hospital faster than the drivers could. After this, we walked to the platform where two lions, one open-mouthed and one close-mouthed, were set by King Ludwig I to signify that people should be allowed to speak against their government. Ironic that it was also the place where Hitler delivered the speeches that stole the freedom from a nation and a people.
Our tour with Sonja was regrettably over, but our historic tour of Munich was still continuing. With Sonja’s guidance, we took the train to Dachau, the first of the concentration camps. The place is a gray, small enclosure in the midst of the Munich suburbs. The road up seems inconspicuous and innocuous, until you see the guard tower and the barbed wire still running along the riverbeds. Inside the walls, only one of the barracks still stands, but cinderblocks mark where the others stood in two long, uniform rows. Inside, the rooms preserve the tiny wooden beds where the prisoners were packed, overcrowded by many thousands of people. The main building, once plastered in huge letters with the lie that obedience is salvation, contains a museum of stories and artifacts, detailing the history of the camp from its creation to house German dissidents through its bloody twists until it was finally liberated. Dotted around are memorials to the dead: a small Russian orthodox chapel, a Protestant church, a Catholic altar, an underground Jewish grotto. On the outskirts is a convent, which existed even while Dachau was active. And then, the most sobering part. Crossing the river, the single muffled sound in the silent space, a path leads to the grove where still stands the crematorium. Silent, sober, we walked through the rooms where the prisoners were showered and stripped, and stood long in the small gray box where thousands of people were sprayed with lethal gas, then passed at last past the brick cremation ovens, with the ashes of many burnt bodies still clinging to the cracks. It was an unreal place and the only emotion that can crack through the silence and the numbness is disbelief, that this could have happened, that this could have been real.
We were not given long to reflect on our visit, for we had to rush back to our hostel to prepare for the opera, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin. We ended up running in dresses and painful shoes several blocks to the opera house to pick up our tickets and find our seats. And by seats, I mean that we were in the back in the standing section, for three hours, listening to a Russian opera with German subtitles. Between me and Marcelo reading the subtitles and all of us watching, we managed to cobble together enough to figure out the plot during the intermission. Our efforts were somewhat frustrated by the gay crossdressers who were playing with a blow-up doll at the back of the stage while Eugene lamented murdering his best friend, and did a dance number during Eugene’s meeting with his old love. Right-o. After the opera was over and we were done being muddled, we lost ourselves in the back of the opera house and emerged through a side door where a very confused usher showed us the way out. We found a lovely authentic German restaurant for dinner and delicious homemade wheat beer (I had pig knuckle; so good!) and were seated at a table with two German men, who told us all about sites to see in Munich. By this time it was late and we were thoroughly exhausted, so we headed back to our hostel and fell asleep to our snoring unknown roommates.
