not your typical bavarian town

One of the barbicans of Rothenburg

“Now this is what I had in mind for a Bavarian town!” my dad said upon entering through the old stone gates of Rothenburg. The tower pierced the sky above, the grey stones meeting the grey skies above. The clouds were gently weeping, cold pellets plummeting miles downward, signaling the beginning of fall. Behind the high stone walls were houses with white plaster and broad wood beams, pink, blue, and red petunias hanging in bunches from window boxes, spilling over like the head of a German beer after it's served on the table. Our march in, with our bags on our backs, passing by the restaurants and hotels, could have reminded us of centuries before, when any number of people had entered the same gates.

View from the town square

“Dad, this isn’t Bavarian! It’s Franconian,” I corrected them and immediately regretted that I did, thinking it just sounded like some smart ass son ready to show everything off. We had left Ludwig’s fairy tale castle of Neuschwanstein and the accompanying Bavarian town of Fussen – which true to Bavarian form looked a bit more Italian than German – up the railroad around Munich, stopping a few times for transfers and kebabs, and finally to the fairytale town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. It’s technically in Bavaria, but it’s part of Franconia, which was the ancient area covering the heart of the old Frankish Empire. The people prefer to be considered separate than Bavarians – indeed, Franconians are Germans, not Bavarians! It was a part of the kingdom of Bavaria, but it was also the Protestant part, which perhaps forms the sharpest contrast between otherwise two indistinguishable parts of Germany. But I’ve stayed in Franconia long enough – twice in Wurzburg – to understand the sensitivity about the non-issue. In American terms, it would be like calling someone from Oklahoma a Texan. Yeah, they’re basically the same place – oil, white people, Injuns, Tex-Mex food, BBQ – but goddamnit, don’t call me a Texan! Not one of those people! And indeed, Franconia is the Oklahoma of Texas, much smaller than its Southern neighbor and often overlooked in favor of them as well, despite having one of the best tourist attractions in all of Germany.

That tourist attraction? Rothenburg ob der Tauber. It’s one of Germany’s oldest, most authentic, and most intact walled cities, still preserving in a true form the medieval feel of Europe. The houses are still built using dark wood with white plaster in between and dark wood shingles on the roof, the sidewalks and roads all cobbled – though truly cobblestone roads are a fairly new thing, as in medieval days typically only the main square and the main road were cobbled, the rest of the town’s streets would have been a mixture of mud and shit - but let's not nitpick when we're trying to picture ourselves in ruby slippers. The town’s name means “Red Fort” in English, as on the hill top was once a red castle or a red roofed castle that stood over the river Tauber – German for Tabor, a common Christian religious name for places, given the origin of the name near Jerusalem. During WWII the town was revered by the Nazis as it was considered “the most German of all German towns” and keeping true to that claim to fame, it was one of the first towns to expel all their Jews – who then were treated as apparently refugees should be treated and were rounded up in camps for slave labor and extermination. You can never be too careful with those Jews, as they say. They were given special Jewish identity cards, kept track of using IBM manufactured punch cards, monitored, and later put aside in special districts and camps.

View from the Burggarten

We stayed there for a total of two nights, which I found was plenty. After the initial thrill of walking through a fortified medieval town, one realizes there really isn’t much more to do. Even beer gardens are somewhat rare in the town, and the beer gardens that are there are a touch on the pricey side. The restaurants and cafes are similarly slim pickings, especially for a tourist town of this caliber, and mostly the town is composed of tacky tourist shops. Though if you’re looking for dolls or wooden puppets, this is perhaps the place to go, with some of the best deals on such items that I’ve seen in Europe. There is one bar there, a place called Rockcafe which had a bit of a stereotypical American music bar design, with lots of vinyl records hanging around and in the bathroom a vending machine with sex toys. But Rothernburg isn’t known for bars or sex toys anyway. Rothenburg is known for its Christmas market, and they have a permanently in season Christmas store right next to the town hall.

The Christmas store is eery, especially in mid-September. It’s two stories of pine scented, crafty wooden and glass ornament displays, so flooding over that it’s nearly impossible not to knock something over. The amount of woodwork in there is stellar, and the place could simply serve as a museum of woodwork with a Christmas theme. But that much Christmas – with carols constantly playing and girls dressed up as elves – is overwhelming and highly disconcerting. An hour under that roof and you begin to constantly check your calendar to make sure you haven’t missed a few months and to see if maybe it is Christmas! Or perhaps you've been teleported to the United States in the near future, where the Christmas creep has made it past Halloween and Black Friday has replaced Columbus Day in some sort of Hellish politically correct takeover of holidays.

Near the Christmas market shop

If you manage to escape the Christmas market store intact, then you’re strong enough to manage the torture museum, which is called the Mittelalterliches Kriminal Museum. There are torture museums all across Europe in every major city and tourist destination, and for the most part they’re all the same museum – the same floor plan, the same poorly edited descriptions of torture and the same mass-produced, “authentic” torture devices on display - sadly they're about as authentic as a Rolex sold in Turkey. The place is so mass produced, that in Prague alone, there are even two identical one-of-a-kind torture museum experiences!

But, from the outset, it’s clear that this isn’t your run-of-the-rack torture palace. This place is branded differently, it’s not of the same company. This is the Mittelalterliches Kriminal Museum! And though the first floor is full of torture devices and wonderful imagery, the next few floors are full of information and records of medieval laws and criminal proceedings, with the top floor being for children, full of small scale action figures of punishments being doled out and cartoons about scheming lawyers – apparently lawyers were about just as popular in 18th century France as they are today. Definitely worth a visit.

View from the walls

The last thing that we discovered in the town was the wall itself. You can walk along the top of the battlements, and look out across the town. Now abutting the wall is a thickly forested park, while before, in the old days, that would have been trimmed back so all invaders could be seen easily and shot. Along the top there are also bricks with names where you learn that, though the city was mostly spared the Allied reign of hellfire that many others suffered from, there still was some pretty immense damage. 

The barbican at the end of Spitalgasse

The story went that since the Secretary of War McCloy knew how lovely the town was, he ordered that artillery not be used on it. Six soldiers of the 14th Infantry Regiment rode up with white flags and told the Nazi occupants that if they did not surrender the city, it would be leveled. Major Thommes on the German side, defied Hitler's order to fight to the end and surrendered the town, also understanding that the way of old Germany - and indeed, all that was beautiful of Germany - would live on if they did not fight. There was some damage done in the war though and the bricks all contain the names of people who had donated to the repair and restoration of the town, reviving it into the beautiful touristic destination it is today. Perhaps un-ironically, many of those names were Japanese, friends with Germans before and after the war. The best place to start a proper wall walk is at the massive barbican at the end of Spitalgasse.

The barbican from the moat

One final note about Rothenburg and one large warning: Germany seems to exist in a time of its own, one in some ways that is before the rise of financial technology, especially in these medieval wunderkindful places like Rothenburg. Forget your credit cards and make sure to stock up on your cash. Even in one of the main tourist shops, where we bought some presents, they didn't have a proper credit card machine. The lady cursed politely upon seeing our plastic, bent down, and pulled up this archaic iron machine that takes an imprint of the credit card on carbon copy. It seemed a close cousin to the printing press possibly still in use over in Mainz.

on the death of a king and the birth of legends

Neuschwanstein peaking from the morning mists

In the middle of a continent that was torn apart by war and itching for more, one sundered by revolutions and dangerous waves of idealism lighting the fires of chaos in the open ovens of taverns and salons, there was one king who held himself quite aloft from everything. While Bismarck was dumping millions of marks into the development of his military and the modernization of his riflemen to make his infantry supreme, another German leader was much more concerned with the development of the arts – and indeed, to show an excellent example of the ultimate triumph of the arts over warmongering and Realpolitik, there lived one mad Bavarian king, Ludwig II. Everybody knows the things that Ludwig touched and held high, whether it’s from the original Disney castle perched high in the Bavarian Alps, or Richard Wagner, the man of his obsession who otherwise would have fallen along with the heaps of other obscure authors, poets, and musicians of that period. And let’s not forget Bavarian culture as a whole, made powerful, momentous, and memorable because of the efforts of that one man, who instead of buying new needle point rifles for his army created armies of musicians to go out and win the world through the heavenly sound of horsehair drifting across catgut.

Of course, we can’t fool ourselves here, there was much value in Bismarck’s military obsession and his sheer ability to make a fool out of all who opposed him. He pressured Napoleon III’s unprepared military into declaring war on him, then – through a great deal of other political machinations, created a vast German Empire that swallowed up all the other German speaking provinces and that would tilt the period’s beloved balance of power, sending Europe into an eventual spiral of paranoia and treaty-signing that would lead to World War I. He held the use of “iron and blood” far above that of democracy, and as one whose goals were to make the German Empire into continental domination, he was successful, but at a future cost that would be much greater. After the pivotal Prussian-Austrian War, Bismarck was able to garner control of all of northern Germany in a single, lightning war – the first time the term “blitzkrieg” would come to use, but not the last. In addition, Bavaria became a mere tribute state, and the once powerful Austrian Empire a mere vassal, living now under “The Misery of Austria”, and whose later Emperors were to be considered buffoons.

View of Hohenschwangau from Neuschwanstein

It’s that world that Ludwig II grew up in, one where the new kingdom of Bavaria was trying to find its place between hugely powerful Empires that were bent on gobbling up the rest of Europe like a feast on a holiday, each participant poking each other with forks under the table while pretending to be civilized gentlemen on the top side. Ludwig was the son of the King of Bavaria, Maximilian II, who himself was keen on the arts and historical studies, having once declared that he would have preferred to have been born a professor than a king. As a king, he was caught in the constant struggle between Austria and Germany over who had the right to rule the German people – a question that would not be answered until his son’s reign – with Bavaria, as a Catholic state, supporting Austria’s claim. As a lover of the arts, he constantly had a coterie of artists around him and rebuilt Schwangau Castle, later to be called Hohenschwangau – or the High Swan County Castle. Hohenschwangau, designed by the German architect and stage designer Domenico Quaglio the Younger, was built in neogothic style and is reminiscent of Crusader castles from long ago, with battlements along the high walls of the house. 

The view Ludwig had imagining his future castle

Ludwig II spent much of his childhood with his brother Otto in Hohenschwangau, surrounded by artists, scientists, philosophers and other friends of the king. There he developed his own love of the arts, often ignoring his princely duties to study politics and how to run a kingdom, partly because the King and Queen seemed to have no real interest in either of their children. Perhaps he thought his father would live forever to work on that, but he had a shock in his 18th year, when his father passed away and he inherited the throne. He was at first energetic with the idea of pushing the arts as a matter of policy, creating his army of musicians and – as his first real act as king – inviting the then reviled Richard Wagner, who was living in poverty and hiding, being a democratic revolutionary in Bismarck’s land of autocracy. Wagner came to live in Ludwig’s household, causing great strain in his family, as Ludwig’s uncle, Luitpold, saw him as a negative influence on the kingdom. Luitpold saw the future of Bavaria with Prussia, which was not compatible with Wagner’s own drama. Yet of the two, it was Wagner who would create an immortal Germany, propelling German folk stories into a real German Myth.

Ludwig was obsessed with Wagner’s operas, an obsession that would never go away. At one point, when Wagner was being driven out of Bavaria by the Parliament led by Luitpold, Ludwig told him that he would rather abdicate and join Wagner – but Wagner refused this offer. It was under Wagner though that Ludwig was the closest to creating a real Bavarian power. At Ludwig’s announced wedding of fellow Wagner fan, Duchess Sophie Charlotte of Bavaria, who was the youngest sister of Austria, Napoleon III would come as a guest, and this would solidify the notion to the people that German unification with Prussia was out of the question. But without this tripartite, it would be impossible to sway the people against Bismarck and a unified Germany. He wrote a letter to Sophie announcing they would not get married, in it, stating “the main substance of our relationship has always been… Richard Wagner’s remarkable and deeply moving destiny.”

It was true. Especially since Ludwig was a bit of a dandy. Not just because he liked the arts, but because he also liked thespians. Male ones. But he also insisted that he would remain true to his Roman Catholic faith, so despite having several male companions, never seemed to have consummated his love for any of them.

The cancellation of the wedding though gave power to his uncle to drive Wagner out. At this time, Prussia and Austria finally moved on the inevitable machine of war, sucking Bavaria into the chaos on Austria’s side. But Bavaria wasn’t prepared, with Bismarck and his allies having just reorganized and modernized Prussia’s military. Bavaria was crushed and forced to submit to Prussia, remaining a kingdom in name only. This defeat led both Ludwig and his brother – who served as a leader in the military – into insanity and obfuscation.

Ludwig would become a recluse, holing up in Hohenschwangau, preferring to live his life as though he were in a fantasy kingdom, with him as an absolute monarch, modeling his life around his servants after the French absolutist king Louis XIV and even seeking to build a scale model palace after Versailles, and calling himself the “Moon King” opposite Louis’s title of the “Sun King”. To supplement this name, after his self-exile, he began to only work at night, and would take carriage rides through the moonlight, calling upon his villagers.

His grander, much more ambitious project was Neuschwanstein, on a mountain peak quite visible from the patios of Hohenschwangau. Neuschwanstain, or “New Swan on the Rock” was the encapsulation of a mountaintop Camelot. It was based off the set design of Lohengrin, who was the Swan Knight in Wagner’s drama, and who was the cause of Ludwig’s initial obsession with the operatic.

Lohengrin's castle realized

Lohengrin is weird story about a guy who comes riding in on a boat pulled by a swan, kills a guy, marries a girl named Elsa, and makes her promise to never ask his name. When she asks his name, he reveals himself as Lohengrin, the son of King Parsifal and a Knight of the Grail, who had sworn to remain anonymous to all of his lovers like some sort of Germanic Casanova. He then decides to leave her and ride back out on his swan. But fortunately, the swan then turns into her brother, but she dies anyway from grief at her husband leaving. Also, the wife of the guy killed earlier turns out to be a witch and she gets killed. But at least Lohengrin is off adventuring somewhere else and marrying other young virgins and Gottfried, Elsa’s sister, is now a Duke. So not everything ends bad that goes bad.

Ludwig grew up adoring this opera and imagining himself as the Swan Knight, while he passed his time below next to the lake that is filled with swans throughout the summer months and while living in his High Swan County Castle. When he became king, he was promoted to being the Swan King and needed a castle fitting as such, so he became convinced in his self-created exile from public life. He would call the castle, New Hohenschwangau, though the name would be later changed after his death. Ludwig sent emissaries out all across the world to discover the beautiful and great, so that he could create castles using a combination of all these good things. Neuschwanstein was a product of this research and glee, its two main inspirations drawing from Chateau de Pierrefonds in Picardy, France, and Wartburg, near Eisenach, in Germany. But Neuschwanstein would far exceed either castle in vision and beauty.

From a nearby promontory

So that the project could be protected from the scheming of his ministers, Ludwig used only his family’s money and borrowed extensively to build his castles, rather than using any of the public treasury funds. Ludwig worked extensively with the architect, Eduard Riedel, to get exactly the image that he wanted. It was a theatrical castle where he could live out his fantasies of being the Swan Knight in seclusion. The interior lacks room for a proper court – which would have been held down at Hohenschwangau – but has an elaborately decorated and designed theatre - the acoustics being of the highest technology of the age - extensive private chambers, and even a room built as a cave, complete with stalagmites and stalactites. All of the art throughout the castle, from paintings to statues to room designs, reflect something to do with one of Wagner’s operas, whether they were of the actual characters, or they were influenced by the set designs.

View of the castle from the village

The house is utterly beautiful but also sadly incomplete. During its construction, an array of ministers who had grown disillusioned with Ludwig’s reign decided to try to depose him and approached Luitpold to lead them, who accepted. They hired a psychologist named Bernhard von Gudden, who despite only having met Ludwig 20 years before, declared Ludwig insane and unfit to rule. They brought Ludwig to Castle Berg as a prisoner and patient, while Luipold ruled as regent. On one day, Ludwig went out with von Gudden for a walk around a nearby lake. Both were found dead in waist-deep water, leaving behind as many conspiracy theories as that which surrounds Kennedy’s death.

After Ludwig’s death, they proclaimed Otto king, who was also insane, so naturally Uncle Luitpold stayed as regent. Luitpold died in 1913 at the age of 91 and was succeeded as regent by his son, also named Ludwig, who then deposed the crazy king Otto and declared himself king. It was a short reign, as World War I started shortly after, bringing a finish to the monarchies of Germany.

Neuschwanstein was never finished and never fully realized its purpose. Shortly after Ludwig's death, the castle with its views of sheer cliff faces, waterfalls, and lakes, became a museum, as it remains today, drawing in 1.3 million visitors every year.

Read my previous blog for some tips in visiting the place.

Fussen and something like Disneyland

on the road to Fussen, breasts and Schweindorf!

Schwandorf town square

I chose Schwandorf because I knew that logistics late in the night in Munich might be a bit difficult during Oktoberfest. Every hostel and hotel in the city had been booked a year before, and the same was true in most of the cities with direct connections to the beer festival. A quick note on Oktoberfest: you can reserve spots in tents, but you've got to make those reservations a year in advance, especially if you're planning on going during a weekend. If you're planning a visit during the week, then stop by early and you'll likely get in the tent. But besides the tents, there are loads of other stuff, like beer gardens, carnival rides and bratwurst vendors galore, not to mention the ever-present boob show from the tightly knotted dirndls. Fun for everyone, truly. Though my dad wasn't feeling it, so he preferred to skip it, at least on the way into Germany, and we didn't really have so much time anyway. 

The hike from the hotel, scenic and foggy

The hotel in Schwandorf, the Hotel Waldlust, was the closest we could get. The hotel is about a 15 minute walk from the train station, which puts it about 10 minutes outside of the town center. Schwandorf is a small town, but there are a couple of sites to see there, namely Kruezberg Wallfahrtskirche, which we didn't really get to see, but it looked nice from the train station. As I don't read German, a brief scan of the website seems to show that it's a Carmelite monastery run by some Indian monks. It looks kind of newish as well. Clearly a must see.

When we arrived at the hotel late that night, it was already closed. However, on the desk was our room key and a friendly sign saying “Hello! You’re breakfast is at 7:00 to 10:00 in the morning!” The room was surprisingly comfortable and huge – ours was a four bed room, complete with a living room and a micro-sized bathroom. The sinks were strategically placed in the living room since the bathroom was so small. The breakfast greeted us in the morning with fresh coffee, fried eggs, and the regular continental fair, but all exceeding expectations.

View of Kruezberg Wallfahrtskirche from the train station

There are other places in Schwandorf, as when we walked pass the small town square, we saw some Gastehofs. However, when I searched for places on google, I was using the regular Gastehaus, not realizing the Bavarian dialect switches the “haus” to a “hof”. Anyways, I don’t know German, and the Germans – at least in Bavaria – tend to be very slow adopters of technology. One is lucky to find restaurants and shops that have made the switch to credit cards! On this last trip in Rothenburg, we even saw the old, metal credit card machine that you make a pink slip impression of the card with! I imagine banking companies must sigh, perhaps weep, and definitely curse the gods every time they get a shipment of paperwork coming in from Bavaria (or Franconia).

From Schwandorf, we made it to Fussen, the summer home of the medieval bishops of Augsburg, so close near where the later kings would make their fairy tale residences. The train makes one connection in Munich, which we very narrowly missed. Munich was packed with Oktoberfest revelers, women in those aforementioned Heavenly breast-packed dirndls and men in childish lederhosen, shouting out drinking songs, while similarly dressed Asian tourists looked around wide-eyed and confused, eager to see the habits and mores of the indigenous German folks and taking lots of selfies with the beer-drinking idolaters in the back ground. There was a day when most Asian tourists would walk around with gigantic cameras the size of their head, but now they walk in packs armed each with a small cell phone and a selfie stick. I guess the selfie stick doubles a nice protection from pickpockets, as you can always beat people over the head with them and stab them.

Schwandorf... or Schweindorf?!

I was also thinking we might see some refugees in this audience, thinking of the irony of having hordes of Muslims running from war only to end up face-to-face with a previously forbidden celebration, complete with massive amounts of drinking and carnival rides. But, in what is perhaps the largest missed opportunity for Germans to integrate the refugees, none were in sight. There were, though, several squads of police forming blocks, wearing what could be described as riot gear but without helmets and shields. Either they were ready for terrorism or for drunken riots, none could quite be sure in that climate.

We made the transfer with little excitement and an hour later, we made our destination by three o’clock, staying right in the old town of Fussen at Ludwig’s Hotel.