Exploring Germany

After spending several days and nights in Frankfurt, my teenage son David and I went careening about Europe in that sputtering little rented Opal. The ultimate destination was Paris, which is in France, southwest of Germany, but as we left Frankfurt, I headed the car due east. As long as we were in Germany, I thought we might as well see more of that country.

I explained Romanesque architecture to David at Bamberg’s cathedral. We then saw Baroque in its most extravagance at a church dedicated to fourteen saints, whose German name I can neither spell nor pronounce. We found a tiny chapel with a handsome Tilman Riemenschneider altar piece. We traveled through beautiful country with a castle on every hill.

As night fell, I turned off the foggy autobahn and followed a narrow local road. Over an arched stone bridge I drove through the gates in a stone wall into an ancient village. At a small hotel (maybe ten rooms) a slim, neat woman who didn’t speak English, took out a slip of paper out of her apron pocket and penciled the price in Deutschmark. As I remember, for about $15 we rented a room, as clean, neat, and austere as our hostess, with two narrow, blonde wood beds. I neither saw nor heard any other guests in the place as David and I slept soundly under fluffy eiderdown comforters.

The next morning we explored the town. We wandered around narrow, cobble-stoned streets between incredibly old houses. Windows with bright-colored shutters had flower boxes overflowing with geraniums, as pretty as in a Disney movie. David found a place to climb up and ran around the top of the wall enclosing the entire village

The little town had a magical quality. We saw few local residents and no other tourists. It was as if the town had been there waiting for us for four hundred years. I called it my “German Brigadoon”.

We drove back over the little bridge (just the kind Gene Kelly danced over in the movie Brigadoon) and on to Rothenberg ober Tauber. My spell checker can’t find proper names, so you’ll just have to trust that this is a famous place. Rothenberg is called “best well-preserved” Medieval town in Germany with another wall for David to run around. We found the cathedral with another Reimanschneither altar piece with its many little carved wooden figures illustrating the story of Jesus’s life from birth to ascension. .

The big difference between my “Brigadoon” and Rothenberg was that Rothenberg was swarming with tourists. Twenty years later on a river cruise I was with a group of 80 who added to Rothenberg’s crowded streets, going in and out the many little shops selling little wooden figurines and other colorful nick-knacks.

I alone of our group revisited Tilmon Reimanschneider’s many-figured triptych in the cathedral. Perhaps I was the only one who knew it was there. Tour guides cater to people who are more interested in shopping rather than in looking at art or architecture. They seldom mention fine art, even if a masterpiece is hidden just around the corner.