Right after school on Wednesday, EL, SG, and I were off to
the airport to spend our 4 day weekend in Munich, Germany. After arriving and finding our accommodations
we headed off to meet two of our friends for dinner at the Hofbräuhaus.
Hofbräuhaus
is the most famous beer hall in Munich. It was founded in 1589 by a Duke of Bavaria
and it has been in the same location (although I think it burned down a couple
of times) since 1688. It can hold 2500
people in the main hall and although it is a major tourist spot, some locals
have permanently reserved beer steins and tables. The food is traditional Bavarian fare. In other words, they serve a lot of
sausage. I normally eat a hot dog about
once a year and consider my yearly sausage intake to be met, but in the spirit
of being in Germany, I got a bratwurst on sauerkraut. A lot of sauerkraut. We also had delicious pretzels and my friends
all got liters of beer. I eventually
started falling asleep, so we walked back across the sticky floor towards the
exit, stopping to take pictures of the amazing ceiling.
The next day we woke up and headed to the city centre. We were going to go to the tourist
information center for a map, but we forgot that November 1 is a holiday in
catholic countries. Since everything was
closed for All Saints Day, we checked out some local churches as the bells
signaling the start of mass peeled.
We first ducked into Frauenkirche (The Church of Our
Lady). The church was completed in 1488
but took a major hit during WWII (like most of the rest of Munich). Luckily, they worked really hard on
rebuilding and restoring it to its original condition. The last restoration was only completed in
1994- 50 years after it was hit. The
outside of the church has two towers with very distinct onion-shaped
domes. I read that there were supposed
to be Gothic style towers (in other
words, the towers were supposed to be pointy), but they ran out of money so
they put domes on them instead.
Inside the church was big and bright and very simply
decorated but massive. We got there
right as mass was beginning so we couldn’t take pictures, however, I secretely
recorded the start of the sung mass that was going on by appearing to really
intently study the tomb of Emperor Ludwig IV of Bavaria. The song was beautiful.
From there, we walked towards the main theatre and the Royal
Residence. The Royal Residence’s entire
front is under restoration, of course.
We took pictures anyway and continued walking up the street past Theatinerkirche,
giant yellow domed church. The inside
was extrememly ornate, but we couldn’t take pictures because mass was still
going on.
We stopped at Starbucks on our was back to Marienplatz to
watch the Neues Rathaus Glockenspiel.
The New Town Hall (Neues Rathaus) is literally 1 block away from the Old
Town Hall and was finished in 1874. The
building is a Gothic Revival architectural marvel, but that’s not the reason
hundreds of tourists (including my friends and me) were there at 11 am. We were there to watch the Glockenspiel.
The Glockenspiel was added to the tower in 1908 and its 43
bells and 32 life-sized figures tell two stories. On the top level, the story of the Duke
Wilhelm V’s marriage to Renata of Lorraine is shown, complete with jousting
knights. I only recorded the knights
first time around (when nothing happens) and unfortunately did not catch the
Bavarian knight winning on the second go round.
The bottom half is the Schäfflertanz (the coopers' dance). In 1517 the plague came to Munich. Supposedly the coopers danced through the
streets to “bring fresh vitality to fearful dispositions.” Their dance showed loyalty to the duke in
difficult times and apparently this dance is performed by actual people in
Munich every 7 years ever since (talk about long-standing traditions).
After the Glockenspiel finished, we were off to visit Dachau
Concentration Camp. While Auschwitz-Birkenau’s
1.1 million murders far outnumber Dachau’s 32,000 deaths, Dachau is important
because it was the first Nazi concentration camp to ever be opened. It opened in 1933 as a prison camp for
political prisoners and wasn’t liberated by American Troops until 1945.
Dachau was the model for all camps that followed it and it
also served as the training facility for the SS Death Squad- the guards at all
other camps. After 1938, all types of prisoners were
detained here, over 200,000 in all. Along
with the horrible treatment, many deaths were caused by a massive typhus
outbreak in 1945 and death marches that took to and from Dachau at the end of
the war increased deaths even more.
As you approach the entrance to the camp you can still see
the train platform and railroad tracks were trains full of people used to
arrive. The iron gate has been
reconstructed to look just like the original with the words “work makes you
free” written on the top. After passing
through the gate, you can see the main camp yard, 2 reconstructed barracks and
the maintenance building. We started by
walking back towards the bunker.
The bunker is not actually a bunker but a prison for “special
prisoners.” There were several Catholic
priests that were held here, a British Intelligence agent, and George Elser-
the man who tried to assassinate Hitler using a bomb in 1939. The
bunker was the place you did not want to be sent. Many murders took place in the bunker (by
guards and other prisoners) and the practice of pole-hanging (putting people’s
hands behind their backs and then hanging them from a pole by their wrists) was
common torture technique.
From there, I went through the main memorial in front of the
maintenance building. It goes down into
a depression to represent the oppression experienced there and then comes out
on the other side by a memorial holding the ashes of an unknown prisoner and a
wall saying “Never Again” in several languages.
Above the center of the memorial is a sculpture representing the
electric barbed wire of the fences and prisoners committing suicide by throwing
themselves into it, which was a common occurrence due to the horrible
conditions of the camp. There is also a
sculpture showing the different colored triangles that the Nazis used to label
people at the camp.
From the memorial, I visited the reconstructed portion of
fence before going to the museum in the Maintenance building to see the museum
film. The Maintenance building
originally served many functions for the camp.
It housed the kitchens (not that they really fed the prisoners), laundry
(again, not really used for the prisoners), the bath houses, and some offices. Now, the maintenance building houses a great museum with a lot of
really interesting information that I won’t write about here because this post
is already getting long.
From the maintenance building I went through the
reconstructed barracks. There were originally
20 barracks that were designed to hold 250 people, but at the time of
liberation 1600 people were in each. I
then walked past the concrete foundations of the original barracks, one of
which housed the brothel. Women
prisoners from other camps were put into this brothel and a visit there was a
reward for hard work. Just when you
think it can’t get worse.
At the back of the camp are several religious
memorials. One is a Catholic chapel,
since over 3,000 Catholic priests and bishops were in the camp. Next to it, of course, is the Jewish
memorial. On the opposite side is the
protestant chapel memorial and across the bridge to the crematorium is the
Russian Orthodox chapel memorial. All
major persecuted groups’ religions are present.
At the back, under the guard tower is an entrance to the Carmelite
Convent. It is a working convent of nuns
who feel it is their duty to pray about what went on at the camp and the
prisoners that were there.
After visiting the memorials, I walked over to the
crematorium. Since so many people were
dying in this camp, they actually had to build a second, larger crematorium to
keep up with all the bodies. It was very
difficult seeing these furnaces. You
always see pictures of them in history classes, but seeing them in real life
makes the true horror of all of it very real.
I stood in a room where they used to pile hundreds of bodies up before
they were burnt. Ugh, awful.
Dachau also had a gas chamber, though it was never used for
mass extermination. Still, to see the
fake shower heads and the drawers where pellets that let off Zyklon B gas were
put was surreal. All around the
crematorium are mass graves and sites where ashes are buried. There is also a memorial statue showing a
prisoner. The words were in German, so I
don’t know what it said, but the statue itself was a powerful image.
I don’t know that I would call my trip to Dachau fun,
because it wasn’t. However, it was
interesting and important. People were
responsible for this horrifying portion of history and only people can stop it
from happening again.
On the train back to Munich we met a man who was a physics
teacher, but he quit his job to take a 3 month trip to Europe. I wish I didn't have major bills to pay and could just travel around.... sigh.
That night we ate at Augustina, another beer hall with
German food. I ate some delicious lentil-sausage-potato
pasta thing, and although I liked it, I am not eating anymore sausage for the
next year.
