Travel Log IV (The East)

Posted: Dezember 23rd, 2008 | Author: soeren | Filed under: Privat | Tags: Family, Germany, Intercultural, Travel | 1 Comment »

Day 10

After a quick tour to the Königssee we started to drive up the A9 all to way to Leipzig. This Autobahn takes you over some hills, where the car really could show its bad gas mileage. It took us until the late afternoon to arrive in Leipzig. As I work in Leipzig, visiting here was a a non-brainer. Nothing much happened on that day so I might as well give you little bit of background about the town.

When I say that this took us to the east it is more a historical than geographical information. The drive is almost straight northwards. Leipzig lies in what constituted East Germany (The German Democratic Republic – GDR) until 1990. On a map you will see that the five states on the ground of the former GDR cover the north-east quadrant of today’s Germany.

Leipzig is a very relevant city in German history. It was an important center of trade and culture hundreds of years before. The University of Leipzig is the second oldest in Germany (estimated 1409), trade was a major business since the late middle ages. Johann Sebastian Bach worked in Leipzig for many years and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe studied at the University.

Leipzig was an important place during the time of change (Wende) in 1989. During its traditional demonstration on mondays (“Montagsdemonstrationen) masses of people were voicing their disagreement with the political and economical situation. This increased pressure on the political system, but were not oppressed bloodily, unlike other riots before. This encouraged the formation of opposition movements. Today, almost two decades after the reunification, Leipzig is one of the few towns in East Germany that is prospering, while many other regions struggle with economic problems as a result of reunification.

Day 11

Leipzig has a lot of sites to offer. In order to acommodate diverging interests we decided to split up. In the morning, the boys went to see an exhibition about the recent history of a divided Germany and the girls looked at old musical instruments.

As I said, Leipzig played a crucial role in the events leading to the fall of the Berlin wall, and that is why the “Haus der Geschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland” has a branch in Leipzig dealing with this part of the German history. Both exhibitions, in Bonn and in Leipzig are very well made. They use a lot of real-life exhibits to illustrate their points. The fact that the museum did not have any explanatoriy texts in English gave me an opportunity to give my father in a law a self-translated tour

Leipzig was also an important music history, so that the Grassi Museum is one exclusivley dedicated to musical instruments and their history. Mother and daugher assured me that it was worth the visit.

Another wonderful thing about Leipzig is, that the sites are so close by. Almost everything you want to show somebody is within the “ring” of the old city center, right downtown. In the afternoon we just walked around and had our rest in a café that in itself is a museum “Zum Arabischen Coffeebaum“. One of the older cafés in Germany, established in 1694. Many famous citizens and visitors of Leipzig had their coffee in this place. The atmosphere is not as classy as in the coffee houses in Austria, but still pretty neat. Plus, while our visitors could take the tour of the little museum (dedicated to coffee and its history in Europe) we were able to sit a little longer and enjoy another piece of cake.

Day 12

Leipzig is not far from Berlin and Berlin and Berlin is of course a mandatory stopover on a trip through Germany. Alas, the parents-in-law showed first symptoms of a emerging culture shock and were eager to get back to Dortmund, which, after seeing something new every day for more than a week, they considered their (temporary) home. They just had seen too many old stones… That created the challenge to give a Berlin tour within half a day.

Berlin, of course, was a focal point of almost all episodes in German history. It was the center of power in Prussia, capital of the Weimar Republic, as well as the Third Reich. During the cold war, it was the one place where Russians and Americans forces were facing each other directly. While Berlin as a whole is a part of East Germany, the city itself was separated into a West German and an East German part. And today, Berlin is the capital again in the reunified Germany.

We parked the car at the new Hauptbahnhof (central station) as this is a pretty central point for a tour and naturally comes with a great connection to the local train system. The Hauptbahnhof was finished only some years ago and is supposed to be one of the many symbols of a reunifed city (and by extension – country). Before that, no real central station existed and in the separated city, there was not one single center. The trains go through on two levels, on one in a North-South direction and on the other in East-West direction and in the middle of the building it is possible to get a glimpse of the two train lines “crossing”. That is about the only cool architectural feature of this station as the rest is an uninspired “glass and steel” style that any office park would be constructed in.

The S-Bahn took us to Bahnhof Friedrichstraße, from which we started walking to “Unter den Linden”, a big boulevard that has at one end the Brandenburg Gate. We walked around to the Reichstag, which is the seat of the parliament of the Federal Republic of Germany, and served as a parliament building since 1894 (at that time for the German Empire). From there we took a big walk to see Checkpoint Charlie, which was one of the crossings betwween East and West Germany during the time of the wall. Today it is nothing but a street intersection and somebody reconstructed a hideous little hut that does not even resemble the border installations that were standing there last. But just as Neuschwanstein this seems to fire the imagination of tourists like nothing else, let alone that there are actual remains of the wall elsewhere or what other sites the huge city has to offer.

Freezing and tired, we returned to the car and headed home to Dortmund.

The last days

Since we arrived in Dortmund early and had the car for two more days we decided to do a spontaneous trip to the Netherlands to see the North Sea at Noordwijk. It’s only three hours (two hours less than to Berlin, when you come to think of it) and is harmless enough to spent a night and two days just to chill.

On the weekend we did some last shopping and the parents-in-law got ready for their trip home.

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