Amy & Adam's European Highlights

Christmas Capitol...

It is a little weird to be celebrating Christmas outside the country, but even so, the holidays in Germany are a pretty amazing thing. To begin with, the holidays stretch over a much longer period of time. Christmas-themed trinkets appear the day after Halloween (no pesky Thanksgiving to interfere with). Kids celebrate St. Nicholas in the first week of December; he's the guy who delivers goodies to shoes left outside the door at night (I think). Christmas itself starts on the 24th... but stretches clear through the 26th. And decorations don't come down until after the January 6 (Three Kings' Day). Additionally, Christmas really does have a Christian inflection here. There doesn't seem to be a lot of tolerance for the 'Happy Holidays' idea. It's pretty much 'Merry/Happy Christmas' or bust. I even tried to introduce the perspective of a secular version of the holiday for public spaces, but it just doesn't resonate. Many Americans may agree, but there is at least an ongoing debate about whether it should be a Christian or secular holiday. Finally, Christmas consumes just about as much of everyday life here as it does in the States, albeit in different forms. While Americans are used to the usual battery of television specials, carols on repeat in all chain stores, the whole 'will retailers make enough in December to offset a down year of sales?' thing and the like, Germany seems to have institutionalized Christmas in similar ways. At the top of this list of institutional holiday activities is the 'Christmas Market'. A huge number of towns--and most major squares of most cities--fill up with these seasonal markets. Here, people sell collectibles ranging from art to trinkets, various junk foods, an infinite variety of hot alcoholic drinks, sausages (really, is there anything in Germany that doesn't go well with a sausage?), all to a huge mass of locals and tourists. It sounds ordinary in the abstract, but it's really an enjoyable experience. Hot food, cold weather and a range of European novelty items in great public squares... it's pretty enjoyable.

Though I mentioned most towns have some version of these markets during the Advent season, some are more famous than others. At the top of the list of popular markets is the one in Nürnberg (Nuremberg in English), a large city located about 2 hours north of Munich in an area of Germany called Franconia. We had to check it out in person, just to see what it what was all about. We booked a night in a great little hotel (thanks, Rick, you're always on the money!) and then headed into the heart of the Christmas Market with what felt like a considerable portion of central Europe. An enjoyable-if-crowded experience!

Pictures

I will always enjoy how European cities provide directions. It's always 'as the crow flies' rather than by streets. It can be really helpful to have an internal compass that can make sense of directions that are not much more specific than 'That way, a ways, just figure it out". More important here, though, is the fact that the Christmas Market in Nürnberg is such a big affair that they have actually installed permanent street signs for it. I'm checking it out here, wondering how they manage to raise and lower it. I know, ridiculous, but I was interested.

Though Nürnberg was very heavily damaged in the Second World War, part of its enormous charm today is that locals have preserved much of the cities medieval and early modern core. This 'Altstadt' is largely ringed by city walls, has beautiful old Gothic structures scattered about and is decked out with a h-u-g-e castle. But when you add all the visitors during the Christmas season, a lot of the city can get very crowded. This little area is an attempt to recreate the narrow passages and shops of medieval Nürnberg--corny but enjoyable--but the number of people rammed into it was astounding; a pedestrian traffic jam. The good news is that they keep most of the old city center automobile-free; even the horses (busy schlepping lazy tourists a few hundred meters in any direction) are a rarity.

The scale of this is hard to capture, but it's an honest-to-god lifesize Christmas... thing? You know, the things that have propellers and spin when heat rises off the candle? Well, they're everywhere here, but this one takes the cake for tackiness. Didn't stop us from gawking, though.

We always try to orient ourselves in cities when we arrive, and that usually means finding a high vantage point. In the interior of Nürnberg, the castle was the best bet for this. It's big--like forty or fifty different buildings, I think--so we confined our visit to the outdoors parts. While you can make the argument that the clouds and sun are romantic, the reality is that it's just cold. Windy with a periodic drizzle, roughly 40 Fahrenheit. For Amy, this translated into some comfort food... Starbucks. Amy, Christmas Blend... at least she conducted the transaction in German!

These are only shots on the outskirts of the heart of the market area. Further on, it gets hard to take pictures because of the number of people on hand. It was packed! But the idea should be pretty clear. Vendors have these cute little wooden stalls from which they peddle their wares, and people move through it like crowds exiting a sporting event. Sprinkle some mulled wine into the mix, and it's a formula for lots of sales. And if we learned anything in Nürnberg, it's that this Christmas Market makes money hand over fist!

Nürnberg also has lots of interesting sites beyond the Christmas market, and we tried to see some of them, too. We spent a good couple hours in the Germanisches Museum, devoted to the culture and history of the German-speaking world. The closest equivalent is probably the Victoria & Albert Museum in London or maybe the Henry Ford Museum in Michigan. Basically a collection of stuff, arranged with loose attention to a theme. In the Germanisches Museum, we’d drift from 16th century muskets to 18th century ball gowns to 19th century Lower Saxon farm house interiors in the course of 3 rooms. The audioguides were next to useless in such a scattered museum—what synthesis can they really provide?—but it was a good time all the same.

Nazi Legacy...

The city is probably best known to Americans as the site of the post-World War II prosecution of leading Nazi figures. In 1945 and 1946, military and political leaders from the former Third Reich were detained, arraigned, tried and exonerated or sentenced for ‘war crimes’ there (genocide was not a legal category until 1948). Choosing Nürnberg for these trials had always seemed an arbitrary selection to me, but it had a metaphorical significance that I just realized. In particular, Nürnberg held special rhetorical and historical significance in Nazi ideology, and was used as the site of the annual Nazi party rally over the course of the 1930s. If you’ve ever seen footage of Hitler railing away on an austere stone platform with swastikas billowing in the background, it’s almost surely from Nürnberg. In the Third Reich years, an enormous ‘party campus’ was developed on the outskirts of the city, and we took a visit.

Most all Nazi architectural works are ridiculously oversized structures which attempt to fuse classical and modern design without ever really getting around either aesthetic very well. What these things really are is big. Er, B-I-G, maybe that’s more accurate. This first picture captures this idea pretty well. It’s the largest remaining Nazi-era building in Germany, the Nazi Party Congress Hall. It was designed to hold some 50,000 folks for annual party gatherings, and it feels as much like the Roman Coliseum on the inside as it looks on the outside. One of the reasons the building survived the war at all was because it was never completed. Funds for it were directed to the war effort in 1938 (a full year before the war actually broke out), and it was left incomplete. But there were more problems than simply funds… the entire concept was impossible. Hitler, who in a previous was an aspiring artist with an eye for architecture, demanded that the entire facility be covered with an unsupported glass roof. Such technology did not exist then, and I’m not entirely sure it does right now. But rather than finish it off inadequately, Third Reich officials moved funding on to more appealing projects. You know, something more realistic, like waging multi-front wars against global powers and attempting to systematically annihilate certain ethnic groups. The ruins of Congress Hall on a bleak late fall day were evocative to say the least. Oh, I should mention that the building has a new wing added on to it that currently houses the Nazi Documentation Center. This fuses interesting architecture and generic historical exhibits to attempt to answer how Nazism became such an all-encompassing in Germany. Both Amy and I felt that the museum and its exhibits rang more hollow than intended; it was missing a human dimension that such a cold, sterile facility sorely needs.

This huge street connects the Congress Hall to a bunch of equally-ridiculous buildings as well as to the barracks area for visiting party-goers. It was designed to be a massive parade route and it still looks the part today. True to form, it's beyond enormous. After World War II, in fact, it was the best remaining runway in town. The American Air Force used it regularly for a year or so. Off to the right, just beyond the scope of the picture, was the site of the proposed Nazi Stadium. It was to hold 400,000 people. Ludicrous, of course, and not surprisingly, it got no further than some preliminary foundation work before it, too, was scrapped. Interestingly, this exact area houses Nürnberg's current soccer stadium, which functioned as a venue during the 2006 World Cup. Rest assured, this 'other' stadium is complete, attractive and considerably smaller.

Before we arrived, this was the thing I was looking forward to seeing. It's the Rally Ground area itself, where the Nazi Party staged its most extravagant annual meetings. This is the rostrum area from which Hitler addressed the assembled masses (upwards of 250,000). While it always looks impressive from afar, a lot of Nazi architecture was done on the cheap and therefore didn't age particularly well. That's certainly true here at the Zepplinsfeld. The Roman columns that used to bracket the speaking platform were removed in the 1960s, as they were deemed structurally unsound. The seating itself is partially used, but now mostly overgrown with weeds and is crumbling. Decay is all around. Interestingly, the enormous stretch of land it occupies has now been converted into multiple youth soccer fields and is now bisected by a major arterial road. In many ways, Nürnberg seems to have an uncomfortable relationship to this place, which I'm still pondering. On the one hand, there are ample tourist information boards (that's me taking a picture of myself through a picture of the same area decked out in 1935 as the 'Cathedral of Light') and there is an attempt to make the place accessible. Yet on the other hand, the soccer fields and loosely maintained parking area--not to mention the big, ugly road--all sort of treat the area as strictly functional. It's an unresolved tension, I think, and I suppose there is a lesson here in how exactly a population goes about accepting and then dismissing its own history. 'Structured ambivalence' might be the right phrase.