Monday, November 23, 2015

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.





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