Nights 15 & 16: Fürth & Nürnberg

My next hosts lived in Fürth, which is a smaller city a few kilometers outside of Nürnberg. Nürnberg is probably most famous for being the ultimate Nazi stronghold during WWII. That's particularly sad because it's got so much other great old history that is overshadowed by the darker deeds that took place there in the most recent century. Nürnberg is also the gorgeous walled city in which Jesse was yelled at by the police for playing trombone in a tunnel. How 'bout that.


I left Salzburg mid-afternoon and headed straight to Nürnberg. My hosts were out until the evening, so I put my giant belongings in a luggage hold in the train station and wandered around the city for a few hours before continuing on the eight more minutes of train to Fürth. I wandered around the old town for a while, finding the different points of interest indicated on my map from the tourist info center. First I visited the Albrecht Dürer house, as I'd written a big paper on him earlier. It was closed that late in the afternoon, but was pretty anyway. It was also extremely close to the huge tunnel in the city wall which I pegged to be the location of the Great Illegal Trombone Incident of 2009. Did I get it right?



 
I walked around the castle for a bit until it started snowing like crazy. That's when I tried to enter a couple of the town's many churches, but they were all locked or had entrance fees. Donations I can understand, but since when do people have to pay to marvel at the beauty of a church?

When that didn't work out, I wandered back to the castle to find a view of the city. The snow had eased up by then and the sun was starting to set.




The prettiest part of the sunset was locked behind bars, I'm afraid. It started getting very cold as the sun disappeared, so I ate some soup in a nice cafe until it had gotten dark and I could take nighttime photos of the lovely, lovely city.







Then trained over to Fürth where my hosts met me and brought me to their IKEA-model apartment where they fed me chocolate ice cream with the strawberries I'd brought them. They were a very sweet younger couple with a 5-yr-old girl in full-on princess mode and a sweet 7-yr-old boy with some mental disability that impaired his speaking and interaction, but not his joie du vivre.

The next day I spent primarily with the mother. She took me to a tower overlooking the area and then to the Nazi Party Rally Grounds and museum in Nürnberg.

The rally grounds were incredible. The bigness of everything was almost monstrous. For example, the sole purpose of this giant street between two ponds was to have big flashy parades and display the power of their forces.

--> The grounds that were covered by thousands of uniformed men marching in perfect formation seventy years ago are now mostly overgrown and unused except for the city fair a couple times a year.

Their congress center was never finished, but the outside wall looks very much like a colosseum. Petra, the mother, demostrated the architectural bigness tricks by having me stand still while she walked to this door of seemingly normal proportions. I kept expecting her to stop and have reached it, but instead she just kept walking and walking until I realized it was so huge that she only came up half way. They sure did know how to make an individual feel insignificant.


Next we visited the nearby field where Hitler once spoke to his hoard of cheering supporters. Most of it is now fenced off and several walls of stone bleachers have disappeared under weeds, but we were able to climb the crumbling stone steps to the platform where he had stood and addressed the masses. Looking out from the platform I recalled the footage I’d seen of the rallies at this place and tried to imagine the massive area filled with attentive faces all concentrated on me. The unnaturally icy wind ripping through our jackets in sudden gusts only added to the eerie feeling of the place.


This wind made sure we didn’t stay long and soon we were inside the nice warm Dokumentationszentrum museum located in part of the unfinished congressional colosseum. It was by far the most well executed WWII museum I have ever visited, even aside from the fact that it was located on the very earth where such a huge part of it took place. It was architecturally fascinating and its exhibits were well distributed between audio and visual aspects. In terms of content, there was no effort made to soften the horrors that had taken place and the history was brutally honest. One thing I noticed was that unlike in some places, it was not all about the United States and heroic Americans that had saved the day. There was also a great audio guide that helped a lot. If you ever find yourself in Nürnberg, this museum is not to be missed.

We were both tired after a couple hours of independent exploration, so Petra and I went home. She had a visitor coming – the mother of one of her daughter’s best friend in Kindergarten, a little boy from Sri Lanka. They arrived back from kindergarten soon after we did and the two adorable little things started playing immediately. We all got a good laugh when they came from upstairs in full royal garb. Too cute.

My hosts had told me about the mother of this little boy the night before. The war in Sri Lanka had made her life a living hell and she’d witnessed much violence, including a family member being killed on her doorstep. This had affected her significantly, of course, and she’d never really recovered from her breakdown. I was glad I’d been warned when she started talking to me about her life and her country the moment we met and then for the next couple hours before I excused myself to go nap. She’d been in Germany for six years, though still had a lot of trouble with the language that made me have to work my brain pretty hard to keep understanding her. Petra also had a rough time with the language barrier, though after a while I realized that I might have actually understood her better than Petra because German is not my native tongue and I understood where many of her grammatical errors came from. It was an interesting observation.

I could have gone back into Nürnberg to poke around some more by myself that afternoon, but I was so tired by that point that the idea of more sightseeing didn’t grab me in the least. I love wandering around ancient medieval streets, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that after two weeks of doing so, my feet were so very tired of cobblestones.

Petra made a nice spaghetti with spinach and sheep cheese dinner for us that evening, but it ended up being hectic because of their son being in a bad mood of some sort. He got home with his father late in the afternoon and immediately adopted me to play his favorite game with him. This game consisted of him bringing me the cordless phone and having me page the other cordless phone that he walked around with. The page alarm was a pretty little jingle and I would make it go off at random times as he wandered around. Every time the little song started playing, his face would break into the biggest, most heartfelt smile I’d ever seen and he would laugh joyfully. This lasted for a long time, but never got old for me. Then he got tired and cranky. Game over.

Both parents were busy that night, so I went to bed early on a very comfortable bunk bed in what will someday be the little girl’s room when she decides she wants her own space. Normally there’s a slide that connects the top bunk to the floor, which had been placed above on the top bunk to make more room for me. When the little girl’s parents told her the slide was on top of the bed, she got excited and just HAD to see it. It was cute. What’s even cuter was that before I arrived, her parents said a visitor named Margaret was coming from America. She was very excited about this, too, but couldn’t remember my name so she decided to call me “Die Tante Mildred,” or, Aunt Mildred. (Petra couldn’t stop laughing as she told me this.) Therefore the little one was pretty confused when she finally met me and found that neither was my name Mildred nor was I old enough to be called “Aunt.” Sometimes kids are just that awesome.
The next morning I had to wake up super early to take the family photo before the special bus came to pick the boy up for school. Once the kids were finally out and the house was quiet again, Petra and I were able to sit down for a nice breakfast. I’d left my identity questions out on the table for them to look at the night before and I talked with Petra about her answers over fresh rolls and jam and cheese. Something she’d written that I identified with very much was that she felt good living in Germany, but found that she often had to defend her nationality against negative stereotypes while traveling, always having to say things like, “I’m German, but I’m not a Nazi,” and the like. This is something that I also find myself doing when in foreign places – “I’m American, but...” (…but I’m not a brainless cheerleader who’s slept with the whole football team/ but I can speak multiple languages/ but I don’t eat at McDonalds/ etc…) It’s much better now that we have a more competent president, but there are still many terribly embarrassing American stereotypes that I’m often defending myself against.

After breakfast and conversation, Petra drove me around Fürth and showed me her favorite bits of city architecture. Most of the city survived the war unscathed because of its huge Jewish population (its nickname is something along the lines of “the German Jerusalem”), so most of the beautifully designed old sandstone buildings remain. Fürth was almost completely light brown in the same way that Salzburg was white-cream colored. It was yet another style of architecture I hadn’t seen before.

When the tour was complete, Petra brought me to the train station and saw me off on my way. Whenever I’d been in train stations and seen trains headed to Hamburg-Altona in the past week or two, I could feel my heart go pitter-pat and part of me wanted nothing more than to hop on and go to my home in the Great German North. This time, however, I was happily able to board one of those trains and four and a half hours later, I was back. It was still just as cold and snowy as I’d left it, but that was okay with me.) In the final stages of planning this trip, I’d decided to take a break in Hamburg for three nights so that I could do a real load of laundry, see some familiar faces, and sleep in my own bed. When the time to travel north finally came around, I was ready to play local again rather than tourist.

However! Something that surprised me very much at this time was that I wasn’t going insane yet. My inner introvert was not throwing a temper tantrum as I had expected it would and in fact, I even felt like I could stay with a couple more host families before going to live under a bridge in some huge anonymous metropolis. I think part of this feeling may be due to all the independence I had during the trip. For some reason I hadn’t really thought about the fact that (duh) people work during the week, so they wouldn’t necessarily have that much time to play host. That gave me lots of me-time to even out the overly-social-time. Go extrovert, go!

However (again)! Now typing this on a late train to Leipzig after only two full days in Hamburg, I have to admit that I would have much rather stayed around for a good while longer before taking off again. I didn’t for a moment seriously consider calling off the rest of the trip, but I can’t promise that the thought didn’t cross my mind. I might have felt more ready to go if I hadn’t been in full-throttle socializing mode every moment I was back (early morning with a hectically wonderful family, long train ride, and then almost immediately into baking veggie lasagna and mocha pecan pie with coffee whipped cream for eight people that night), but what can you do. Come to think of it, I really haven’t had any downtime since Christmas-ish (er… before that), as I was rehearsing, performing, finishing classes, in Mallorca, and then all over the country. Luckily this leg of the journey will be shorter – only four families/eight nights in East Germany. There are three or so families in other parts of Germany that weren’t able to host me during this time but expressed great interest in having me visit later, so I’ll probably go spend a few nights with them sometime this semester. The next four hosts on the list look like lots of fun, so hopefully everything will work out.