German journey

THE TRAVEL REVIEW III
R D Kernohan's whistlestop tour (with the Czech Republic thrown in)

Berlin by night

Tegel
As big-city airports go, Berlin's Tegel (near Spandau) is quite pleasant, with its hexagonal terminal and brief walks to the gates but it will be gone by 2012. One of the last distortions caused by the Cold War and the Wall will be smoothed out when the old East German airport at Schönefeld becomes Berlin's airport. But the airport I shall miss is the inner-city Tempelhof, latterly much reduced in its services, which I remember from happy landings after bumpy flights along the air corridor even before the Wall went up. It also has a sentimental role for Berliners because of its part in the Airlift, but sentiment lost out in a referendum about keeping it open. The pro-Tempelhof vote didn't reach the required electoral percentage.

Berlin
The 100 bus route takes us from our West Berlin hotel near the zoo to the heart of the old East Berlin, the still ugly but slightly brightened Alexanderplatz, by way of the Reichstag (now Bundestag) and the Unter den Linden. Take a 200 bus back and you get a longer trip by the Potsdamerplatz, taking in the traffic jams in the revived business area once so blighted by the Wall. It still takes a bit of getting used to.
     I always liked Berlin, even in the bad days, but it is now possible to enjoy it. It is a spacious green city but its public transport is excellent. It is too flat a place to show off its best buildings to full advantage; but the Unter den Linden is one of Europe's great streets again, though quieter than the revived and more commercial Friedrichstrasse. Yet I still have a soft spot for the massive KDW department store of West Berlin, as interesting as Harrods and a lot better value. Its toy department must have the largest gathering of teddy bears ever assembled away from the annual picnic.
     The Gendarmenmarkt, for long the ugliest of DDR Berlin's ruins, has recovered its classical elegance and the problems of the Museum Island (Europe's most compact concentration of great galleries) are no longer those of major reconstruction but of an apparent German itch to keep reorganising everything. Even the grandiose cathedral sponsored by the last Kaiser has come into its own again with the upward revaluation of Victorian and Edwardian architecture. It is the only church I know to have a statue of Calvin within its doors – an odd sign of the Old Prussian Church's inclusion of both Lutheran and Reformed traditions. There remains one open sore on a prime site across from the cathedral, perhaps the premier site of Berlin for it was once covered by the baroque royal palace. The Communists demolished a restorable building to accommodate their Marx-Engels Platz and then added the Palast der Republik, part parliament, part civic centre. Its construction made liberal use of asbestos and, according to which Berliners you consult, this has either compelled its destruction or provided an excuse for it.
     But parts of the steel framework still remain, adding possible delays to the uncertainties of the plan approved by the Bundestag to create a great cultural centre, the 'Humboldtforum', within a reconstructed palace. Building is to start in 2010 and off-site masonry work is said to have begun.
     I made one curious discovery from a book I bought in the Unter den Linden which included the journal of the 1826 visit to Scotland by Berlin's great architect, K F Schinkel. When this master of the classical style came to Edinburgh he seemed less interested in the New Town than in the picturesque contrasts of the old one and its romantic surroundings. He was, like most educated Europeans of his time, spellbound by Sir Walter Scott, though he also made the fashionable pilgrimage to Robert Owen's New Lanark.

Potsdam
At the moment Potsdam confirms R L Stevenson's assertion that to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive. I had been hoping to see it for a long time but Western journalists were not welcome in DDR times and I had been too busy since. But I was mildly disappointed. The palaces are fine but historic palaces, like historic churches, can seem dead when no longer used for their original purpose. The youngest palace, the English-country-house-style Cecilienhof built for the last Crown Prince ('Little Willie'), seemed the liveliest. This is partly because the 1945 conference there means more to us than the Hohenzollerns and partly because half of it is a hotel, with wedding-parties on the lawn.
     But the town centre is a mess, torn apart by rebuilding work and with down-at-heel parts and some nasty graffiti. I was told that bits of Potsdam are becoming fashionable and a quarter of the population is said to have come from Berlin or West Germany, but there are many signs of the legacy left by isolation from Berlin, the Russian Cold War presence, and the DDR’s attempt to proletarianise the old Prussian and military city. The cleaned-up neo-Communist Party (PDS) even came close to getting its candidate in as mayor.
     The military traditions of Potsdam also complicate a restoration problem. While the plans to rebuild the town palace are going ahead, there is confusion over the rebuilding of the Garrison Church, swept away by the Communists. It had architectural merit and historic importance but it was the scene of Hitler's infamous charade when the Austrian-born retired Bavarian lance-corporal strutted before the senile Hindenburg as the heir to Frederick the Great and Bismarck. I got confusing advice on the spot about prospects and the internet reveals agreement in principle to rebuild but argument and even rancour over both the finances and the aim of the project, with disagreements about what sort of church or 'peace centre' it should be.

Magdeburg
Magdeburg is maybe best seen from the Elbe, for the towers on the ridge above don't at first sight reveal how much character the city lost in war-time destruction and nearly half a century of Communism. The DDR restored some outstanding buildings with painful slowness, among them the Magdeburg Rathaus, but it planked down 'socialist architecture' in incongruous places and left many empty spaces.
     The earliest German Gothic cathedral suffered relatively moderate damage in the war and played a notable part in the protests of 1989, but the DDR had more success in paganising East Germany than communising it. That noble cathedral, with its medieval and modern religious sculptures, is the setting for a story I was told. I cannot vouch for its truth but it makes a point. A party of East German teachers are supposed to have been brought to study the art and architecture. 'By the way,' said one afterwards, 'Who was the man on the Cross?'
     But Magdeburg has one advantage over West German cities. We needed some supplies on a Saturday afternoon, when it can be hard to find a proper shop open in Hamburg. The biggest Magdeburg department store was open and doing brisk business, livelier than the streets around it. I took a tram towards the cathedral quarter and got a salutary lesson to share with those Edinburgh citizens who will live to see our super-trams. Modern trams run far faster than the Glasgow cars of my youth and can brake sharply. You don't just get a hurl. If you're unwary you get hurled about. I nursed a badly banged knee for several days afterwards.

Wittenberg
'Lutherstadt Wittenberg', to quote its formal name, is rather a dozy place these days for a town that saw the start of one of the world's great revolutions. It never quite recovered from the loss of the university which had Martin Luther as a professor and (according to Shakespeare) Hamlet as a student. There is a bogus 'Hamlet's house' round the back of Luther's town church. The number of hymn books stacked for the congregation's use suggests that attendances have dropped off since that notable ministry.

Meissen
Having done the long haul up to Meissen's hill-top cathedral on a previous visit, we lingered around the lower town, finding a busy market, a healthy-looking town church, and a bookshop that did a small provincial town much credit. I think my wife says there was also a lot of porcelain about the place. However it was too early in the day to try the famous Vincenz Richter winehouse. A small group of vineyards above the Elbe produce some of the few notable wines in East Germany, some matching the Rhine in quality but not quantity.

Dresden
Although much of Berlin was still in ruins when I first saw it 50 years ago, I never felt any embarrassment about the destruction there, only a great sadness. The bombing seemed (in the Cromwellian phrase) a 'cruel necessity' and the city's greatest ordeal came from Hitler's last stand. But Dresden is different. Even though the latest research scales down the estimates of the dead in the firestorm devastation of February 1945, and even though the old city and its marvellous skyline have been as fully restored as they can be, I can't quite shake off a sense of guilt. There was no necessity. Dresden is rich in messages and symbols of reconciliation but I can't visit it without meditating not just on the need for reconciliation but the burden of atonement.
     The Communist regime made a slow, decent job of restoring the Zwinger galleries, the Semper Opera, and the palace with its Catholic court church, though it made the rest of the Altstadt a drab disaster. Only after reunification, however, did Dresden muster the civic pride, personal initiatives, sense of history, and residual religious faith to rebuild the great baroque Protestant town church, the Frauenkirche, restoring the Canaletto skyline and the main town square. The nearest British approach to its external style is the domed Radcliffe Camera in Oxford but there is no parallel to its internal splendour. This is a triumphant Lutheran variation, emphasising the links between word and sacrament (as well as the importance of church music), on a style usually associated with South German and Austrian Catholicism.
     Some critics have been scathing about the use of such resources to create an 'architectural facsimile'. But the church was busy as well as impressive and some who come to stare remain to pray.

Prague
I apologise to Czech readers for mentioning Prague in a German notebook but much turbulent and tragic history is explained by the way that the Czechs of Bohemia form a great salient biting into Germany and cutting across the direct route from Dresden to Munich. Their beloved Prague still bids to be the loveliest city in Europe, as it was when I first saw it defaced by Communist banners and with an empty site where a massive statue of Stalin had just been demolished. Now it is defaced by the impact of too much tourism in too small an area of the city, not just West European but Russian, Far Eastern, and Latin American. That makes English the main lingua franca of the Old City but the Czechs have got over their understandable post-war aversion to German. When I first went there the older people knew it but hated to speak it and the younger ones hadn't learned it.

Freising, Bavaria
To be honest, I've only had a glimpse of the towers of the old ecclesiastical capital of Bavaria but geographically this is really Freising airport and not Munich. Hardly anyone seems to use its official style, which names it after the rumbustious Bavarian politician Franz Josef Strauss. For an airport of its size it seems surprisingly painless, especially for a quick getaway into a waiting bus and on to the autobahn from which you scarcely see Munich if you choose to head for the Alps.
     Incidentally the popular British view that the autobahn was a Nazi concept is a bit astray of the truth. The first stretch of the sort, then called the 'automobile road' to Bonn, was opened in 1932 by the Lord Mayor of Cologne, a Centre Party politician called Konrad Adenauer.

Ruhpolding
Good Protestants though they are, our Bavarian hosts are anxious that we devote an unseasonably wet and raw Sunday morning to the picturesque rituals of a Georgiritt, a mounted pilgrimage in honour of St George which has somehow got separated by several months from the saint's day. Rome is lukewarm now about the St George legends but he retains a lot of supporters' clubs in Bavarian churches. Such of the open-air Mass as I heard seemed done (in the Presbyterian phrase) decently and in order, but the cold drove me to seek refuge in the Catholic Church and browse through the hymn-book. But I emerged to see whether the horses were really doused with holy water by the priest at the subsequent cavalcade. They were.

Rauschberg, Bavarian Alps
We atone for our lax Sunday morning of horses and holy water by going up for an open-air service on top of the Rauschberg. This mountain has the advantage which made the Swiss Rigi such a success in Thomas Cook's time. It's not an outstanding peak itself but is a viewpoint for range after range of mountains in several countries. I thought this might have provoked a sermon on the Devil showing Jesus 'all the kingdoms of the world,' but we got an acceptable one on wandering (an emotion-laden word in German) and signposts. After three minutes I was able to predict its future direction and destination pretty accurately. A number of curious German wanderers stopped off from the mountain paths to join in, mostly staying to the end.

Labenbachhof
The setting for the scholarly part of this encounter between Edinburgh Presbyterians and Munich Lutherans (a curious but enduring by-product of the civic 'twinning' of the cities) is a Protestant-orientated conference centre in a lonely part of the valley above Ruhpolding. It has the merit, from the viewpoint of organisers and speakers, that anyone who thinks of skipping lectures has nowhere else to go.
     What a lot depends, when you lecture in English to a foreign audience, on the quality of your translator. This can be a bit of a lottery, for people who are marvellous in idiomatic German and English can stumble on the vocabulary of history, theology, or politics. I was lucky, being allotted Brigitte, Swiss-born wife of Sandy Wedderburn, a St Andrews theologian who went via Durham to a chair at Munich. Until recently we also had another Scots minister, Alasdair Heron, with a theological chair at the North Bavarian University of Erlangen. I hope we can keep up some continuity with these academic connections. One of the themes of my talk about the international links of Scots reformed religion was the way that the emphasis in our European connections had fluctuated so much over the centuries, sometimes mainly with France or Holland, at other times with Germany and Switzerland.
     Maybe it was as well there wasn't too much time for discussion of one of my other themes, the links between imperial expansion and Scots Presbyterianism; although in taking properly modest pride in Scots missionaries and emigrants I had also deplored our consequent ignorance about countries like Brazil and Indonesia, both of which have more Presbyterians than Scotland.
     On our last night before leaving the Alps we get some singing in, responding to Goethe's Röslein rot with 'Ae Fond Kiss'. But the German trump card is a version of 'Auld Lang Syne' by an aspiring Goethe with a Düsseldorf publisher. It can't really be called a translation for it goes on about nightingales and doesn't mention drink, not even cups of kindness.

Chiemsee
The uncompleted Herrenchiemsee palace is the most bizarre of the mad King Ludwig II's creations, not just because he tried to recreate Versailles on an island but because it was a private theme park for his obsession with Louis XIV. But the Chiemsee lake has another attraction, an 80-year old paddle-steamer. The Swiss lakes have even older and better-known specimens but Chiemsee is worth a call. It was also a lot calmer and milder than my trip to the south end of Arran on the Waverley a month before.

Munich
Beer, white sausages and speeches seem to be the formula for a Munich civic reception at the Rathaus. I enjoyed all three, for the British consul-general, though apparently English, made a very sensible speech about what Scotland and Bavaria had in common. But in a very mixed company we kept off politics, though there were signs that (as happened) the Right was going to lose its absolute majority in the Bavarian State Landtag, with the gains going to Greens, rightish Liberals, and an independent alliance, not to the Social Democrats. I also kept to myself my doubts about the Bavarian conservatives' policy of claiming to be a distinctive party (as the Christian Social Union) allied in federal politics with Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats and not part of them.
     One of the things Scotland and Bavaria have in common is a Parliament with a guid conceit of itself, though I prefer the Bavarian site. The Maximilianeum, originally a royal educational foundation, has a panoramic view over Munich, a modest debating chamber, and some grand reception rooms. In one of them I was pleased to see William III, the Orange hero, had his portrait in a roomful of 'great Europeans'. They must take their ecumenism seriously in Bavaria.
     But we moved from ecumenical relations to inter-faith ones. I only saw synagogues in Berlin and Dresden from the outside, the one finely restored, the other in a bleak modern style, but here in Munich I had a conducted tour of the new synagogue.
     Neither architecturally nor theologically is it a restoration of the most conspicuous synagogue of pre-Hitler Munich, a fine Victorian building which the Nazis destroyed even before the 'Crystal Night' pogrom of 1938. It's on the opposite side of the inner city, a new building less forbidding in its setting than the Dresden one by the same architects, and is in a 'moderately conservative' orthodox tradition and not the reform one which once flourished in Munich. I don't profess to know all that now separates them, but the most obvious one is over the role of women in the synagogue and their eligibility as rabbis. But it was a woman who showed us the synagogue's treasures and its heart-rending memorial. A woman also leads German Jewry's main representative body.

Gröbenzell
I am staying at Baldham, an eastern outer suburb, but our Saturday evening Communion service is at Gröbenzell, away on the other side of Munich. The drive gives me a glimpse of the Allianz football stadium shared by Bayern Munich and the venerable but cash-strapped 1860 Munich, now languishing in the Second Bundesliga.
     We have only brought one ordained minister from Edinburgh, but he gets preaching. The other Scots get standing up to sing the 'Ye gates, lift up your heads' part of the 24th Psalm. The rest of the service is very Lutheran with a sung liturgy. Even the words of the institution of the Lord's Supper are sung, though with exemplary diction. Fortunately the presiding Dekanin of Munich has a good voice as well as a striking presence. The sung service seems commoner with Bavarian Lutherans than elsewhere in Protestant Germany but not all ministers do it.
     I noted that the one Roman Catholic among our Munich hosts joined in the Communion. It was well into the last century before Presbyterians and Lutherans had any formal agreement about orders and inter-communion (leaving aside the special case of 'Union Churches' in parts of Germany), but theologians and legalists lagged far behind local church opinion and practice. Will the same process and right of private judgment by-pass the official Roman obstacles on these matters?

Nymphenburg, Munich
After Sunday morning service (without the sung liturgy), my kind hosts at Baldham seemed desperate to show me some sights and I picked one I missed on my last trip: the summer palace at Nymphenburg, Munich's variation on themes of Versailles, Potsdam, and Schönbrunn. But I've never solved one problem. When you try to repay hospitality in a strange city you really have to ask hosts to suggest where you might go and they always modestly opt for places a star or two below what you're ready to pay. Even Nymphenburg has nearby value-for-money Gaststätten for hearty eaters.
     But I also left for my hosts W A Poucher's marvellous photographs of the Highlands, a book several stars above the usual literary-cum-photographic souvenirs of Scotland. I hope it has found a good home on suburban Munich bookshelves rich in high-class art books; a complete translation of Shakespeare into German, sonnets and all; and even a facsimile of the first Luther Bible. There were also two more surprising items there: a copy of Lorimer's New Testament in Scots and a book of mine which has been out of print for more than 10 years.
     And so to Easyjet. The Munich-Edinburgh plane seemed well filled. I hope the budget airline stays with the route and keeps the direct Scottish connections about which British Airways always seemed so half-hearted.