Beautiful Grapes (Germany #19)

BACHARACH--2,000 years ago, this walled Roman city located at the foot of steep mountain walls was a Rhine Valley stronghold. For generations, it thrived by controlling the wine trade on the river through its customs house. Grapes still grow abundantly on the adjacent dizzying slopes and are used in fine Riesling wines produced here.

Arriving at noon from Cologne, we embark on a mobile wine-tasting slash walking tour of the town, which if you ask me is by far the best way to do it.

Every house in Bacharach has a wine cellar. The one we visit is more like a dark mountain cavern; nonetheless wine is still being made there, and by the most modern of methods. Our guide, a personable young woman who is both a Bacharach native and novelist, says one family now does most of the wine-growing, with Polish workers coming for a few weeks every September and October to harvest the grapes.

 Although Bacharach (pop.  900) relies on wine and tourism for survival, the season is short. There are not enough year-round jobs for the town’s young people, who thus must look elsewhere for employment. Knowing this makes me glad I’ve come and will spend some euros; a place so historic and beautiful deserves to survive and must be preserved.

And beautiful it is. Our tour takes us along a stone-walled stream running through the town. At one point, we come to a spot known as “Painter’s Corner” featuring a wonderful view of nearly vertical hillside vineyards. The name is a tribute to J.M.W. Turner (1775 - 1851), perhaps the most famous English Romantic landscape artist, who once painted it; a copy of his work still hangs in the town.

Our walk ends with a fine spread of sausages, cheeses, breads, and wine at Weingut Karl Heidrich, the oldest wine tavern in town (established 1505). When I learn how inexpensive their excellent Rieslings are (4-6 euros a bottle!), I decide to purchase four bottles. A fellow tourist warns that shipping to the U.S. will cost 45 euros, but we can take this much home in our suitcases--and we do.

When I wonder aloud if American composer Burt Bacharach has any connection to this town, Joachim asks if he is of Jewish descent, explaining that many German Jews took on the names of their towns. Later, I learn that Bacharach, son of Irma and Bert Bacharach (a well-known syndicated newspaper columnist), is indeed of German-Jewish descent.

We depart from Bacharach by taking an hour-long boat ride down the Rhine, which cuts through this high mountain valley. Stretches of woodlands and cliffs line both sides of the river, along with picturesque towns. Impressive castles perch on high bluffs. Grapevines grow everywhere.

Rome to Marx (Germany #18)

TRIER--Founded in 16 B.C., this is the oldest city in Germany--and the birthplace of Karl Marx (1818).

Trier (pop.100,000) lies on the banks of the Moselle River in a valley between low vine-covered hills of sandstone. It’s near the border with Luxembourg and within the important Mosel wine region; another charming city with impressive ruins.

After arriving in time for lunch (we never miss a meal!) we have a lecture on Trier’s Roman origins (they defeated Assyrian colonizers who’d settled here around 2000 BC). The city later became the capital of the Roman province of Gallia Belgica and Roman prefecture of Gaul. Within its walls, as many as 70,000 may have lived.

Our guide, a local teacher who has discovered numerous artifacts (especially Roman coins from the river bed), leads us on a walking tour beginning at the Porta Nigra (180 A.D.), said to be the best-preserved of all Roman city gates worldwide. This gate to the old Roman city also is the beginning of the present-day pedestrian zone. As an unpaid volunteer, our guide also helped go through the excavated earth from the major Roman site in the middle of the town square, above which an impressive glass-walled building has been erected.

The Basilika, Emperor Constantine’s throne room, is the largest surviving single-room structure from Roman times. Going to the public baths was an important part of Roman life and Trier had three large ones. It also had an amphitheatre that is still used today for occasional concerts.

Leaping forward to the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, we learn thatTrier passed to the Kingdom of Prussia. As part of the Prussian Rhineland, it developed economically during the 19th century. The city rose in revolt during the revolutions of 1848 in the German states, although the rebels were forced to concede. Trier became part of the German Empire in 1871.

During WWII, over 60,000 British prisoners of war, captured at Dunkirk and Northern France, were marched to Trier, which became a staging post for British soldiers headed for German prisoner-of-war camps. Trier was heavily bombed and bombarded in 1944; 40% of the inner city was destroyed.

At dinner, our tour leader Joaichim treats us to a bottle of wine out of his own pocket at a wine bar across the street from the Karl Marx House museum, where the author of The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–1894), both co-written with his friend and fellow German revolutionary socialist Friedrich Engels, was born.

The house’s significance went unnoticed until 1904. After working hard to buy it, the Social Democratic Party of Germany succeeded in 1928. After the Nazis came to power in 1933, the building was confiscated and turned into a printing house. In 1947 the building was opened as a museum of the life and works of Marx. About 32,000 visit every year, 1/3 of whom are tourists from China, for whom it is one of the main attractions in Germany. This is why several large Chinese restaurants are situated nearby, according to Joaichim, who says many Chinese tourists won’t eat anything but Chinese food.

Little is known about Karl Marx's childhood. Born into a wealthy middle class family of Jewish ancestry, he was privately educated until 1830, when he entered Trier High School. The school employed many liberal humanists as teachers, angering the government; police raided it in 1832.

In 1835, the seventeen year-old Marx entered the University of Bonn to study philosophy and literature. But his father insisted on law as a more practical field of study. He was able to avoid military service because of a weak chest. Young Marx was more interested in alcohol (he was co-president of the Trier Tavern Club drinking society) and socializing than studying law.

Due to his poor grades, his father forced him to transfer to the far more serious and academically oriented University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of Hegel and in 1836 became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen. Marx also wrote both non-fiction and fiction for his own enjoyment. In 1837, he completed a short novel, Scorpion and Felix; a one act drama, Oulanem; and some poems; none of which were published in his lifetime.

Following the completion of his studies, Marx became a journalist in Cologne, writing for a radical newspaper. In 1843, he married Jenny and moved to Paris, writing for other radical papers. In 1845, he became a leading figure of the Communist League, moved back to Cologne, and founded his own newspaper. In 1849, he was exiled and moved to London, where he and his family lived in poverty, and Marx continued writing and formulating his theories about the nature of society.

On the way back to our hotel from dinner, Joaichim tells me that Marx had an affair with Engels’ wife, and Engels tolerated it. Talk about to each according to his needs! I wonder how different the world might be today if they had never written anything.

The Black Forest (Germany #17)

HEIDELBERG--Suddenly stricken by a bronchial virus, I took to my hotel bed for two hours in the afternoon, regrettably missing a guided tour of the baroque old town, which is dominated by the ruins of Heidelberg Castle on steep wooded slopes high above the River Neckar. The castle, a popular tourist attraction surrounded by a park, is a mix of styles from Gothic to Renaissance. An old stone bridge (erected 1786-88) and medieval bridge gate were originally part of the town wall.

Located in south-west Germany in the Rhine Rift Valley, Heidelberg (pop.145,000) occupies mainly the left river bank and is bordered by mountains. It’s among the warmest regions of Germany, with plants atypical of central Europe, including almond and fig trees. It’s an historic city, as well. The University of Heidelberg played a leading part in the era of humanism and reformation in the 15th and 16th centuries. Heidelberg's library, founded in 1421, is the oldest public library in Germany still intact.

From 1933–1945, Heidelberg was a stronghold of the Nazi regime. Non-Aryan university staff were discriminated against. By 1939, one-third had been forced out for racial and political reasons. During Kristallnacht (9 November 1938), Nazis burned down two synagogues and started systematically deporting Jews; 150 were sent to Dachau concentration camp, and thousands of others followed.

On 30 March 1945, the civilian population surrendered to the U.S. Army without resistance. Historians believe Heidelberg escaped bombing in WWII because it was neither an industrial center nor a transport hub, and America wanted to use the city as a garrison after the war (we’ve had a military base here since 1951).

On our second day here, I’d recovered sufficiently to take part in a trip to the Black Forest, a wooded mountain range in southwestern Germany bordered by the Rhine valley. It was a long drive, made longer by traffic congestion and fog that hid the high peaks and scenic hills. It was so named by the Romans because its dense growth of conifers blocked out most of the light inside the forest. Today, the Black Forest mostly consists of pines and firs, some of which are grown commercially. Due to mass logging and land use changes, it’s only a fraction of its original size. And in 1999, a cyclone downed trees on hundreds of acres of mountaintops, leaving some bare.

On a happier note, we had a fabulous lunch at an inn that included the famous Black Forest cake, which of course is made with chocolate cake, cream, sour cherries, and Kirsch.

On the way back to Heidelberg, I visited Kloster Alpirsbach, a Benedictine monastery magnificent in its starkness. Now a protestant church, it nonetheless has a Catholic church attached to it; a reminder of the days when if your prince changed his religion, everyone did. Monks began brewing beer there in 1095. A yeasty aroma in the air--and a sign on the brewery next door proclaiming theirs the “World’s greatest beer”--indicated that the beer-making tradition remains.

In the evening, we dined at a 350-year-old “romantik hotel” in the wine-growing region, where the vineyards grow on nearly vertical mountain slopes and all work must be done by hand because mechanized farm equipment can’t get up there.