After spending Saturday night, Sunday, and Monday morning in Berlin, then Monday night and Tuesday exploring Dortmund and Soest, and Wednesday morning driving to Pfungstadt, we had exhausted the three places with family connections in Germany that we wanted to visit. We now became out-and-out, no-good, dirty rotten tourists.
Wednesday afternoon we arrived in the city of Ulm, which held two points of interest for us. First up was the Ulm Munster, or Cathedral, which boasts the tallest steeple in the world--over 500 feet tall. And yes, you can climb up it. We arrived in the late afternoon and started up.
Mary was the first to call "Uncle," stopping at the first level--a cool room atop the bells in the steeple with windows set up so you could look down onto the massive bells. "I'll wait for you here," she said, and Sarah, David and I headed up.
We reached a point that seemed pretty high up, and only then noticed the staircase in the middle of the steeple that went even higher. That's where Sarah called it quits; she sat down on the metal that formed the roof of the steeple (or base of the topmost part) and waited for David and I to ascend that last staircase.
When we reached the top, the view was fantastic. I kept worrying about dropping the camera over the side; David was just ecstatic about climbing that high up. We walked around the narrow catwalk (all done in stone, very impressive) and looked out over the Danube, the city, and the plaza below. Then we headed down, collecting Sarah on the way, then found Mary for the descent to the base. When we got all the way down, my calves certainly knew they had had a workout that day. There are 768 stairs, which is to say 1,536 going both directions. I felt them all by the time I was done.
We toured the main body of the Munster itself, and admired the German coats-of-arms along the walls. We looked in vain for the Kleppinger coat of arms, but I realized the chances were slim; we were too far south and east for where our family had been. David and I explored a crypt, which seemed (if my middle German is any good...and it's not...) to hold the remains of some bishops from the Middle Ages; impressive in a church whose record-holding steeple was finished only in the early 19th century.
After the Munster, and a bite of refreshment in a cafe in its north shadow, we discovered a note from the local constablulary on the windshield of the car: we'd parked and failed to pay at the meter, so I got a 5-euro parking ticket. Grrr. We then drove over to the second thing we wanted to see in Ulm: Albert Einstein's birthplace. David, on learning this spring that Einstein was born in Germany, announced he wanted to see it, and so we did. The building itself is gone, but in its place is a whimsical memorial to the genius featuring his famous tongue-sticking-out grin.
That evening we drove to Gunzburg, outside of Legoland Deutschland, and rested for our longest, and most packed, day of the trip: Thursday July 1.
Wednesday, August 18, 2010
Sunday, August 15, 2010
Europe Trip: Where We Come From
One of the principal reasons for the trip was to celebrate the 700th anniversary of recorded Kleppinger family history: we apparently trace to 1310 in the town of Dortmund, with later emigrations to Soest and Pfungstadt. And so we made a point to visit each place, in turn, to see where we're from.
Dortmund is now a major city, but in the medieval period it was a walled town in roughly the shape of an oval, and was a major trading hub for western Germany. The major axis of the oval today is a shopping street, with lots of stores and boutiques, in a nod to its mercantile heritage. Now. we didn't find any Kleppingers while we were there, but we did find two special things. The first is the St Adolphus church, located just north of that major shopping street; it dates to 1250, and so while we explored that church, with its rough stone walls, we could just imagine our earliest ancestors, whose name was Klepping at the time, worshiping in that sacred space--or even helping to build it.
And the second was even cooler than that. Coming just off the main street, in the southeastern part of the old town, was a pretty, tree-lined boulevard with more boutiques, shops, restaurants and sidewalk cafes, and a fountain at its base. The street? "Kleppingstrasse"--Klepping Street! How cool is that? The family history hangs together when telling of our time in Dortmund--apparently we were quite prosperous as wool merchants and traders, even to the point of loaning money to the English crown. And apparently we did well enough, over these last seven centuries, to have a street named after us.
Our next site was the town of Soest, about 25 miles east of Dortmund, where the family moved in the 1600s. Soest, likewise, was a walled city, and today retains much of its charm: it's just a picturesque German village, with timbered buildings, colorful walls, narrow streets, and little squares with a church on them absolutely everywhere. We ate dinner here in a little restaurant off one of those squares, with a waitress who spoke no English. Soest is famous for the green color of its limestone, and so many of the old churches and buildings are built with a greenish tinge to the stone. It wasn't until later that I remembered chemistry class and what makes stone green, and then started to wonder how close we were to the uranium mines that the Nazis were using to try to build their own a-bomb.
Soest was a picture-perfect place, a tiny town with a lot of charm, just as Dortmund was a large city that had retained its charm as well. Our final place, though, wasn't quite the same. I believe that Pfungstadt is the town from which Johann Goerg Kleppinger emigrated to America in 1732, and in looking around at the place on Wednesday (June 30), I can see why he left. It's beige: it's just a plain, simple, almost drab, colorless town 30 miles south of Frankfurt. It's surrounded by factories, so it doesn't even feel very welcoming. We did notice, though, that the landscape around town is reminiscent of eastern Pennsylvania; I could easily see Johann getting off the ship in Philadelphia, looking around eastern PA, and deciding, Yeah, this looks like home: rolling hills, farmland.... The other thing that was notable about Pfungstadt (in addition to its local beer) was a road sign we saw pointing that-a-way to the Town Archives. Oh, if I had a pad of paper, a pencil, and two free days...! But that's not why we were there, I reminded myself; this is the sampler tour, so we can come back another time to find Johann's birth records and the like.
Dortmund is now a major city, but in the medieval period it was a walled town in roughly the shape of an oval, and was a major trading hub for western Germany. The major axis of the oval today is a shopping street, with lots of stores and boutiques, in a nod to its mercantile heritage. Now. we didn't find any Kleppingers while we were there, but we did find two special things. The first is the St Adolphus church, located just north of that major shopping street; it dates to 1250, and so while we explored that church, with its rough stone walls, we could just imagine our earliest ancestors, whose name was Klepping at the time, worshiping in that sacred space--or even helping to build it.
And the second was even cooler than that. Coming just off the main street, in the southeastern part of the old town, was a pretty, tree-lined boulevard with more boutiques, shops, restaurants and sidewalk cafes, and a fountain at its base. The street? "Kleppingstrasse"--Klepping Street! How cool is that? The family history hangs together when telling of our time in Dortmund--apparently we were quite prosperous as wool merchants and traders, even to the point of loaning money to the English crown. And apparently we did well enough, over these last seven centuries, to have a street named after us.
Our next site was the town of Soest, about 25 miles east of Dortmund, where the family moved in the 1600s. Soest, likewise, was a walled city, and today retains much of its charm: it's just a picturesque German village, with timbered buildings, colorful walls, narrow streets, and little squares with a church on them absolutely everywhere. We ate dinner here in a little restaurant off one of those squares, with a waitress who spoke no English. Soest is famous for the green color of its limestone, and so many of the old churches and buildings are built with a greenish tinge to the stone. It wasn't until later that I remembered chemistry class and what makes stone green, and then started to wonder how close we were to the uranium mines that the Nazis were using to try to build their own a-bomb.
Soest was a picture-perfect place, a tiny town with a lot of charm, just as Dortmund was a large city that had retained its charm as well. Our final place, though, wasn't quite the same. I believe that Pfungstadt is the town from which Johann Goerg Kleppinger emigrated to America in 1732, and in looking around at the place on Wednesday (June 30), I can see why he left. It's beige: it's just a plain, simple, almost drab, colorless town 30 miles south of Frankfurt. It's surrounded by factories, so it doesn't even feel very welcoming. We did notice, though, that the landscape around town is reminiscent of eastern Pennsylvania; I could easily see Johann getting off the ship in Philadelphia, looking around eastern PA, and deciding, Yeah, this looks like home: rolling hills, farmland.... The other thing that was notable about Pfungstadt (in addition to its local beer) was a road sign we saw pointing that-a-way to the Town Archives. Oh, if I had a pad of paper, a pencil, and two free days...! But that's not why we were there, I reminded myself; this is the sampler tour, so we can come back another time to find Johann's birth records and the like.
Europe Trip: Exploring Berlin
After our ICE trains to Berlin, we found our hotel pretty easily (thank God for subway workers who speak English) and checked in in late afternoon. We found ourselves surprisingly awake still despite the jet lag and the long hours awake, so we went exploring.
Our hotel was a few blocks inside what would have been East Berlin only 21 years before, and about four blocks from Checkpoint Charlie itself. We walked over and the stories are right: there is precious little that remains of the Berlin Wall there. There are murals along the street that bisected the wall, and running across the street is a two-wide set of cobblestones that marked where the Wall had stood. But from a distance you wouldn't know it was ever there. We toured the Wall museum that's there and the kids had some insight into what it meant, seeing the ways people used to escape and what happened when they didn't.
That night, and through much of our time in Berlin, we had surprising difficulty getting Sarah to eat. She's usually our foodie, and so for her to become picky was not what we had expected. We eventually hit on the key: Italian food. Spaghetti, pizza...familiar things like that were OK with her.
Our full day in Berlin (Sunday, June 27) we slept in a little, then after lunch boarded one of those hop-on-hop-off city tour buses. That enabled us to see all manner of sights, and as the weather was terrific, we could sit on the open-air top deck of the bus and really see everything. We did see more of the Wall then; Berlin left a segment by the Spee River standing and it's now an outdoor mural site for local artists.
Speaking of other atrocities, David wanted to see where Hitler's final bunker was, and so we walked to find it. It turns out to be relatively unmarked; there is a placard in front of an otherwise unassuming dirt parking lot in front of an otherwise unassuming set of apartment buildings, and you have to know what you're looking for to find it. It's good, we decided, to not make a big deal of the place, especially given what atrocities were directed from there. I felt a little uneasy standing there; the power of evil had diminished in the last 65 years, but it was still in the air. Irony alert: nearby is the German memorial to the Holocaust victims.
Walking back to the hotel that night was interrupted by the squeal of vuvuzelas and the honking of thousands of horns; Germany had just defeated Argentina in the World Cup playoffs, and Berlin started going nuts with its pride for the team. The row lasted until around 10--we could still hear some horns that late! The kids got to understand how important World Cup soccer is in just about anywhere else in the world.
Our hotel was a few blocks inside what would have been East Berlin only 21 years before, and about four blocks from Checkpoint Charlie itself. We walked over and the stories are right: there is precious little that remains of the Berlin Wall there. There are murals along the street that bisected the wall, and running across the street is a two-wide set of cobblestones that marked where the Wall had stood. But from a distance you wouldn't know it was ever there. We toured the Wall museum that's there and the kids had some insight into what it meant, seeing the ways people used to escape and what happened when they didn't.
That night, and through much of our time in Berlin, we had surprising difficulty getting Sarah to eat. She's usually our foodie, and so for her to become picky was not what we had expected. We eventually hit on the key: Italian food. Spaghetti, pizza...familiar things like that were OK with her.
Our full day in Berlin (Sunday, June 27) we slept in a little, then after lunch boarded one of those hop-on-hop-off city tour buses. That enabled us to see all manner of sights, and as the weather was terrific, we could sit on the open-air top deck of the bus and really see everything. We did see more of the Wall then; Berlin left a segment by the Spee River standing and it's now an outdoor mural site for local artists.
Speaking of other atrocities, David wanted to see where Hitler's final bunker was, and so we walked to find it. It turns out to be relatively unmarked; there is a placard in front of an otherwise unassuming dirt parking lot in front of an otherwise unassuming set of apartment buildings, and you have to know what you're looking for to find it. It's good, we decided, to not make a big deal of the place, especially given what atrocities were directed from there. I felt a little uneasy standing there; the power of evil had diminished in the last 65 years, but it was still in the air. Irony alert: nearby is the German memorial to the Holocaust victims.
Walking back to the hotel that night was interrupted by the squeal of vuvuzelas and the honking of thousands of horns; Germany had just defeated Argentina in the World Cup playoffs, and Berlin started going nuts with its pride for the team. The row lasted until around 10--we could still hear some horns that late! The kids got to understand how important World Cup soccer is in just about anywhere else in the world.
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