Cruise on the Rhine

What is it with Hercules? The Germans of the Enlightenment appeared to worship the guy, and everywhere you go there are statues of him killing small animals with a club. Surely, in order to depict him as heroic, you would make the animals a little bigger? That disturbing artwork aside, our second foray into Germany was even better than the first. We spent five days in Munich, exploring the city on foot and visiting all the glorious architecture for which it is famous.


Of these, the new town hall was probably most impressive, built in the fashion of an old castle, with towering spires, ornately decorated with gothic symbols and hanging flower beds full of roses. There was also, directly in front of it, a massive three tonne solid gold statue of the Virgin Mary. The story goes that in the 15th century religious wars, a protestant army from the north invaded Munich and the local Duke exercised his discretion and fled into the woods to hide. When the invaders inexplicably left, and the Duke returned, the citizens were naturally none too happy with him. The Duke explained that he had been in the woods praying to the Virgin Mary to save them and, no need to thank him, but it had clearly worked! Hence the statue, not of him victorious on a horse, but of Mary. The political skill of the rulers in those days clearly puts ours to shame.



Other notable activities around Munich included a day trip to the castle of King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Christine had seen it before, but nothing she described prepared me for the sheer hubris of the place. Ludwig himself had been a very young man when he ascended the throne of Bavaria in the mid-nineteenth century, and his childhood prior to that had been a lonely one in which he spent most of his time reading fairytales. Naturally, on becoming king, he literally built one of the castles from those fairytales so he could live in it (exactly what I would have done, but with central heating) We've all seen it before, it's the one the Disneyland castle is based on, but you still can't believe it's real at first. It was actually designed, not by a military man, but a theatre set designer. It was never completely finished, Ludwig was deposed and murdered having spent all his money on castles when he was about 40, but what is there is astonishing. All the more so because it was just for him and his fantasy world - he was the Michael Jackson of the 19th century!



Munich would not have been complete of course without a trip to a beer hall, and we sampled the delights of the Augustinian Brewery. 'The beers too good to give you a hangover', my arse. Christine and I were shattered the next day and have sworn off drinking until the next time we pass a pub. Christine did make a friend in the form of a 70 year old gentleman who had absolutely no respect for my presence and basically proposed to her. Even though he was rich we was not a real good prospect as he spent 4 hours a day in that hall, so we turned him down...



The good is always balanced by the bleak in Germany though, and we also visited Dachau, the first concentration camp built in Germany prior to the Second World War. In many respects in looked like any old military barracks, with rows of buildings to house the prisoners, and a massive gravel parade ground for the roll calls that covered a good acre. Then we followed a small path out the rear of the camp to the crematorium. It was a single low building with about half a dozen rooms. Victims were taken to the first room and briefed on the 'showers' they were about to take, ordered to undress in the second room before being crammed into the third. Standing in the third room made me want to belong to a different species, maybe an amoeba or a worm. There were fake shower heads in the low ceiling to preserve the illusion, and then drainage holes in the concrete floor to carry away the human waste left after the guards outside dropped in two capsules of poison gas. Christine refused to take a photo in this room and I can't blame her, it was horrific. Other prisoners then dragged the corpses into the fourth room to be cremated in large ovens which are still preserved. Next time someone talks to me about the danger posed to our 'Australian Way Of Life' by immigrants, I am going to slap them and point them in the direction of Dachau, because that is where it all ends.


On a more pleasant note, the following day we caught a train to Koblenz, situated where the Moselle and Rhine rivers meet. We did a 7 hour cruise up to Bingham, passing through some of the most gorgeous country I have seen. There were steep, green hills lining each side and they were absolutely littered with vineyards and medieval castles looking down on us as we floated on by. We must have seen about 30 different castles, the main purpose of them being to extract a toll from the poor barge operators plying their trade up and down the Rhine (just like Sydney!) Most of them dated from the early middle ages and had changed owners innumerable times over the years through the fortunes of war, but most had survived through being continually rebuilt. Being a peasant in those days appeared to consist of working to build castles for you lordship, so he then had the necessary fortifications and power to levy taxes on you to pay for the castle (ah, the more things change... etc)



After Koblenz it was a short hop for a single night in Cologne. We spent time in their enormous Cathedral, which was somehow left untouched when the remainder of the city was devastated in World War II, and then tried to visit the Museum of Chocolate... but it was closed!! Christine was utterly, utterly devastated but will make up for it with a visit to the Couture Houses of Paris (and here was I thinking Guy Laroche played on the blind side for France!