A Week in Germany: Saturday

21. 01. 2012

Up early. Off to Heathrow's Terminal 1. Been a long time since I’ve been to the old Terminals 1 and 2-3. Flights to the States leave from the new Terminals 4 and 5. Since Bibs was born 4.5 years ago — Yes it was just her half-birthday which Montessori celebrates for children whose birthdays fall in the summer holiday. Sadly she celebrated the day not in school, but home with a nasty flu caught from her brother, and then passed on to her mother. The family flu.

Anyway, since Bibs was born 4.5 years ago nearly all our travel has been to Boston to welcome or to visit grandchildren. Today we are off to Germany for a week. When Bob worked at Citibank he travelled in Europe a lot for meetings. Often I would meet up with him for a long weekend wherever he was. That’s how I saw the highpoints of many European capitals during the early years of living in London. He has convinced his new bosses that visiting clients in Germany may be a worthwhile expense even in these straitened times. And bank travel is now in the back of the plane where I always sat, but for one or two hour flights to Europe, even once cosseted bankers can cope.

Frankfurt is a one hour flight, but a bit bumpy through the cloudy stormy weather system sitting over northern Europe since the planes don’t have enough time in the air to fly high above the continental weather. Easy trip into the city to our hotel, near the train station, filled with tour groups from the States and from Japan.

Losing an hour in the London to Europe time difference always makes it imperative to hit the ground running on arrival or what was the point of getting up so early in the first place. So we headed out immediately for lunch and the itinerary chosen by me, always acknowledged as the family tour leader. In the half hour walk to the Domplatz, we passed in the train station a small group of people demonstrating their wish to bring back “Glass-Steagall,” holding up posters with FDR’s face.  In the mall across the street from the train station, we passed a larger demonstration of people demanding the release of Bradley Manning. A few blocks further, and we passed by the “Occupy Frankfurt” encampment under the giant Euro sign at the ECB. America truly belongs to the world.

An excellent lunch at  Paulaner am Dom, chosen from a TripAdvisor list of Frankfurt favourites, a schnitzel  for Bob and a bowl of pea soup with a pretzel on the side for me. And a large stein of the excellent Paulaner dunkel bier from Munich. The restaurant was once in a medieval hostelry facing the back of the Dom, but a bombing raid wiped out most of the historic heart of Frankfurt in 1944. So everything has been carefully and authentically rebuilt, but the aura of medievalism can never be quite recreated.

The red sandstone Dom dedicated to St Bartholomew was built in 1877, ten years after the previous church was destroyed in a fire. This building was reconstructed after the 1944 bomb damage gutted the interior and reduced the building to a shell. Nevertheless it is  filled with a treasure load of medieval altarpieces and tomb monuments, because it is the fifth church on the site, and a previous incarnation was the site of the election and coronation of the Holy Roman Emperors, hence the name Kaiserdom.

The tower dominates the old city's skyline

A tomb monument

A jolly Germanic Last Supper

Even better, it may be closer to February than it is to Christmas, but the lighted Christmas trees still flank the high altar and the stunning Krippen tableau—the crèche scenes beloved in Germany—is still in place at the back of the nave.

Christmas trees lighting the dark afternoon

The Krippen is so large, one view was not enough to see both the stable
and the Three Kings approaching

Now I don’t feel so bad about the snowmen who are still  settled on our mantel in London, nor have I had the heart to remove the Santa hats from our welcome bears. A local toy store is also not in a rush to move past Christmas.

Outside the Dom is a fenced area that is called the Archaeological Garden that is an active dig site, and at the moment mostly covered with white tents, but around the edges some excavated foundations are visible.

The 12^th century Nikolaikirche in the Römerplatz, the historic heart of the city, has a simple plaster and red sandstone interior that is very beautiful. Some of the medieval tomb covers and sculptures were saved after the bombing and have been installed on the walls of the nave.

St Nikolai has a huge carillon, and here is a You Tube link

A carved pediment over the entrance

Mayor Siegfried zum Paradies and his wife Katharina Netheha zum Wedel.
Both were created by Madern Gerthener (1410/1420).

By mid-afternoon, we at last reached the Archaeological Museum in the Carmelite Monastery built in the late 15th century. What an amazing place. The monastery has been refitted to house the museum without destroying the integrity of the original religious foundation. The museum’s collection is displayed in the church nave under a ceiling that still retains bits of the painted decoration. The collection is a combination of local finds and an extensive collection of Classical and Oriental pieces. The local finds are the most interesting although textual commentary on the artefacts only in German does limit the appreciation for those of us who studied German in high school and currently remember only about one in four vocabulary words. However a short video with a choice of written captions including English was a wonderful virtual reconstruction of the buildings being excavated in the Archaeological Garden outside the Dom. The building is a Carolingian-Ottonian Palace begun in the 9th century by Ludwig the Pious and various chapels and churches that eventually became the Dom.

The star attraction at the Museum is the monastic cloister whose walls are adorned with a 15^th century cycle of wall paintings recounting the life of Christ. 

The cloister is lovely, but the glass enclosure kept catching
the light in my camera lens.

By the time we walked around the cloister, the daylight was waning, and the skies were dark with rain clouds, so we will have to return another day when the light is on our side to see these amazing paintings done by Jörg Rathgeb between 1480 and 1526 on two sides of the cloister. The paintings are done as connected vertical panels beginning with the Nativity.

The weather was deteriorating by the time we returned to the hotel for a late afternoon rest, and a long nap in my case, and when we heard the rain and wind pattering on the windows, we opted for an easy supper in the hotel restaurant.