In Which We Briefly Visit Germany

When I mentioned to a Swiss friend that we were going to Frankfurt, she expressed surprise that we would take the trouble.  It seems that Frankfurt is not generally considered a prime tourist destination.  It was, in fact, to be a business trip, one that The Spouse has made for many years.  The Frankfurt Book Fair is the world's largest book trade show and draws everyone who is anyone in the publishing business to a huge convention center near the city's main train station.  Because many never bother to leave the center, their view of Frankfurt is confined to what can be seen from the train from the airport.

Undaunted, I looked forward to exploring a new European city.  While TS went off to meetings, I began by taking a walking tour recommended by friends who had been to Frankfurt last summer.  It's a perfect way to get to know the city; I love walking, and Frankfurt happens to be eminently walkable.  Moreover, the guide, an American expatriate named Jo, was knowledgeable, enthusiastic and good company.  The tour group included visitors from Texas, Hamburg, China, England and Malaysia, many also in town for the book fair.

A Roman Lion

Jo stressed that Frankfurt is an old city, dating back at least to the Romans who built a bridge at a natural ford of the Main River, which channeled trade from all over Europe and points beyond.  The area became a trading center where merchants gathered regularly for fairs.  The settlement that grew up beside the bridge was given special privileges, especially status as a free city, exempt from control by local nobles.  As Jo pointed out, Frankfurt was "always about the money" and today is the financial center of Germany and one of the major centers of Europe.  This might help explain the negative attitudes of other Europeans.  Focused on trade, Frankfurt was not a center for culture or learning.  Moreover, much of it was destroyed during several days of American fire-bombing in 1944, so that today's city dates only from the 1950s.  Europeans respect nothing so much as antiquity.  Even so, Jo emphasized that some buildings did survive, including the cathedral tower and a number of stone buildings, and these served as the basis for postwar restoration

Medieval Frankfurt was a densely packed warren of half-timbered houses.  Only one survived the American bombers' conflagration; standing nearest to the river, it had been selected as an exit point for a network of underground escape passages.  The city's firemen focused their energies on protecting it.  Although some of the new buildings in the area copied the half-timbered style, the streets were laid out on a wider plan to allow for passage of cars as well as pedestrians.

Jo with Book-Burning Plaque

Not surprisingly, the Holocaust and World War II were major themes of the tour.  We began at the central square in front of the Rathaus, or City Hall, and one of the first things Jo showed us was a bronze plaque marking the spot where in 1933 Nazi-inspired students held a bonfire of controversial books.  Among the names listed there were Karl Marx and Berthold Brecht, but also Sigmund Freud.

Frankfurt had one of the largest Jewish populations in Germany, and we visited an area where one of the main synagogues stood.  It was destroyed on Krystalnacht, in 1938, and the cemetery nearby was desecrated.  Today a modern city government building stands on the site of the synagogue, but the cemetery has been restored.  Around it runs a rough wall lined with small stone plaques recording the names of all Jews born in Frankfurt who died in the Holocaust.  Jo showed us the memorials for Anne Frank and her family, who were from Frankfurt but had fled to to Amsterdam in an attempt to escape the Nazis.

There were many other sights to see:  the Cathedral, where for centuries Holy Roman Emperors were elected and crowned; the birthplace of the great German writer Goethe, a lovely Romanesque church with several excellent portals (as you will soon note, we are huge fans of Romanesque architecture).  There was a wonderful urban market that reminded me of Reading Terminal Market in Philadelphia.  The Rathus' rooftops sported a number of playful cats:

The central impression I gained of Frankfurt was of a city both old and new, where a medieval tower that had survived firebombing stood tall near brand new sky scrapers.   It seemed forward-looking as well as respectful of its history -- a good combination in my mind.

Statue of Goethe and Europe's Tallest Building

After leaving the tour I decided to see how department stores in Germany compared with those in the U.S.  Though the Galerie seemed pretty familiar, I found it much superior in one respect: the entire top floor was given over to a cafeteria, with outdoor seating affording panoramic views of the city.  So I settled down to rest my weary feet and take in the view along with kaffee und kuchen.

In Which We Go to the Mountaintop. Literally.

Most of the Swiss live in apartments in densely packed towns and cities, but at heart they are mountain people.  On Sundays they pull on hiking boots and return to their roots.  Some drive but most take trains, if the packed conditions are any indication. 

Last Sunday we decided to join the crowds and visit Engelberg, one of the mountain towns where we will be heading to ski in a few short months.  Armed with our Halbtax card, entitling us to buy tickets at a reduced rate, we cut short our usual Sunday fruhstuck, or breakfast of croissants, juice and coffee, and filled up our daypacks with lunch, fleeces and rain gear, just in case.  At the train station we joined many others similarly dressed for a walk in the mountains.  Boarding the 8:01 train we had to search a while before finding seats together.

A View from the Train

In Luzern's huge Hauptbahnhof we changed to a narrow gauge train with only three Thomas-the-Tank-Engine-style carriages.  Arriving with only a few minutes to spare before departure we found the cars filled with people of all ages and nationalities, many holding on their laps backpacks with telescoped hiking sticks strapped on.  We located aisle seats facing each other, but as the train left the city and skirted the lake it became clear that any seat would be scenic.  On one hand lush green mountainsides rose steeply and on the other brilliant blue Lake Luzern stretched far to distant mountains.  Eventually the train left the shore and began climbing into a valley whose sides rose ever more steeply as we went.  Yet surprisingly we didn’t leave the farms behind; the lush pastures just became more vertical, until we wondered how the cows managed to keep from tumbling downhill as they grazed.  At several points the grade became so steep that the train switched to control from a cable on the ground,  and I had to brace myself against the central table to keep from tumbling into TS's lap!  (By the way, you can click on any of these pictures to get an enlarged view.)

Yet when we reached Engleberg, a charming town completely encircled by mountain peaks, we discovered that we had only finished the first leg of our journey to the mountaintop.  A ten-minute walk through town and along a mountain stream brought us to the first of three separate mountain conveyances that eventually took us to the top of Titlis, 10,000 feet above sea level.  The first was the most familiar to us, a six-person gondola.

At the valley floor quickly descended below us, we had dramatic confirmation of a fact that had begun to be impressed in our American minds:  These Alps are steep!  We are used to mountains; we have skied in Colorado and Utah and backpacked the Wind River range in Wyoming.  We have been in the Pyranees in Spain and the Lake District in England, but they always struck us as somehow smaller and less wild than American mountains.  Perhaps because we knew that the Alps have been settled by humans for millennia we thought of them as Old World, somehow tamer.  We now learn that the Alps are in fact very young mountains, as these things go.  Hence, they haven't been worn down by time, as have the mountains in Pennsylvania.  Hence, they are steep. Very, very steep.

We transferred to a large aerial tram and then to a round, rotating gondola touted as the first of its kind in the world.  Actually, the gondola stayed in place, but the floor rotated, leaving those of us who like to hold on to something stable in such situations feeling a tad queasy.  But it did offer breath-taking views as we gradually rose to the top of the snow covered mountain.  Even after disembarking, we took an elevator to the top floor of the resort, where folks who had come properly equipped could simply put on their skis and glide down the glacier.  It was a bit startling to realize that this is the same route we will follow when we set out to ski this mountain in a couple of months.

Our own skis are still on a ship somewhere on the Atlantic, or I would have regretted that we had not thought to bring them.  There were only a few runs available, but the exotic idea of skiing in early October was delightful. Look closely at the run down the middle of the picture and you can see several skiers.


Most powerful, however, was the sheer fact that we were standing on top of a mountain, and in the midst of the most majestic peaks we had ever seen.  To the southwest a solid bank of clouds backed up against a line of peaks.  It looked as though a river of clouds was streaming over their tips.  (That's the sound of the ski lift in the background.)

Everywhere we looked was awesome, inhuman beauty. 

Nevertheless, it was well past noon and we were hungry.  So somehow in the midst of all that grandeur, we brought out our lunch -- along with several hundred other mountain-lovers.  We were happy that we had brought our own, for there was a long line waiting for pomme frites and brauts.

Finally, we took last long looks before retracing our steps back down the mountain and eventually home.  Awed and happy.

In which the weather clears and I am amazed

I have been in Switzerland now for eight days, plus five when we made our pre-move visit in June.  In all that time it had been too cloudy to see the Alps.  Sure, I could see the outlines of nearer mountains, but the real Alps remained hidden from me.  I'd begun to wonder whether they actually existed or were some vast hoax, perpetrated via Photoshop.  The Spouse assured me that they were there and that someday I would see them.  But the best I could hope for, it seemed, were distant, mysterious hints:

Then, yesterday, the sky gradually began to clear.  Not all at once, but in stages, like a courtesan shedding layer after layer of gauzy scarves...

 

And, then, this morning when I woke up THEY WERE THERE!

And, as it was a Saturday, we mounted our bicycles and rode along a quiet protected bicycle path beside the Lorze River, to the edge of the Zuggersee to get an even better look.  

We could not help but feel amazed at, and grateful for, our great good fortune to be in this place at this moment in our lives.

In Which We Exult in Our New Digs, and Wrestle With German Appliances

It is hard to decide where to begin my account, so I think I will just begin with our arrival in our new apartment.  It is brand new, so new in fact that we were the first family to move into the building.  (This became a bit of a problem on our first evening there, when we discovered that the elevator had been turned off.  Five floors is not an insurmountable climb, but not something one wants to do too often. )  The building is in the middle of the charming town of Baar, not far from Zug and the Zugersee, which we can see a little slice of from our window.  We are used to spectacular views from our eleventh-floor Philadelphia condo, but the view here is of a far different order -- beyond the town center stretch green Swiss hillsides and the beginnings of the Alps beyond, at least when we are not hemmed in by clouds.

On our first day, however, the weather was not merely cloudy.  It rained, no poured, the entire day.  Which left us free to explore our new environment without distraction.  We found ourselves in a superbly designed modern apartment with all the latest amenities.  The only problem was that to take advantage of most of them we had first to decipher the appliance manuals.  Which were in German -- or if we were lucky, in German, French and Italian, the three major official languages of Switzerland.  (There is actually one other, but I'll go into that another time.)  Here the fact became important that my husband, henceforth to be known as The Spouse, or TS for short, is fluent in French.  Even so, we discovered that many of the more technical words seem to be new to the language since his graduate school days.

The most crucial problem was figuring out how to use the oven.   We had thoughtfully been provided with a frozen pizza that we planned to have for dinner -- thus avoiding the necessity of venturing outside -- but we quickly learned that this oven was something special.  It seems that for the Swiss the latest in cooking technology involves not only convection but steam, something we had never encountered before.  In fact, aside from the fact that one can't simply broil something, there seem to be an infinite number of possible cooking methods.  As long as one can figure out which buttons to push and in which order.

In time, we -- or I should say he -- puzzled things out and we did have our pizza, along with a rather nice Chianti purchased from the local Coop supermarket.  After which, we settled in to surf our way through the channels on our Swisscom cable hookup, which include two BBC channels and CNN in addition to many in German, Swiss German (quite a different thing), French, and Italian.  We are nothing if not cosmopolitan here in Schweiz.