I may have to keep this post genuinely short, though I tend to say that a lot. I made the mistake of scheduling too much total sightseeing for the brief time that I have spent, two days from now, in Nuremberg. I took it easy when I got here, getting up late two days in a row, as a result of which I will not have time to see the Nazi party rally grounds or the documentation center about the rise of Nazism in Germany. It is a pity, given the uniqueness of the site, to have to miss it, but such is life: I scheduled too much time for Frankfurt and too little for Nuremberg. I am going to see Dinkelsbuhl and Wurzburg tomorrow and Nordlingen and Ausburg on Monday, more or less as planned; the distance of the smaller two of those four cities from any transport hub will have me spending lots of time going back and forth on trains.
My only notes from past days that I forgot to mention are short, and I can make them shorter. First off, I forgot to mention - though this is based on a very small sample size of experience - that service in French cafes is slightly better than that in German restaurants. I say this because the French - again, based on my one experience - make one feel welcome no matter what one orders and do not make one feel guilty for not ordering drinks, which are inevitably overpriced. While waiters in unpretentious beerhouses outside of the city center do not hover over one as they offer one something to drink, I noticed waiters in Heidelberg glancing balefully at me as I refused their offers of drinks. Perhaps this was more a reflection of that city itself or of eating in touristy areas than it is of national character or Germany's restaurant culture; though, since I was eating in a touristy part of Strasbourg, which is a touristy city, and was still treated with the utmost respect and cordiality, I would not be surprised if my experience reflected the slight superiority of French waiters over German waiters.
My only other query from days past that I did not mention was whether or not the people working at the train station like their jobs. I admit that one cannot solve all of the problems in the world and that not everyone can be made to like his job, but I cannot help pitying people who have to answer more or less continual customer inquiries for eight hours per day. It is possible that some people are perfectly fitted to such work and would not like anything better; it is likely that many people look at any job as a necessary evil and would not see working at a train station as being worse than anything else; and yet I wonder, whenever I approach the counter at the ticket office (or when I am at the airport, &c.), if the people working behind it are not tired and harried. This is not an issue that has any ready answer; it is more of a preoccupation than anything else.
Again, since I need to get up early tomorrow (and might even get to the train station before the ticket office opens; hopefully not), I will have to keep this post short. One of my most interesting observations on the way to Rothenburg ab der Tauber (hereafter referred to in this post as "Rothenburg") was that we were passing through little villages, including fenced-in communities of little shanties, within ten or fifteen minutes of leaving Nuremberg. We passed a few fields full of solar panels, poppies, and white and yellow wildflowers; we passed through gently rolling hills, pink and lilac wildflowers, and bluebells; and we passed through wooded regions and the same attractive towns that I have seen all over Germany, filled with nicer houses than one could buy or rent in the city. The train ride into Rothenburg - i.e., the last leg of the journey there - was a bit of a farce, as there were only a few Germans left on the train. I remarked to my neighbours that we were going to take the city by storm, having come from all over the world to look at a town of some ten thousand people and snap photos of its historic buildings.
My feelings about being a tourist are ambivalent. That is, while I like to look at cities (and natural reserves, &c.) in other countries to see how people live there, I feel that there is something a little false about looking at towns that have been preserved as in amber: I prefer being a tourist interacting with a living environment to being a tourist seeking to recreate the pictures on postcards. I had been to one fort, as a child in elementary school, and two historical cities, Konstantinovo and one outside of Perm, the name of which I have forgotten, prior to coming to Rothenburg. In all three instances I felt that I had been more deeply informed about something. The fort stirred my imagination about life on the frontiers of Canada; the town outside of Perm was made completely of wood and showed me what towns in Russia in past centuries looked like; and Konstantinovo, the trip to which was the worst of the three, taught me what it meant to be a Russian tourist and showed me the environs in which Sergey Yesenin, my favorite poet, grew up. Since all three of the aforementioned trips had value despite being unequivocally touristy, I was able to fairly quickly overcome my misgivings about having gone to Rothenburg, a city which I decided, when I got there, would not be worth the time that it took to see it.
My only notes from past days that I forgot to mention are short, and I can make them shorter. First off, I forgot to mention - though this is based on a very small sample size of experience - that service in French cafes is slightly better than that in German restaurants. I say this because the French - again, based on my one experience - make one feel welcome no matter what one orders and do not make one feel guilty for not ordering drinks, which are inevitably overpriced. While waiters in unpretentious beerhouses outside of the city center do not hover over one as they offer one something to drink, I noticed waiters in Heidelberg glancing balefully at me as I refused their offers of drinks. Perhaps this was more a reflection of that city itself or of eating in touristy areas than it is of national character or Germany's restaurant culture; though, since I was eating in a touristy part of Strasbourg, which is a touristy city, and was still treated with the utmost respect and cordiality, I would not be surprised if my experience reflected the slight superiority of French waiters over German waiters.
My only other query from days past that I did not mention was whether or not the people working at the train station like their jobs. I admit that one cannot solve all of the problems in the world and that not everyone can be made to like his job, but I cannot help pitying people who have to answer more or less continual customer inquiries for eight hours per day. It is possible that some people are perfectly fitted to such work and would not like anything better; it is likely that many people look at any job as a necessary evil and would not see working at a train station as being worse than anything else; and yet I wonder, whenever I approach the counter at the ticket office (or when I am at the airport, &c.), if the people working behind it are not tired and harried. This is not an issue that has any ready answer; it is more of a preoccupation than anything else.
Again, since I need to get up early tomorrow (and might even get to the train station before the ticket office opens; hopefully not), I will have to keep this post short. One of my most interesting observations on the way to Rothenburg ab der Tauber (hereafter referred to in this post as "Rothenburg") was that we were passing through little villages, including fenced-in communities of little shanties, within ten or fifteen minutes of leaving Nuremberg. We passed a few fields full of solar panels, poppies, and white and yellow wildflowers; we passed through gently rolling hills, pink and lilac wildflowers, and bluebells; and we passed through wooded regions and the same attractive towns that I have seen all over Germany, filled with nicer houses than one could buy or rent in the city. The train ride into Rothenburg - i.e., the last leg of the journey there - was a bit of a farce, as there were only a few Germans left on the train. I remarked to my neighbours that we were going to take the city by storm, having come from all over the world to look at a town of some ten thousand people and snap photos of its historic buildings.
My feelings about being a tourist are ambivalent. That is, while I like to look at cities (and natural reserves, &c.) in other countries to see how people live there, I feel that there is something a little false about looking at towns that have been preserved as in amber: I prefer being a tourist interacting with a living environment to being a tourist seeking to recreate the pictures on postcards. I had been to one fort, as a child in elementary school, and two historical cities, Konstantinovo and one outside of Perm, the name of which I have forgotten, prior to coming to Rothenburg. In all three instances I felt that I had been more deeply informed about something. The fort stirred my imagination about life on the frontiers of Canada; the town outside of Perm was made completely of wood and showed me what towns in Russia in past centuries looked like; and Konstantinovo, the trip to which was the worst of the three, taught me what it meant to be a Russian tourist and showed me the environs in which Sergey Yesenin, my favorite poet, grew up. Since all three of the aforementioned trips had value despite being unequivocally touristy, I was able to fairly quickly overcome my misgivings about having gone to Rothenburg, a city which I decided, when I got there, would not be worth the time that it took to see it.
As I started off in the direction of Rothenburg's historic city center, an older woman told me that I was going the wrong way and recommended that I see the "criminal museum," or something like that - she did not know its name in English, and, as I had gotten a map in German from the tourist office in case I had to ask a local for directions, I also did not know what it would be called, though I divined (incorrectly) that it was a museum of torture instruments, as I thought that I remembered having read about some such museum in Rothenburg. Given the time constraints of this post, I will write strictly about that very museum.
Rather, I will write about something else first: Rothenburg has free bathrooms! It is only the second German city, the first being Bonn, that I have visited that has had at least one free bathroom (Rothenburg had several). For this it deserves the highest praise.
I was just as skeptical of the "criminal museum" (written all in one word, as is the German way) as I was of Rothenburg itself when I entered it: I feared that I was doing something needlessly touristy and throwing away my money by visiting it. I quickly discovered, though, that the museum was much larger and all-encompassing than I had thought: it was a museum of Germany's legal history. It was full of all sorts of old legal documents, instruments of torture, descriptions of punishments for crimes, official court seals, and so on, and so forth, and it gave me some new insights into medieval jurisprudence. It seems to me that the word of law, until the 19th century, was fickle and arbitrary; that one could be tried for a crime at any moment for more or less no reason and then convicted of it; that legal proceedings were incredibly draconian and involved an unfathomably-large bureaucracy; and that, while most laws were designed to allow the rich to suppress the poor, some of them, such as those relating to sanitation, were designed to help even the poor (though, ultimately, it was in the interests of the rich to help them; the rich could not stay rich if the poor all died of disease). I left the museum with little other than these vague impressions, a mass of facts in my head (such as that an unmarried man's touching an unmarried woman's hand resulted in a fine), and the knowledge that one of the popes was known for working extremely had to improve the lot of the poor and that people complained enough about the cruelty of legal practice in the 18th century that, by around the end of the 19th century, torture was no longer a codified part of legal proceedings. I also learned a lot about class structure - people were not allowed to wear clothes that reflected a different class from the one to which they belonged - misogyny, public shaming, and all sorts of other related things. My interest in medieval history has been sparked, as there were so many punishments for so many different types of crimes that one wonders how people ever got on with their daily lives - everyone must either have been in a torture chamber, in jail, or dead! I am sure that the laws as they were written down were, for pragmatic or selfish reasons, not always practiced as they were supposed to be.
That more or less covers my journal entry for now, I think. I have noticed that Germans are punctilious about recycling (Did I mention this already?)... I have to get up at around 7:45 tomorrow (I admit that this is not so bad; many people get up earlier than that for work.) to catch a train to Dinkelsbuhl. I can always go to Weimar when I am in Leipzig if I want to make up for having missed out on learning more about the Nuremberg trials and Nazi rallies, though, having seen Dachau and Auschwitz, I probably already have a decent grasp of the course of Nazi history. I regret having booked too few days in Nuremberg less every time I step into this abysmal hostel. I only have one more night here after this one!
I forgot to mention having bumped into the woman who recommended that I visit the criminal museum in the criminal museum itself and having chatted with some Russian tourists who were delighted that I was working on translations and wished me all of life's joys and the best of luck with my translations as we parted ways. Also, my sole roommate last night was a classical flutist from England who had bought a 3-month rail pass for all of Europe and was going to auditions in different German cities, in addition to travelling. One meets interesting people on these trips!
Rather, I will write about something else first: Rothenburg has free bathrooms! It is only the second German city, the first being Bonn, that I have visited that has had at least one free bathroom (Rothenburg had several). For this it deserves the highest praise.
I was just as skeptical of the "criminal museum" (written all in one word, as is the German way) as I was of Rothenburg itself when I entered it: I feared that I was doing something needlessly touristy and throwing away my money by visiting it. I quickly discovered, though, that the museum was much larger and all-encompassing than I had thought: it was a museum of Germany's legal history. It was full of all sorts of old legal documents, instruments of torture, descriptions of punishments for crimes, official court seals, and so on, and so forth, and it gave me some new insights into medieval jurisprudence. It seems to me that the word of law, until the 19th century, was fickle and arbitrary; that one could be tried for a crime at any moment for more or less no reason and then convicted of it; that legal proceedings were incredibly draconian and involved an unfathomably-large bureaucracy; and that, while most laws were designed to allow the rich to suppress the poor, some of them, such as those relating to sanitation, were designed to help even the poor (though, ultimately, it was in the interests of the rich to help them; the rich could not stay rich if the poor all died of disease). I left the museum with little other than these vague impressions, a mass of facts in my head (such as that an unmarried man's touching an unmarried woman's hand resulted in a fine), and the knowledge that one of the popes was known for working extremely had to improve the lot of the poor and that people complained enough about the cruelty of legal practice in the 18th century that, by around the end of the 19th century, torture was no longer a codified part of legal proceedings. I also learned a lot about class structure - people were not allowed to wear clothes that reflected a different class from the one to which they belonged - misogyny, public shaming, and all sorts of other related things. My interest in medieval history has been sparked, as there were so many punishments for so many different types of crimes that one wonders how people ever got on with their daily lives - everyone must either have been in a torture chamber, in jail, or dead! I am sure that the laws as they were written down were, for pragmatic or selfish reasons, not always practiced as they were supposed to be.
That more or less covers my journal entry for now, I think. I have noticed that Germans are punctilious about recycling (Did I mention this already?)... I have to get up at around 7:45 tomorrow (I admit that this is not so bad; many people get up earlier than that for work.) to catch a train to Dinkelsbuhl. I can always go to Weimar when I am in Leipzig if I want to make up for having missed out on learning more about the Nuremberg trials and Nazi rallies, though, having seen Dachau and Auschwitz, I probably already have a decent grasp of the course of Nazi history. I regret having booked too few days in Nuremberg less every time I step into this abysmal hostel. I only have one more night here after this one!
I forgot to mention having bumped into the woman who recommended that I visit the criminal museum in the criminal museum itself and having chatted with some Russian tourists who were delighted that I was working on translations and wished me all of life's joys and the best of luck with my translations as we parted ways. Also, my sole roommate last night was a classical flutist from England who had bought a 3-month rail pass for all of Europe and was going to auditions in different German cities, in addition to travelling. One meets interesting people on these trips!
This is a view of part of the city from the side.
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