Trip Report: Day Six - Munich

Our last day in Munich! We kept meaning to go to Nuremberg, an hour away, to see the Christmas market there, but we only got as far as finding out the train tickets were 60 Euros, which seemed a bit steep, and then we ended up sleeping too late anyway. So for the last day in Munich we headed to the most fun place of all, the Nazi Documentation Museum.

On the way there we passed through the Konigsplatz, a huge square filled with big neoclassical buildings, some of which are museums and some just monuments. This was the heart of Nazi Germany. They completely rebuilt the square to be as impressively dominating as possible. Most of the changes they made were reversed after the war, with several buildings being torn down completely.

The Nazi Documentation Museum sits on the former site of the party headquarters, which was destroyed after World War II. There are no artifacts or fancy displays here, just lots of pictures and text telling the story of what happened in Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. It is not a place to take kids, for example. But it was very, very sobering, and very worth seeing. One line I remember in particular: "The rise of the Nazi Party was not inevitable. It was the result of regular people not trying hard enough to fight back against extremism."

Anyway, after that we went and got some sausages in a nearby Christmas market. This one was devoted entirely to food.

This is maybe the only time in Germany we encountered somebody who didn't speak English. We ended up pointing to the sausage we wanted and it all worked out great. Then we stood in the street and ate them like all these other people.

After that we went back to our room to pack up! And then we met our friends Art & Leanne, coincidentally also vacationing in Munich, for an early dinner at Restaurant Alter Hof in a building that dates from the 1200s.

It was super fun to see them! The last time we saw Leanne & Art we were in Vermont. Apparently we unconsciously coordinate our vacation plans.

Then one last trip through the Marianplatz Christmas market!

Then we tried to go to bed early and failed and got terrible sleep, because our bodies knew we had to get up at 5:00am to catch a train.

Trip Report: Day Five - Munich

The next morning we headed out via streetcar for Schloss Nyphenburg, a palace where some of the descendants of the previous royal family still live. Only a few rooms are open to the public, but Rick Steves said the gardens were beautiful. 

It's really big.

The main central hall was the most impressive room by far.

The rest are standard palace-type rooms, a little less fancy than the Residenz we visited a few days prior.

One of the princes had a bunch of portraits painted of women he considered to be his ideals of female perfection. What a creep!

 

The gardens really were impressive. We walked all the way down to the end and back. It was about a mile. My feet were reeealllly cold by the end.

We went back to Central Munich and stopped in one of the train stations for sandwiches. The existence of cheap, delicious sandwiches in street stalls across Europe was one of the most fascinating things to me about this trip. Why are American sandwiches so terrible?

Then we headed up to the Modern Art Museum, within walking distance of our hotel.

It was very good, a nice change of pace from seeing historical stuff.

And almost deserted.

After the museum we walked through the old city to our dinner reservation. There were lots of people out. It was so cold! Germans are tough.

We ran across this big rally in one of the central squares.

Later we did google translate: "We are all from somewhere! Anxiety? For sure! For a fear-free and open society." Ah, to live in such times.

The restaurant I chose for dinner was across the street from Hofbrauhaus, the most famous beer hall in Munich. We did not go inside.

Our restaurant (Ayingers) was great, though. So cozy.



And this picture reminds me that instead of a bread basket, in Munich you get a basket of pretzels.

I got some delicious venison in mushroom sauce, with spaetzle on the side.

Ben got pork knuckle with more dumplings.

On the way back we passed through the Marienplatz Christmas market once again, and this time lingered a bit to look at the stalls.

 

We got some Christmas ornaments!

And I finally got some gluhwein, and discovered that the reason Germans can walk around outside at night in the freezing cold is because they're full of hot wine.

I had to get a second one so we could have two souvenir mugs. Obviously!

Trip Report: Day Four - Munich

On the fourth day, we went to Dachau.

Dachau is a suburban town about 30 minutes from Munich by train. The concentration camp is right in the middle of town. There was no secret about this place, or the others like it. Everyone knew it existed and what it was.

This was the first of the Nazi's concentration camps, set up in the mid 1930s, and was a model for what the system would become. It was established primarily for political prisoners, and sometimes people were actually released after a while. They killed plenty of people here, though; over 40,000. The crematoriums still exist. There are two separate crematorium buildings. They decided the first one wasn't big enough so they built a second, larger one.

It was very, very cold while we were here. We were dressed in our warmest clothing and it was tough being outside. It's almost unfathomable that any of the poorly clothed prisoners survived the winters here at all.

The barracks were torn down after the war, but they've rebuilt some of them as part of the memorial.

The administrative building houses an extensive museum today. There are no euphemisms here; they very explicitly tell you exactly what happened, from the rise of the Hitler and the Nazi Party through to the bitter end.

The current political climate made this all especially difficult to read about: the economic problems that allowed the Nazis to capitalize on fear and xenophobia to gain support. How nobody outside the Nazi Party took Hitler seriously; how the political establishment believed once he took power his support would collapse, because his incompetence would become impossible to ignore. How, although his support grew over time, he only ever truly had a small percentage of the population behind him, but the masses largely ignored what was going on as long as policies didn't directly negatively impact them. How the Nazis slowly chipped away at rights and freedoms of minorities and marginalized populations for years before they finally just started rounding them up and executing them.

Survivors of this camp are still alive. American soldiers who liberated it are still alive. And here we are again, with xenophobic, racist politicians and policies at the head of Western democracies. It is not good.

I'm glad we went to Dachau. I think everyone should go. But I don't feel like I need to go to a place like that ever again.

When we got back to Munich, it was weirdly disconcerting to come up out of the subway into a Christmas market full of people eating sausage and drinking gluhwein. Just as it was in the 1930s: life continued as usual for most people. At least those who were ethnic Germans able to pretend what was happening didn't have anything to do with them.

We walked inside several of the big churches around central Munich. This is St. Peter's, the oldest church in the area. There has been a church on this site since the 8th century. St. Peter's wasn't completely destroyed in the war, but it was damaged to the extent that repairs weren't complete until the 1990s.

We weren't feeling particularly touristy so we walked back through Marianplatz to our hotel.

They were cleaning our room so we sat in the hipster lobby for a while.

For dinner we went to Munchner Stubn, primarily because it was next door to the hotel. It ended up being great.

This was 12 Euros.

It was a tough day. The experience made me question my instinctive reaction to President Trump, which has been to mostly ignore the news and pretend nothing bad is happening. That's not a good solution. I don't know what the solution is, but it isn't that.