21 October: Hamburg to Rügen

It was Sunday morning so we decided to splurge on breakfast at the hotel (a whopping 22 Euro per person, but at least they had an elaborate buffet and a mouth-watering menu of eggs made-to-order). I had eggs Benedict and John had scrambled eggs with smoked salmon. We didn’t roll out onto the road until 11 a.m., but one has to indulge a little at a 5-star hotel, after all!

Today’s agenda was a leisurely drive from Hamburg to the former East German resort island of Rügen. We knew it would be a stretch to get all the way to Rügen on this trip, but I had heard many good things about it and I thought it would be nice to finally be able to say that we had ventured into the former East Germany. I mapped out a route for us that would take us north towards Lübeck, east past Wismar, and north to Rostock on the Autobahn, then we would veer north to Ahrenshoop, a tiny village on the Darß peninsula, a curved slip of land that juts out into the Ostsee (Baltic Sea). I had seen a picture of Ahrenshoop in the “My Favourite Deutschland” Mercedes calendar that John was given when he picked up his B-Class last year, and ever since I have been saying “I want to go there.” It looked so peaceful, with its windswept beach and quaint thatched-roof cottages.

The drive into East Germany was blissful thanks to the gorgeous new Autobahn (West German tax dollars at work!). The rest areas were so new that some of them weren’t even open yet and it looked like they had just planted the landscaping. We crossed the old border somewhere east of Lübeck; it is now marked only by a sign along the freeway. It was exciting to finally see signs for Berlin and even Poland as wee headed further east. The drive took us through gently rolling countryside as we skirted Lübeck, Wismar, and Rostock, stopped for gas in Roggentin, then headed north towards the Darß peninsula.

We arrived in Ahrenshoop in the early afternoon and the first thing we noticed as we drove into town was all the thatched-roof cottages, including a brand-new residential subdivision in which all the houses were painted cheerful shades of periwinkle, orange, yellow, and green. I wish I knew more about this ancient form of northern architecture – the roofs are simply beautiful constructions, with rounded corners and crossed wood beams at the peaks that are carved in the shapes of animal heads. We parked in a visitor lot next to a Frischemarkt supermarket that also sported a thatched roof. In fact, most of the buildings in town – old and new, commercial and residential – had thatched roofs, which I thought was very cool.

We took a stroll down a tree-lined promenade past more thatched-roof vacation cottages (now mostly shuttered up for the season) and out to the grassy bluff overlooking a long stretch of smooth white beach. A few dozen striped beach chairs were scattered across the sand and several families were out for their afternoon walk (photo, right). We followed a trail up the beach back towards our car and, without realizing it at the time, I took a picture of the very same cottage that is pictured in our Mercedes calendar (photo, above).

Back in the car, we crossed the Darß peninsula, which is mostly a nature preserve protecting an ancient stand of beech-juniper forest, then returned to the mainland and continued east to Stralsund, gateway to the island of Rügen. We had to follow an elaborate detour to cross the old bridge over to the island; above us we saw hordes of people walking on the brand-new suspension bridge, which was apparently being opened this weekend.

The barren, windswept island of Rügen has been a mecca for artists, writers, and vacationers since the railroads began bringing visitors to its shores in the mid-19^th century. The island’s major resort centers are Sassnitz, Binz, Sellin, and Göhren, and I had booked us a room for the night at the Kurhaus Binz, described as the “grand old lady of the Baltic Sea” in our guidebook. The drive across Rügen’s empty countryside on lovely tree-lined roads was simply blissful; it actually reminded us a lot of northern Michigan. We finally arrived at the seaside village of Binz around 5 pm. We have never been to Michigan’s Mackinac Island, but I immediately made the comparison based on pictures I’ve seen – Binz is all about grand Victorian hotels and shops, all painted out in crisp white with elaborate gingerbread trim. We were pleased to find that the Kurhaus Binz was among the grandest of them all, and the interior was every bit as lavish as the exterior. We had a bit of trouble navigating ourselves to the hotel entrance because Susie kept trying to take us around to the front, which is directly on the beach, but we got a nice tour of Binz in the process. We brought out bags into the lobby, John parked the E-Class in the subterranean garage, and we were shown to our spacious and elegantly-appointed room, done in ocean-inspired tones of yellow and blue. John commented that it had a very “American luxury hotel” feel to it, unlike any other hotel we have stayed at in Germany. From our balcony we could look east to the sea, where the peach glow of sunset was just visible under a thick bank of gray clouds.

I decided to take a stroll out to the pier to see the last of the sunset (photo, below) while John stayed inside to watch the final Formula 1 race of the season. It was quite chilly and windy, so I didn’t stay out long, but I did walk a ways down the beachfront promenade to check out our dining options (the hotel’s restaurant menu looked interesting but it was very pricey). I talked John into having dinner at the casual, modern Fischküche nearby because they were showing the F1 race on a largescreen TV. There were hardly any people in the restaurant; Binz is obviously a summer-oriented resort and it was nice to be there when everything was quiet. I had the Pfannefisch platter on special, with steinbutt, perch, and a third kind of fish, scattered with tiny poached shrimp and green onions. John had three kinds of smoked fish with Rösti-style potatoes. For dessert John had a sabayone cream with berries and hazelnut ice cream and I had a nut-filled pancake concoction that was simply delicious!

Photos from today:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hausfrau/sets/72157604055574806/

20 October, Hanseatic Hamburg

We didn’t want to spend a small fortune on breakfast at the hotel (one of the few places we’ve stayed in Germany where breakfast wasn’t included in the room price, but I guess that comes with the territory) so we went to a very nice Starbucks on the Binnenalster for coffee and sweet rolls while we mapped out our route for the day.

One of the most powerful members of the Hanseatic League (a medieval union of merchant cities that controlled the shipping trade in the Baltic and North seas) and heavily influenced by its rich seafaring history, Hamburg – now Germany’s second-largest city – is still one of Europe’s largest ports, but has been transformed into a modern-day mecca for advertising, media, show business and fashion. We only had a day to take in as much of Hamburg as possible, so we decided to make our way on foot across the middle of the city, from the premier shopping streets of the Neustadt to the historic Altstadt and busy Hafen (harbor), which has embodied the heart and soul of Hamburg for centuries.

It was a brilliant fall day and the views of the downtown skyline across the sparkling waters of the Binnenalster were stunning (photo, above). Hamburg is sometimes called the “Venice of Germany,” and while I’m sure most visitors to the fabled Italian city would no doubt scoff at the comparison, Hamburg is defined by water – from the shores of the Alstersee (dammed in the 18^th century) to the countless canals threading through the city, spanned by hundreds of bridges and lined with arcaded passageways and waterfront restaurants.

From the lakefront shopping promenade of Jungfernstieg we headed towards the distinctive neo-Renaissance Rathaus (photo, right), which rises dramatically in front of a square said to resemble Venice’s Piazza San Marco. A bunch of photographers all had their cameras trained on the tip of the Rathaus spire and we thought that something exciting was going to happen when the clock struck the hour, but the moment came and went without incident and we never did figure out what they were all taking pictures of. We walked through the entry hall of the Rathaus (home to Hamburg’s city council and state government, since it is both an independent city and one of the 16 federal states of Germany) and into a lovely interior courtyard dominated by an elaborate fountain. Exiting towards the south, we found ourselves gravitating towards another dramatic black spire, which turned out to be the remains of the 19^th-century St. Nikolaikiche. The tower and a few outside walls are all that remain of this impressive neo-Gothic church, which was destroyed in the week-long 1943 fire-bombing of Hamburg known as “Operation Gomorrah” in which more than 35,000 people died and nearly a million residents lost their homes. The spire now stands as a memorial to all of those killed and persecuted during the war, and an elevator has recently been installed that takes you up through the skeleton-like tower to an observation platform high above the city. We decided to make the ascent and were rewarded with magnificent views in all directions, framed by the blackened gargoyles adorning the spire (view of the Rathaus and Alstersee, right). Somber photos posted around the platform tell the story of the fire-bombing, along with a moving account that I have reproduced in part here:

Hamburg is one of the cities that was most affected by air-raids during WWII. Most momentous among the aerial attacks on the city were the bombings that occurred between 25 July and 3 August 1943. The Royal Air Force bombed Hamburg’s residential areas for several nights in a row, aiming to demoralize the German population, while the U.S. Air Force attacked U-boat shipyards and armaments factories during the day. “Operation Gomorrah” reduced large parts of the city to ashes. 35,000 people died in the flames, among them thousands of slave laborers who had been deported to Germany from other European countries and over 5,000 children…

These images of destruction remind us of the cruelty which Nazi Germany spread all over Euopre with its war of aggression and annihilation. It was been rightfully pointed out that the carpet bombings of residential areas were in breach of international law, cruiel, and not the right instrument for breaking the German masses’ loyalty to Hitler. However, the fuse for the firestorm was lit in Germany. The German air-raids on Guernica, Warsaw, Conventry and Rotterdam, London, and many other cities in Western and Eastern Europe preceded the destruction of Hamburg.

The original catastrophe occurred ten years earlier, in 1933, when then the National Socialists with the support of large parts of the elite and the population abolished democracy and the rule of law within a matter of weeks. This catastrophe was to bring on all the other tragedies that followed…Ultimately, the dead, injured, and homelss of the air-raids, too, were victims of Nazi Germany’s politics of aggression, its claim for world domination and its barbarization of war.

Underneath the “floor” of the church is an exhibition center, which was currently home to a moving display of WWII photographs. We spent some time looking at the exhibit and then moved on towards the harbor.

We made our way to Deichstraße, one of the oldest residential areas in the Altstadt, dating to the 14^th century. Most of the lavishly restored merchants’ houses along this street date from the 17^th through 19^th century, as many of the older structures were destroyed in the Great Fire of 1842. Behind Deichstraße runs one of the oldest canals in Hamburg (photo, above). We followed Deichstraße to the Zollkanal (Customs Canal) and Binnenhafen (Inner Harbor), and from there walked along the water past 19^th-century brick warehouses (photo, right) and dozens of boats of every shape and size, including the Flusschifferkirche, a floating church for sailors. As we approached the harbor the boats got bigger and we started seeing signs for the many harbor tours available. We decided to buy tickets for a one-hour cruise on a Louisiana-style paddlewheel boat. We originally inquired about an English tour but we would have had to wait over an hour, so we settled for a German tour.

Words cannot describe how amazing the harbor tour was! In the first ten minutes we saw an enormous cruise ship and a container ship under construction, the historic St. Pauli Fischmarkt (where you can buy your freshly-caught dinner if you are willing to get up at 4 a.m. on Sunday morning), and a string of modern office and apartment buildings boasting some of the most desirable addresses in the city. One apartment building was designed to resemble a sleek luxury yacht (photo, right). We passed a long stretch of lovely historic homes fronting a stretch of sandy beach, then headed out into the harbor proper. We got a very up-close-and-personal look at the container docks, which are simply awe-inspiring. Picture acres and acres of containers – each the size of a semi tractor trailer – stacked five and six high, awaiting shipment to points around the globe, and row after row of those odd-looking container-loading structures that I have always thought resembled enormous dinosaur skeletons (photo, right). We sidled right up alongside a huge ship called the Hanjin Chicago (photo, below) that was currently being loaded and floated down its entire length while our guide gave us all sorts of impressive statistics about the ship and its load. Another container ship had its compartment doors open so we could see down into the belly of the ship, where more containers are stored. On the way back up the harbor we looked at several more container ships, an ancient oil tanker, and a ship equipped to carry cars, complete with drive-on / drive-off ramp on the back. We passed the city’s wastewater plant with its distinctive egg-shaped structures, and got a better look at the cruise ship and container ship in their dry docks. Finally we passed by a huge new construction project that will eventually boast the largest interior warehouse space of any port in the world.

We finished our tour around 2:15 and looked around the tourist shops along the waterfront for souvenirs, but it was mostly dreck. I couldn’t even find a decent ship-in-a-bottle, but I did buy a cool Hamburg magnet. We made our way back to the Neustadt and spent some time browsing the high-end clothing stores in the swanky shopping district before stopping at Soho (the empty sushi restaurant from last night) for cappuccinos. We walked down Mönckebergstraße, the more middle-of-the-road shopping street, and discovered the Lego store. They had the largest selection of Star Wars sets I have ever seen, including a bunch of large-scale models on display. One whole wall of the store was devoted to round bins of individual Lego pieces that you could buy by the tub-full, including individual body parts like Legoman heads, legs, and torsos so you can mix-and-match your own Legomen. It was very cool.

We decided to have dinner at the Rathsweinkeller under the Rathaus, which was mentioned in Fodor’s. The restaurant has been redesigned and has a new name, but I can’t remember what it was. I was disappointed that the huge ship models hanging from the ceiling (described in Fodor’s) were gone, but it was still an amazing, cavernous room with huge wooden columns and a lively, modern décor, including a very cool floor-to-ceiling bar. We were pleasantly surprised by our meal. John had terrine of buffalo mozzarella and I had Mousse von Ziegenfrischkäse (goat cheese mousse), both of which were accompanied by lovely salads of arugula, frisée, cherry tomatoes, and pine nuts with a sweet balsamic vinaigrette (a little too heavy on the dressing but otherwise great). John’s entrée was medallions of Seeteufel (a fish called seadevil??) and I had the Hamburger Pannfisch which is the local version of Zwiebelrostbraten, with panfish, roasted potatoes, crispy onions, and a sweet mustard sauce. For dessert we both had a jellied blueberry terrine accompanied by mascarpone-peanut butter mousse and fried mint leaves. It was a little weird but quite creative! We decided to finish things off with calvados for me and William’s pear schnapps for John. As we were leaving the lights were turned down and started changing colors, creating a very cool effect. On our way back to the hotel we stopped to take in the gorgeous view of the Rathaus along the canal, gloriously lit against the midnight-blue sky. We’d certainly had a whirlwind tour of Hamburg but we came away with fond feelings for the city. Now I understand why Beth and Axel say Hamburg is their favorite German city!

Lots of photos from today:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hausfrau/sets/72157603999803477/

19 October: In Search of Ancestors

We enjoyed the typical buffet of meats and cheeses in Schloss Petershagen’s sunny dining room; other than a table of conference attendees, we were the only people there. We walked around the grounds a little bit before checking out but couldn’t get around to the river side of the castle for a picture, so we ended up taking quite a long walk out onto the highway bridge to get the view I was looking for (photo, right). We could see two old-fashioned windmills way off in the distance; I hoped that we would see some more of them up close as we headed further north. A plaque mounted on the wall in the courtyard indicated that Schloss Petershagen was the residence of the prince bishops of Minden beginning in 1306; in 1605 it passed into the possession of crown prince Mark Brandenburg, and in 1901 it was taken over by the Hestermann family.

We then set off on our rather slapdash search for John’s ancestors. We had set aside this day to drive around the Minden countryside visiting several sites mentioned in old family records. We didn’t have a whole lot to go on – a copy of John’s great-great-grandfather’s birth certificate from the little church in southern Illinois and a couple other records that John had found online in the Mormon Church archives – so John was a bit pessimistic about the whole thing, but we figured we could at least visit the general area that John's family had called home. Of course I was quite certain that we would walk into a graveyard and just happen across a family headstone. Our first conundrum was that John’s ancestor, Ernst Heinrich, was born at a place called Bergkirchen near Minden. Bergkirchen means “hill churches” and, as you might imagine, there are a number of towns bearing that name in Germany. Unfortunately two of them happen to be in the general vicinity of Minden. We decided to head to the Bergkirchen nearest to Minden first. We found ourselves traversing a gently rolling countryside and took a winding road up the side of a long ridge to a sprawling village at the crest. There wasn’t much to the town aside from a rustic stone church (photo, right) and a hotel; the rest was largely newer residential construction. A plaque above the side entrance of the church dated it to 1752 but unfortunately the place was shuttered up and no one responded to our knocks (we tried every door we could find). An old graveyard surrounded the church but there were surprisingly few headstones and, of the few that we could actually read, none mentioned any names we recognized. We went across the street to the “new” cemetery in hopes of finding more recently deceased ancestors, but to no avail. The cemetery was divided into family plots and many of them were carefully tended with elaborately landscaped gardens.

A bit frustrated but not yet without hope, we continued on to the village of Langenholzhausen (“long wooden houses”), where John had traced another relative through online records. We found another old stone church there; this one was also locked up and had no date on it, but looked even older than the one in Bergkirchen. There were very few headstones left standing in the graveyard and the inscriptions were all virtually illegible. We looked around a bit but couldn’t find the new cemetery.

Next, on a whim, we looked up Westerwalder Hof in our Germany atlas. Westerwalder means “western forest” and a Hof is a farm; this place was mentioned on another birth certificate that John had found online. Amazingly, there was only one Westerwalder Hof listed in our atlas for all of Germany and it wasn’t far from our present location, so off we went. We found ourselves on a narrow tree-lined road and passed a green-and-yellow sign labeled “Westerwalder Hof,” which means it is smaller than a town – not much more than a cluster of farms, really, surrounded by beautiful countryside (photo, right). There was a roadside German-Italian restaurant called “Westerwalder Hof” in an old red brick farm building, but it was all closed up – which seemed to be the trend for the day. All of the farmhouses and outbuildings in this area were constructed of red brick, some with quite ornate façades – very different from the architecture of southern Germany. We spotted two women talking outside the house next door and I convinced John to approach them – what if they were relatives and we never knew? One of the women headed to her car and started to drive away as we walked up; she stopped and John asked her if she knew of anyone by his name in the area, but she pointed at the house and told us we would have to inquire there. Reluctantly, John knocked on the door and an elderly woman answered with a small dog yapping at her heels. She looked at us rather skeptically even though John explained in his best German that we were Americans looking for our ancestors. She just shook her head and shut the door rather quickly in our faces.

Our final shot of the day was the second Bergkirchen, which was also not far from where we were. It also had an old stone church but there wasn’t a single headstone left in the empty churchyard. We looked through the new cemetery nearby but didn’t find any familiar names. We had exhausted all of our leads and were no closer to finding John's ancestors than we had been this morning. I did take lots of pictures everywhere just in case we ever find more information to link the family to one of these locations. We didn’t feel like our time had been wasted – it was a lovely day and we had enjoyed our meanderings through the rolling countryside. John wondered what painful circumstances had convinced his ancestors to pick up and leave this beautiful place for the great unknown of America, and, ultimately, the flatlands of southern Illinois. We stopped for gas and ate some candy bars but otherwise hadn’t eaten anything all day, so we decided to hit the road for Hamburg.

It was a two-hour drive to the great Hanseatic city of Hamburg and we arrived in rush hour traffic with me at the wheel. Susie navigated us faithfully into the city and we found the swanky Hotel SIDE near the bustling Neustadt shopping district without too much trouble. The area around the hotel entrance was crammed with black Mercedes – a large group of businesspeople seemed to be arriving all at once – but I managed to squeeze the car into the loading zone and we were assisted by a friendly doorman who spoke German with a funny accent; I think he might have been Russian. We left our car to the valet and walked into the sleek and cavernous lobby, where we checked in with a woman who switched smoothly to English when I balked after she asked me for my credit card. She suggested a couple of restaurants for dinner.

A doorman showed us to our room on the sixth floor and gave us a quick runthrough of the bewildering amenities. The SIDE is a “design hotel” true to its word – everything was stark white and sleek dark wood and very chic, almost to the point of being more about style than functionality. Hidden switches controlled innumerable lights and window blinds, a flat-screen TV rose from a square console at the foot of the bed, and the bathroom was a wonder of opaque green glass. The toilet was square. We quickly changed into more stylish clothes (everyone in the lobby seemed to be wearing crisp black suits) and headed out.

The city seemed strangely quiet for 8 p.m. on a Friday night. One of the restaurants the woman at the desk had recommended, a sushi place called Soho on one of the canals, was totally abandoned, and we couldn’t find the Italian place she had referred to along the Binnenalster (one of two large lakes in the middle of Hamburg), so we wandered down a promising-looking street and ended up in a cramped Fischstube populated by a mostly older crowd. It was cozy and quaint, with a menu of traditional seafood fare. John had Zanderfillet with a creamy sauce and spinach and I had a huge steaming pot of mussels in white wine sauce. Unfortunately the service wasn’t great – the waitstaff kept ignoring us while serving the German guests seated around us – so we left without getting dessert and headed back to the hotel.

More photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/hausfrau/sets/72157603990990478/