I walked the Camino de Santiago much faster than I expected! With a whole extra weekend ahead of me, I had lots of options, and I decided to visit my friend, Eric, in a country that had come highly recommended along the Camino: Germany!
I haven’t had the chance to learn German yet, but Eric is really good at speaking English! Plus, he knows all the sights to see in his hometown of Leipzig! The plan was to start the day with a quick tour of some of the city highlights and finish up at the famous Leipzig Zoo! I highly recommend making friends in other countries who will show you around, so long as you’re willing to do the same when they come visit you!
Leipzig is in a neat part of Germany with its own dialect, called Upper Saxon! It’s very distinct, if you know how to listen for it. For instance, a Berliner would call this city “Leipzik,” while a Leipziger would call home “Leipzish!” Eric says northern Germans view Leipzigers like hicks! Even Friederich Nietzsche scoffed, “[I]magine a “classically educated” man with a Leipzig dialect!” Well, so what? Leipzig gave birth to innovators, like the pioneer of modern music, Richard Wagner, and calculus whiz/ultimate optimist, Gottfried Leibniz! Johann von Goethe went to school at Leipzig University, and Johann Bach was the music director of all four of the city’s churches! They were hardly intellectual pushovers! And, I’ll have you know that Eric received training in Latin and is now attending school on the UNESCO World Heritage List! Ha ha, Nietszche!
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After all those sunny days in Spain, Leipzig reminded me how darn cold early spring can be! Maybe I shouldn’t have burned all of my supplies in Fisterra. Not to be daunted by a little weather, though, I joined Eric for a whirlwind tour of the city, starting with the Exhibition Center! Leipzig’s reputation for trade fairs is virtually unmatched in Europe, probably because fairs have been a critical part of Leipzig’s history since at least 1497! That’s when Emperor Maximilian I endowed Leipzig with the imperial right to host trade fairs (also endorsed by Pope Leo X), then decreed, ten years later, that all traders passing through the area had to stop in Leipzig and sell their wares!
Now, the new Center, with its giant rose sculpture, its walkway through the middle of a pond, and its lions (the symbols of Leipzig), hosts dozens of trade fairs for poultry, automobiles, comics, and beyond! Leipzig’s cosmopolitan reputation even led to its nomination as a venue for the 2012 Olympics! Even though it lost, it’s really swell to be here in 2012. Sorry, London!
We took the light rail into the historic district, and I was really surprised to see so many closed shops covered in graffiti along the way! I was under the impression that Germany was still the economic powerhouse of Europe, but then again, any big city can have its troubled areas!
The train dropped us off in front of the Mädler-Passage, originally a 16th-century exhibition hall built from the wine bar of Dr. Stromer von Auerbach! Though it’s been demolished and rebuilt many times over the centuries, the wine bar, now known as Auerbach’s Keller, still remains! You may recognize it from its role in Goethe’s Faust! Auerbach’s Keller was the first place that Mephistopheles took Faust on their adventures! He found some students imbibing heartily and summoned them various drinks from a hole in the table! In their sloppiness, they spilled some of the wine, and it turned to fire! The students were so mad that they tried to stab Mephistopheles, and well, he had no choice but to bedevil them into a hallucinatory world of wine, vine, and wonder!
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In 1913, Mathieu Molitor installed a two-piece, bronze sculpture of this scene atop the staircases leading down into Auerbach’s Keller. It’s said that rubbing Faust’s foot brings good luck, so I made sure to give it a good rubbing!
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Because it was so cold, our walkabout moved quickly. We briefly passed the industrial Museum of Art, the Old and New City Halls, and the Courthouse, to be visited if I return, and arrived at the Leipzig University Library, where Eric used to spend many long hours, probably in one of the library’s 780 reading places! This library’s been around since 1542 and started with 2,500 volumes. Since then, that collection has expanded to over 5 million, but only 4% is visible! Since he was no longer a student, our visit was limited to the front foyer, which was, nonetheless, marvelously elegant with tall, white columns and Romanesque statues! If I’d been a student here, I think I would have spent a lot of time in this library too!
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On the way to the library, I’d noticed some tall, spiny church spires in the distance that looked really interesting, so we decided to stop there before lunch. This church is called Peterskirche, or Peter’s Church, and it’s unlike anything I’d seen in Spain! Maybe that’s because it’s German, or Lutheran, or both! Its 10th-century incarnation was Catholic, but during the Reformation, it fell to decay! That’s not too surprising, because Martin Luther did most of his preaching down the street at Thomaskirche!
So, Peterskirche cycled through stages of rebirth and decay until 1878, when an architectural competition brought August Hartel and Constantin Lipsius onto the scene. It took them seven years of planning before they laid the first foundation stone, then three more years to bring Leipzig’s first Protestant church back to life! Now, it is the tallest of the three remaining churches in Leipzig (the others being Thomaskirche and Nikolaikirche) and easily one of the scariest! I like that, though!
Since both of us were starving, Eric introduced me to German fast food. Normally I stick to more local fare when I visit a new country, but I have to make this recommendation: try another country’s fast food at least once. A German Subway beats an American Subway in every way! There’s just something about German bread that makes a sandwich taste wonderful!
That being said, it was really weird that all of the menus were in English. This was useful for me, since I hadn’t come prepared with any phrases like “Ich hätte gern ,” but it really surprised me, and kind of offended me, that the franchise so brazenly dismissed the German language in Germany! If I’d spoken more than a few words, I would have boldly ignored the menu and ordered what I saw. Someday!
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Have I mentioned how cold it’s been today? Well, we ate lunch in an alleyway and realized that we’d probably freeze right to death wandering around the zoo. Instead, we made two shorter trips before calling it a day. The first took us all the way to the top of the tallest building in Leipzig, the City-Hochhaus, where Eric pointed out the zoo, the opera house, Thomaskirche, and way off in the misty distance, his house! The air wasn’t clear enough to get good views, but Eric assured me this wasn’t smog, just standard winter cloud cover!
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To conclude our whirlwind tour of Leipzig, we took the light rail a bit further to the Völkerschlachtdenkmal, or the Monument to the Battle of Nations! Now this is one imposing monument! Near here, in 1813, the hearty Leipzigers beat back Napoleon’s forces! A full century of planning went into figuring out how best to memorialize that victory. Then, in 1913, just in time for the centennial anniversary, this 91-meter, 300-kiloton, 364-step monument opened to the public. It has since served as a staging area for mass propaganda, a center for debate on the erection of modern memorials, and now, a museum!
After running more stairs than we’d planned to walk, we entered the monument’s rotunda, the paragon of uniformity. Huge stone faces, flanked by superhuman soldiers, support an enormous dome, which is ringed with lines of identical soldiers on horseback. Apart from the wreath in the center of the rotunda, it’s all in shades of gray! It is majestic, if a bit spooky!
Stairs run from the bottom level all the way to the top, and there are two viewing platforms, one in the middle, and one on the roof. I thought I was ready for the challenge but settled for the compromise of riding the elevator halfway. That led us out onto the narrow walkway around the outside of the monument. Apparently a lot of people have fallen from here, so I didn’t feel too inspired to jump up and take a photo!
When we went back inside, the stairwell to the roof was governed by a street light! It turns out that this stairwell is so narrow that only one single-file line can ascend or descend at a time! Well, we made it, took in another great panoramic view, and decided to descend the entire stairwell at once. Eric challenged me to go really fast down the spiraling stairs, and boy, the descent turned hypnotic! By the time we emerged at the bottom, it was hard to walk straight!
After getting our bearings, Eric took me through the old fairgrounds to Hit Markt to introduce me to some of his favorite chocolates, especially the Schoko-Bananen! Did you know these were the first chocolate confections in the world with fruity filling?! Originally, the filling was just flavored, sugary foam, but in the 60s, Casali signed a deal with Chiquita that added eight whole percent of real bananas to the filling! So there’s something healthy about them! That was all the excuse I needed to gobble them up on the train ride back to Eric’s place!
I wondered if I could find them back home, but Eric says it’s illegal to ship them to the United States! That just can’t be! I did some investigation, but I still can’t find any definite restrictions on exporting chocolate from Germany or importing chocolate into the US. Maybe it’s because only American children seem to choke on Kinder Surprise! I guess I’ll just have to come back one day!
Auf wiedersehen!
