Autobahn-ing to Bavaria

Photo by Katalin Varga

The Road

Driving on the Autobahn is about enjoying the lack of speed limits, but also taking the fullest advantage of them. Traffic slows or stops so often on the famed highways that when you have the chance, you put the pedal to the metal and cover as much distance as possible before traffic comes to a grinding halt once again. 

The speed limit isn't so much a luxury, but an opportunity to recapture lost time. 

After a few hours, you are skilled at making the most efficient use of those windows of no-speed-limit driving. You become adept at looking for the next slowdown during these bouts of high speed. You start to sense danger. You get nervous when you see the flash of a brake light ahead. 

After you're accustomed to the fear of brake lights, and after you've understood that time is lost and gained during those precious minutes when you can drive as fast as you can, then you have understood the Autobahn – it's stop and go stretched into a longer, faster scale. 

The Plan

On Google Maps, the trip from Düsseldorf to the edge of the Alps, seemed simple. Six hours of Autobahn driving, with a few pee breaks, would make it a do-able weekend trip. 

We left after work on a Friday, planning a stop for the night halfway. Then, I figured, it would be an easy drive in the late morning to the Alps. Sunday afternoon would, in my completely inexperienced and totally unprepared mind, offer plenty of time for the six-hour drive home. 

In reality, it was six hours to get halfway there. There was construction, where lanes were reduced and narrowed, so you're inches away from oncoming traffic on one side and inches from the daredevils passing you on the other side – yeah, drivers pass on the inside in a construction zone. 

Then it took us an hour to cover the final 10km. The traffic stopped after we had passed the last exit, so we were stuck, waiting to get to our exit, knowing our beds for the night were so close.

By the time we staggered into our hotel it was almost 1am. We showered and lay in bed, feeling too tired to fall asleep. 

We didn't really get a look at the city we were in – Würzburg – until we awoke the next morning and looked out the window. In the distance, we saw the fortress-like palace on a hill overlooking the city. The sun was shining and it seemed like it was a good day to be on the road. We went downstairs for our first Bavarian breakfast. 

I pity the vegan living in Bavaria, because this region knows how to do bacon, eggs, and dairy. Everything tasted fresh and delicious.  

The bacon tasted like those thick slices of country bacon you get from farmers who care enough about their pigs to name them. The butter was smooth, rich and creamy. It tasted like butter, a taste we forget in this margarine-mongering world. 

There was even a photo of the egg farmer delivering eggs to hotel in front of the scrambled eggs on the breakfast buffet table. She wasn't holding the day's newspaper for Proof of Freshness, but I still couldn't help but appreciate this commitment to serving good food.  

With our bellies full, we resumed the road trip. Again, running into enough slowing or stopped traffic that our arrival was delayed. We arrived late, so we decided to check into our hotel later and proceed straight to our destination: Neuschwanstein Castle. 

Neuschwanstein... what you can't see is all the tourists on the bridge, taking the same photo.

The Castle 

Neuschwanstein Castle was designed by a reclusive Bavarian prince who wanted to use it as a private retreat and hide from the world and his princely responsibilities. An irony, considering it's now one of Germany's biggest tourist attractions.  

A small town at the foot of the castle's hill is built for tourists, and offers carriage rides, souvenirs, and cheap sausages to visitors from all over the world. For those who decide to walk up the hill instead of taking a carriage, they are treated to fresh, pine-scented air and views of the castle as they approach it.  

Neuschwanstein is less castle and more palace. It's filled with over-the-top ornate wood-working, gold trim, fancy furniture, ball rooms, throne rooms, and glorious views of the mountains above and the valleys beneath it. It is a romantic place.  

The castle has been accepting visitors since shortly after Ludwig's mysterious drowning – for over 130 years – so the Bavarians know how to move as many paying customers through as quickly as they can. 

You book a time to get in. You follow a guide into the castle. The guide doesn't speak. You get an audio guide and the human guide waves and hustles you from room to room. As you enter a room, a tour group in front of you is leaving that room. As you leave that room, another tour group enters it. 

Of course, you don't get to see every room, because that would take to much time. The tour concludes after a brisk half hour, then you exit through several gift shops, but not before passing a few balconies with stunning views.

Impromptu Parking Lot Mountain Photo Shoot.

The Alps 

As lovely as the castle is, it doesn't compare to the beautiful mountains that surround it. Neuschwanstein is a fairy tale, but the Alps are mythical.  

As we drove south on Saturday, we were waiting to catch the first glimpse of them. At the top of every hill, we squinted south, but didn't see them. They didn't come into view gradually, but suddenly. As we rounded a bend on the Autobahn, it appeared: a big, granite wall that looks so big that you wonder why couldn't you see them sooner. 

At one point, after we visited the castle, we stopped in a gym parking lot to watch the setting sun glint off the mountain and take a few photos. From the balcony of our hotel room, it was easy just to stand there and stare at them.

Our hotel had a balcony with a beautiful sweep
of the mountains.

The Burg 

Red-roofed Rothenburg ob der Taub was one of the biggest towns in the Holy Roman Empire during the Middle Ages. The walled town grew wildly rich from trade passing through its gates.  

Then it run into some bad luck.  

A Catholic army captured it during the 30 Years War. They billeted there, which is a technical way of saying they lived in and pillaged the town at the same time. Not long after the Catholic army left, the plague arrived, killing off a chunk of the surviving population in gross and gory ways that aren't worth describing here. The city got a break for a few hundred years. It sat there on the Taub river forgotten, in a sort of stasis.  

Then the war came in 1945.  

Unlike many German towns and cities, Rothenburg ob der Taub was spared carpet bombing because it had no strategic value – no mines, factories, refineries, or military targets, unless you count the Medieval city walls and cobblestone streets. 

As the Americans approached, the German army got orders to fight to the death. The German commander disobeyed those orders and surrendered the city, sparing it from an artillery barrage and giving us a picturesque Medieval German town to visit. A rarity. 

Rothenburg's old Town Hall.

Unlike many rebuilt old towns in Germany – which look frighteningly alike – Rothenburg's old town is not a standardized cookie-cutter old town. It's a product of its medieval past – glorious and inglorious – not a post-war rebuild. The streets curve and bend for inexplicable reasons. There are pretty buildings that please the eye and functional buildings that aren't so eye-pleasing. It's often the latter that don't get rebuilt from the rubble. And rare is the city with its old walls not only intact, but so diligently maintained that one can walk around the city by walking the wall's battlements. 

With only two hours to spare, we had time for a discovery walk and a pfifferlinge-themed lunch. It wasn't enough time. Rothenburg is not the type of place you'd spend an entire weekend, but it deserves at least an afternoon of strolling and sightseeing.  

But of course, we wouldn't have come to Rothenburg if we weren't making a road trip of our trip to Bavaria.  

Europe is so dense when it comes to historical significance or natural wonders that you just point the car in a direction and drive. The Autobahn, despite its occasional slowdowns, is a fantastic way reach those interesting places.  

A true old town.

Hungary's Heart(land)

On the trail to Fuzer castle.

Every country has a landscape that shapes its mythology. The beating heart of the nation. For Canada, it's the North. The Americans have the West. Hungarians have Hortobagy, our first stop on a road trip with Kata's parents into Hungary's east.

Poets have waxed, well, poetic, about it. It's vast and bare, hot and dry. There are few places to hide from the sun. Wildfires flare up in the summer heat. Sandor Petofi called it the Burning Fields.

Driving into the Hortobagy is like driving into a time capsule. The barns have thatched roofs, with carefully grounded lightning rods to avoid fire. Water is brought up from wells with wooden levers, visible from far off. And some even wear traditional costume.

Driving through it, you notice the landscape itself. The shades of brown that stretch almost as far as the eye can see until the plains turn into hills in the hazy distance. The sunflowers weighed down by the seeds, and the fields of swaying wheat. If you're counting horses through the heat shimmer, you lose count.

But we were only passing through the Burning Fields. We stopped briefly in the town of Hortobagy – long enough to buy a handmade straw hat at the old farmers' market and see the famous Nine Hole Bridge. Then onto the road we went...

The Nine Hole Bridge of Hortobagy. 

Debrecen

For my entire stint in Hungary, the only thing I knew about Debrecen was that they made delicious, spicy sausages there. It wasn't until this trip that I learned its other big export is Resistance.

For some reason, the Reformation ideas resonated with the people of Debrecen, and the city wholeheartedly latched onto the Calvinism in the 1500s. Its university produced Calvinist scholars who traveled all over Europe, spreading the good word of the Reformation and giving the city its nickname: 'The Geneva of Hungary."

Calvinism was huge in Switzerland, but the rest of its followers were scattered in small pockets all over Europe. Debrecen was on the edge of the Roman Catholic/Protestant world – to the south was the Muslim Ottoman Empire and further east was Orthodox Russia. For Calvinism to take hold and become its springboard in the region says something about its people's dedication.

Debrecen University's pretty library.

We visited the Debrecen's university. Aside from a nice museum about medieval life and a beautiful library with artifacts from the university's most famous graduates, they have an old lecture hall. This is no ordinary lecture hall. It was here, in 1848, the Hungarian National Assembly declared independence. Kossuth Lajos would later read the proclamation from the steps of the nearby Great Reformed Church to a cheering crowd.

The lecture hall has a new coat of paint, but mostly it is as it was then. Assembly members would have sat in the same wooden pews. There was a raised pulpit up front, where Kossuth would have read the declaration.

To reach the library and the lecture hall, you climb a flight of ancient, thick wooden stairs. They're worn smooth, but still sturdy enough that they don't give way or groan under someone's weight – quality oak from the forests we'd be hiking the next day. As we climbed the stairs, Kata said, "These are original! Can you believe that Petofi Sandor and Kossuth Lajos walked on these same stairs?" We were walking in the footsteps of Hungary's heroes.

The Great Reformed Church in Debrecen.

Füzer

Our final destination was a hunting lodge in Füzer, a region of sloping, forested mountains close to the Slovak border.

After a good night's sleep – the lodge's bar closed early – we struck out on the planned 23km hike. The route would take us up several mountains, through scenic woodland, past the great castle of Füzer.

Hungarian castles are not Cinderella castles. Most have seen action. Many were built to resist another Mongol invasion after the nearly apocalyptic first Mongol invasion in 1241. The Mongols defeated the Hungarian army and destroyed the capital, pillaged the countryside, ravaged the population, and destroyed every city or town that wasn't protected by a stone fortress.

Anticipating a second invasion, the Hungarians set to work building stone castles that couldn't be breached by a horde of Mongol horsemen. They might pillage and burn the countryside, but they couldn't stay long with a garrison of troops in a castle that could attack them from the rear.

The strategy worked against the second Mongol invasion. With all the food stored in the vaults of the impregnable castles, the Mongols starved. Facing guerrilla attacks from the castle's garrisons, they fled in disarray.

Most those Hungarian castles couldn't resist the gigantic siege cannons the Ottoman Turks dragged with them through the Balkans. One after another, castle after castle fell to the Turks as they marched into Hungary, driving towards Vienna.

Füzer held out against the Turks, along with a handful of others like Eger, and have passed into national myth. But it was the Austrians who destroyed it. Getting tired of putting down Hungarian revolutions, they planted explosives in every castle, demolishing them to leave no stronghold behind for Hungarian rebels.

It is a not-so heroic end for castles that stood against so much, so I understand the government's recent desire to rebuild the castles. I also understand the romantic desire to leave the ruins behind as a more somber reminder of the past. But I have to say, there is something raw and awe-inspiring about visiting a castle ruin in Hungary.

Fuzer castle has been carefully restored,
 right down to the toilets.

Füzer was one of the rebuilt castles chosen, and they've done a lovely job of it. The chapel, living quarters, a disconcertingly large amount of toilets, four storage vaults – for wine, beer,  bacon, and then everything else – among other rooms are carefully restored.

Füzer was a short stop at the hike. Much of the day was spent humping mountains and going off the beaten path in the forests beyond Füzer.

The trail skirted the border between Hungary and Slovakia, a silly border that is just shy of a hundred years old – very young in mountain and forest years. As we hiked along the path, we flitted from Hungary to Slovakia and back again as lumberjacks and hunters must have done for centuries before the Allies plopped a border there in 1920.

We also stopped at the Hungarian Language Museum.
I looked at the pictures there.

Tokaj

After an evening of sleep and recovery from the hike – despite staying up later, since we ordered extra beer before the hotel bar closed – we stopped at Tokaj, one of Hungary's top-notch wine growing regions.

The Romantic English poets, like Byron, loved this region's wine. Louis XIV declared it, "the King of Wines and the Wine of Kings." For centuries, it was one of Europe's favourite wines. Today, after being held behind an Iron Curtain for two generations, wine from Tokaj is rightfully getting its reputation back.

And yet, despite a great visit to a wine cellar, where we sampled three varying grades wine from dry to semi-sweet to sweet, and then a final a dry, furmint version, the only photo I took was of this public toilet. A toilet Kata designed as a young industrial design student.

Still, I recommend visiting Tokaj for the fine wine, and the finely designed public toilets.

The proud designer and her public toilet.

Guide to German Politics

The Reichstag in Berlin.

The German federal election is this Sunday, so for all those readers abroad who wonder how the German government works – don't lie, you know you've thought about it – here is a quick guide to Germany's political system.

On the surface it might be tempting to compare the German political system to the Canadian system. They're both federal systems with power devolved to provinces or states, but in Canada it's that way because of size. 

In Germany, this system comes from history. Before there was a Germany, there was a bunch of small countries and kingdoms and dukedoms of German-speakers. Bavaria was a kingdom. Hamburg was an independent city-state for centuries. Hesse was a country whose chief exports were cuckoo clocks and mercenaries.

If they weren't completely independent, they enjoyed a certain level sovereignty within the Holy Roman Empire and, later, the German Confederation. Even when Prussia (another German-speaking country) absorbed them all into the German Empire, they were granted a great deal of autonomy.

How today's federal government functions is dictated in Basic Law, Germany's constitution. Rules around institutions can be changed, but not easily. Sections around individual and human rights can never be changed because some assholes in the 1930s did exactly that.

It's worth mentioning that Basic Law's articles were written based on the hard lessons learned from the National Socialist dictatorship and the political deadlock of the Weimar Republic that lead to it.

Bundesrat

This is Germany's upper house, like Canada's Senate. Unlike Canada's Senators, who are appointed by the prime minister, members of the Bundesrat are sent to Berlin by Germany's 16 states.

They're chosen based on the party composition of their state's assembly, or Landtag, which itself is partly based on proportional representation. States get a base number of delegates, which rises based on population – more people, more votes.

In Canada, the Senate was once considered the sober second thought, above the partisan House of Commons. Germany's Bundesrat is more of a check on federal power. It offers a state perspective on issues and acts as a brake on the federal government's powers over the states.

The Bundesrat doesn't usually propose legislation but it must pass all legislation before is becomes law and has the power to veto bills from the Bundestag.

If the Bundesrat vetoes a bill, and the Bundestag doesn't agree, then it goes to a compromise committee formed of members from both houses, which makes, you guessed it, a compromise. When a compromise is reached, neither Bundesrat or Bundestag can change it.

You can bet there was some hard lessons led to that idea.

Chancellor

Chancellor Angela Merkel is Germany's prime minister. She, along with the cabinet she selects, is the executive branch of the German government. Yes, there is a German president, but he is mostly a ceremonial head of state who signs laws, waves to crowds from balconies, and cuts ribbons.

The Chancellor is the head of the largest party of the Bundestag, or the largest coalition of partners. She and the cabinet proposes legislation. They are the initiators in the law-making process. Ultimately, they hold the real power.

Interesting aside: Chancellors cannot call snap elections and cannot be removed with a No Confidence vote unless a successor has already been chosen. Germany learned the hard way in the Weimar days that a hamstrung parliament just begs for a dictator 'to get things done.'

Bundestag

This is the lower house and will be elected directly by the people this Sunday. They represent the people of their districts and act as a check on the executive – holding question periods, scrutinizing legislation, broaching constituent concerns. In Canada, that's usually the mandate for the Opposition, but in Germany there is no Official Opposition – it's everyone's job.

Voting is a mixed-member proportional system. I can sense your eyes are starting to glaze over, so hold on.

Half of the Bundestag (299 members) are elected directly by their constituencies in a first-past-the-post race. They become the representatives of their specific districts, like an MP in Canada representing their riding.

Now for the proportional representation vote. Hey, don't open another tab! Stay with me!

On the other half of a voter's ballot is a box to tick for a political party. Voters choose their party of choice, which is counted as a popular vote. A percentage of seats are then allocated based on that vote, which is tallied nationwide. This sends a total of almost 600 members to the Bundestag.

This election, Germans get to vote twice: for the person they want to represent their district and for the party that aligns with their political desires.

Political parties must earn at least five percent of that popular vote or win three districts to get earn popular representation seats – again a leftover from the lessons of the Weimar Republic to keep the crazy political fringes from hijacking the Bundestag.

Some words about this election...

Currently, four parties hold seats in the Bundestag – Anglea Merkel's ruling Christian Democratic Party and its Bavarian sister party, Christian Social Union (CDU/CSU), the Social Democrats (SPD), the Left Party, and the Greens.

The right-wing CDU and the left-wing SPD have been in a ruling coalition together and, in compromising with each other, have both drifted to the centre. Many of their traditional supporters look likely to vote for more extreme parties on the left and right. 

The Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Freedom Party (FDP) have put their immigration and economic policies, respectively, to the right of the traditionally right-wing CDU. Their polling numbers hover at around 10 percent a piece. 

The coalition was more costly for SPD. Despite an energized beginning to the campaign with a new leader, polls now suggest they're in for a big loss. The Left, the Greens have benefitted from the SPD's listless campaign, and are both sitting at around 10% of the popular vote. They might also be losing vote to the AfD too. 

You might not like what they have to say, but parties were sent to the Bundestag by the people who voted for them. That's the beauty of the proportional party vote, it opens up the Bundestag to more parties and more views. Plus, that five percent threshold keeps the crazies out, like the Pirate Party (sounds funny, I know), or the NPD (the not so funny neo-fascists).

This also makes it difficult to predict how the next government will look because the winning party needs to form a coalition with other parties no matter what. The CDU looks likely to win, but with no majority will it seek support from the SPD again? Or will it lean to its right, towards the Freedom Party? Or with the Greens, who are open to a coalition with the CDU?

For those of you who made it to the end of this post, I think we can agree: This is exciting stuff!