Hannah Swithinbank

Tears for the Past

Water from melting snow drips down one of the stelae in the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin.

I think the fact that I don’t really understand the Holocaust Memorial’s artistic/architectural nature and yet was still affected by it speaks to how well done the memorial is.  I don’t get how or why a field of concrete stelae is supposed to or can memorialise the Holocaust – but it *does*.    You walk between the rows of these blocks, which are of various heights – in the middle you are completely dwarfed by them – taking turns as and when you want to turn to find your own way through the field.  If it is a metaphor for history, then it’s almost scarily effective – each turn has its own impact on the trail you leave behind you, and can cause you to end up emerging somewhere else around the edge of the field – and with no distinguishing features on the blocks there is very little to aid you in picking out a very specific path as you go through or reaching a specific destination.  You could walk through in a straight line and miss a lot.  You could very deliberately count your way through, taking certain rows, and still miss a lot.  You could aim for an exit point and wander as vaguely as you liked towards that goal. Or you could wander at will, and end up anywhere, or get completely lost.  It’s dislocating and chilling – especially in the snow.

The day I was there the sun was starting to melt the snow that had settled on top of some of the stelae, with water droplets running down the sides of the blocks like tears.   I wanted to capture some of these drops – but also to give a sense of the memorial as a larger structure that you can get lost in.  It was a little tricky to get both, since the stelae are laid out in straight lines – which means it was hard to get them into the background of a photograph whose focal point was some small drops of water on the face of a block.  In the end, this is what I managed to capture.  Now I have it, I feel like, in a way, the ‘tears’ of the melting snow in focus in front of the bright white snowy, straight path up out of the maze of stelae might say something about the importance of tears, grief and memorialising in finding a way through the maze of history as it impacts upon us.  Which isn’t at all what I was initially aiming for – which was the tears caught in the middle of the field of blocks.  Maybe my camera is smarter than me.

Some reasons why you shouldn’t go to Trier in winter

1. It will be COLD.  And Trier is a town where the things you want to see are largely outsidey things that involve wandering around. Apart from the Rheinisches Landesmuseum, which is obviously an inside thing, and the churches the main sights are the Roman ruins like the Kaiserthermen and the amphitheatre, and the town itself.

2. Cold itself isn’t too horrible, it’s when you start adding in wintery weather like rain, sleet or snow. ALL of which it did at some point on Friday when I was there.   This is what town looked like from the Porta Nigra on Friday afternoon.  ‘Twas lovely.  You could sort of see that Trier is actually a really lovely town, but by the time you’d got wet ankles a cold head and cold hands, you weren’t really in the mood to appreciate it.

3. There is an additional problem that arises when you add cold and wet winter weather to a collection of outside sights. It’s called ICE.   Apart from the Porta Nigra and the Viehmarktthermen (which is under a big glass box) all the Roman sites I wanted to see were shut due to icy surfaces.  So I stood outside them and whimpered, and took photos through the fence.

5. Photos. Aha, yes. Cameras and sleet are two unmixy things.  Snow, oddly, isn’t so bad, for it feels dryer (don’t ask, I have my own personal science going on, clearly) but sleet and rain don’t make my camera feel comfortable.  So on Friday I took few photos and fewer that I liked. Saturday was better as, although it had snowed overnight, it wasn’t whilst I was out and about, and there was even a smidgen of blue sky and sunlight, which made for better photography.

6. Other things indoorsy things will also be closed, because there is restauration work being done (the Liebfraukirche), or because it’s January (the Landesmuseum).  ‘Twas at the discovery of this last, on Saturday morning that I just starting laughing at my comedy of woe.  Trier in January FAIL.

That said, it wasn’t actually a complete bust.  Saturday morning, despite the snowy and icy conditions meaning that things were shut and that I kept trying to do the splits whilst walking on, well, pretty much every possible road surface (the GRAVEL in the park was frozen and slippy, seriously), the town looked really lovely in it’s snow dusting.  For example – the cloister behind the Dom and the Liebfraukirche.   There’s a lovely little coffee shop in the House of the Three Kings, which does amazing bagels and is open from seven am, which is great when your hostel doesn’t do breakfast.  The walk along the Mosel River past the windmills to the Römerbrücke is rather lovely.

There’s also a really really nice little wine cellar-restaurant across the road from the Liebfraukirche.  It’s called Weinstube Kesselstatt and is a really beautiful place with lovely wine and yummy food, and it totally made up for the fact that Friday was cold and wet and miserable and filled with shut things I wanted to see.

Mid-Week Skiving

I can’t remember exactly why I decided that skipping out on a day in the library to go to Aachen was better than waiting to the weekend, since there wasn’t any rugby to watch at the weekend (I’ve found an Irish pub in Cologne that shows rugby, and I’m very excited about the possibility of seeing the autumn internationals – or I was until practically the entire England squad ended up in the hospital).  I suspect it was to do with the weathe – that I decided that I didn’t see the point in day-tripping in the rain, and so picked the first not-rainy day to go hop on the train.

Aachen is a wee city (well, wee-er than Cologne) near the border, and it is where Charlemagne had his palace.   It’s busy developing a Charlemagne trail at the moment, which could be fun.   I mostly wanted to see the cathedral (which is home to Charlemagne’s throne) and go spa-ing.  I also fancied seeing the cathedral treasury, but in the end I passed up on it to go spa-ing, on the theory that I would be going back to Aachen, hopefully with the brilliant @Sunsetmog if she can make it out here, and could go to the Treasury then.   In the end result, I probably should have gone to the Treasury instead, spa-ing was fine, but just not quite as unwinding as it should have been, due to – well, cultural differences/personal hang-ups.  I just don’t do  mixed nekkid saunaing.  I find this not relaxing.   I also like my spa-baths to be not two flights of stairs away from my saunas. Carolus Thermen is big and swish and all, but it’s actually too big for my tastes.  Well now I know – next time I will go for Mediaeval Treasures.

The Cathedral was Made of Awesome, though.  FYI, the Treasury is open from 10am and the cathedral from 11am (there are services before, so you can pop in, but not really tourist).  Also, if you want to see Charlemagne’s throne, which is up in the gallery, you have to take a tour.   It’s about €3 and it also takes you into the cathedral Choir, which is otherwise gated off, so it’s worth it – even in German.  I did the German tour in the morning, ‘cos I wanted to go to the Spa, but there’s an English one at 2pm nowadays, which is a Good Thing, ‘cos I’m pretty sure, based on what I gleaned, that the tour guides are good and interesting.

It’s just the most gorgeous building.  If you come at it from the train station you sort of fall upon it, set in a wee square, all soaring lines and architectural wonder.  Then you go round a corner and find yourself in the small square in front of the cathedral.  The other side of the cathedral faces onto a large square between the cathedral and the Rathaus, but it’s a bit empty and not as nice.  Basically, the cathedral’s in two bits.  There’s the older two tier octagon, which Charlemagne’s original chapel, and which is a masterpiece of mosaic bling, and is home to the throne (a very simple set of marble blocks bound together, with a view down to the altar.  Then there’s the the later, gothic choir, which flies up straight and narrow, and seems to be made of stained glass windows (which were restored after the war).  It really is the original definition of awesome.  There was definitely awe involved as I stood with my neck craned looking up at the ceilings and windows.   Although it’s relatively small, it’s definitely one of the loveliest cathedrals I’ve been in – and I’ve now been in a fairly large number of European cathedrals.

Finally, in Aachen, there was Printen. Nom nom nom nom nom. Printen is Aachen’s own special kind of lebkuchen (german gingerbread) – a spicy, chewy biscuit, with crunchy rock candy bits. It comes in all shapes and sizes, and coatings – sugar glaze, chocolate, chocolate with bits – and it’s NUMMY. I came home with a stash at it.

Yay for Post-its.

There’s no easy way to change the name on the post box of my flat (which is why I told everyone to add the name of my landlord when mailing stuff to me) – but there are some people who won’t do that. Like the bank, for instance, who don’t have a ‘z.H’ (c/o) line on their address forms. So I have stuck a post-it on the front of the box, and I’m hoping it won’t get rained off every other day.

I managed to get it up in time for the postman to deliver the PIN number for my new bank account, but the card, which should have been sent out first, has gone AWOL. So yesterday I had a fun Anglo-German phone conversation with the bank to get them to send a replacement. It’ll be nice when it arrives – currently I have money in one account and no way of accessing it, and not much money in the account I can access. And they’re in different countries, making transfers tricky and potentially expensive.

It’s all part of the fun of moving, no?