Bernkastel Kues on the Mosel River

The trip back to Bitburg was not that short.  I intended to stop at Bernkastel-Kues on the Mosel River, but that was about 170 miles away from Heidelberg.  This would be a long-haul drive, but we would be back home in Bitburg on Friday night, since it would be another 50 miles from Bernkastel to Bitburg.  Bernkastel-Kues is a German town on the Middle Mosel in the Bernkastel-Wittlich district of Rhineland-Palatinate, well-known as a winegrowing center.  This town was the birthplace of one of the most famous German polymaths, the medieval churchman, theologian, and philosopher, Nicholaus of Cusa (1401-1464).  Bernkastel-Kues lies in the Mosel valley, roughly 30 miles from Trier, with about 7,500 people and less than 4% foreigners.  At the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Bernkastel and Kues were annexed to the Kingdom of Prussia.  The first road bridge between Bernkastel and Kues was built between 1872 and 1874, as was the first railway link in 1882 and 1883.  In 1891, Bernkastel marked its 600-year jubilee as a town.  The current Bernkastel-Kues came into being in April 1905 through the merger of Bernkastel with the winemaking village of Kues across the Mosel River.  Bernkastel has a medieval marketplace with gabled timber-frame houses from the 17th century.  Near the outlying center lies the former Machern Monastery in whose rooms are now found a winery, a house brewery, and a restaurant.  They celebrate the Mosel Musik Festival, the Wine Festival of the Middle Moselle, and a Christmas market here each year.  Historically, the most important economic sector has been winegrowing, so that today there are still many popular Riesling wineries in Bernkastel-Kues.  Thus, Bernkastel-Kues has become a stop on many Rhine-Mosel cruises.  I had visited here by car during grape harvesting time when I was in Trier in the late 1960s.  I loved the Mosel Reisling wines, as opposed to the Bavarian beer, because of my time in Trier, since this same Mosel River flows by Trier.  Have you heard of the Mosel River?

Heidelberg

That Thursday evening, August 11, 1977, we stayed overnight at the Zum Schonen Ecke in Heidelberg, about 100 miles further north of Rottenburg.  As far as I can tell, this Heidelberg hotel no longer exists.  We had diner and went to bed.  The next morning, we were ready to go.  Heidelberg is a German city in Baden-Wurttemberg, situated on the Neckar River, with about 160,000 people.  Heidelberg University, that was founded in 1386, is one of Germany’s oldest universities and most famous for its drinking songs.  This University played a leading part in Medieval Scholasticism, Renaissance humanism, the German Reformation, and in the subsequent conflicts between Lutheranism and Calvinism during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.  In April 1518, a few months after proclaiming his Ninety-five Theses, Martin Luther was received in Heidelberg, to defend them.  Heidelberg’s library, founded in 1421, is the oldest existing public library in Germany.  Heidelberg is home to several internationally renowned research facilities adjacent to its university, since it has been a hub for the arts, especially literature, throughout the centuries.  Heidelberg is still a popular tourist destination due to its romantic cityscape, including Heidelberg Castle, the Philosophers’ Walk, and the Baroque old town.  Modern Heidelberg can trace its beginnings to the fifth century, but the town’s founding date is 1156.  During the Nazi period (1933–1945), Heidelberg was a stronghold of the Nazi party.  During the Kristallnacht in 1938, Nazis burned down two synagogues in Heidelberg.  The next day, they started the systematic deportation of Jews, sending 150 of them to a Dachau concentration camp.  Heidelberg, unlike most German cities and towns, was spared from Allied bombing raids during the war.  A popular belief is that Heidelberg escaped bombing because the U.S. Army wanted to use this city as a headquarters garrison after the war.  However, as Heidelberg was neither an industrial center nor a transport hub, it did not present a tactical or strategic target.  In 1945, the university was reopened relatively quickly on the initiative of a small group of professors, among whom were the anti-Nazi economist Alfred Weber and the philosopher Karl Jaspers.  In December 1945, US Army General George S. Patton was involved in a car accident and died in the Heidelberg US Army hospital on December 21, 1945. The population of the city of Heidelberg exceeded 100,000 for the first time in 1946, as it has become a city with an international population, including one of the largest American communities outside of North America.  The Heidelberg Castle is surrounded by a park, where the famous poet Johann von Goethe once walked.  We could see the Heidelberg Castle, a landmark of Heidelberg, in the distance from our hotel.  The castle ruins are among the most important Renaissance structures north of the Alps.  The castle has only been partially rebuilt since its demolition in the 17th and 18th centuries, as it dominates the view of the old downtown.  Originally built in 1214 and later expanded into two castles around 1294, in 1537, a lightning bolt destroyed the upper castle.  In 1764, another lightning bolt caused a fire which destroyed some rebuilt sections.  Thus, we said good-bye to Heidelberg as we headed north back home on Friday, August 12.  Have you ever been to Heidelberg?

Medieval German cities

Thus, on Thursday, August 11, 1977, we were ready to go to some other Medieval German cities.  First up was the Augsburg Cathedral, about 30 miles west of Munich, a city in the Bavarian part of Swabia, Germany.  Augsburg, a university town, is the third-largest city in Bavaria, after Munich and Nuremberg, with a population of a little over 300,000.  After Neuss, Trier, Worms, Cologne and Xanten, Augsburg is one of Germany’s oldest cities, founded in 15 BCE by the Romans, named after the Roman emperor Augustus.  It was a Free Imperial City from 1276 to 1803.  This city played a leading role in the Reformation as the site of the 1530 Lutheran Augsburg Confession and the 1555 Peace of Augsburg.  After that it was on to another medieval town of Dinkelsbuhl, about 65 miles north of Augsburg.  Dinkelsbuhl, a historic town in Central Franconia, is now part of the state of Bavaria, a former free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire that lies on the northern part of the Romantic Road, with a population of about 11,000, one of three particularly striking historic towns.  The others are Rothenburg and Nordlingen.  The film The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm (1962) was filmed on location in Dinkelsbuhl, a very typical German town of the 15th to early 17th centuries, like a living medieval city.  The other town like it is perhaps more famous, the untouched town of Rothenburg, called the Jewel of the Middle Ages, about 30 miles further north, with a population around 5,500.  Rothenburg on the Tauber River is a town in the district of Ansbach of Middle Franconia, in Bavaria, with its well-preserved medieval old town, a destination for tourists from around the world.  Rothenburg was a free imperial city from the late Middle Ages to 1803 that literally means “Red Castle above the Tauber.”  Rothenburg held a special significance for Nazi ideologists.  For them, it was the epitome of the German “home town,” representing all that was quintessentially German.  Throughout the 1930s, the Nazi organization KDF organized regular day trips to Rothenburg from all over the German Reich.  This initiative was staunchly supported by Rothenburg’s citizenry both for its perceived economic benefits and because Rothenburg was hailed as “the most German of German towns.”  The U.S. Assistant Secretary of War, John J. McCloy, knew about the historic importance and beauty of Rothenburg, so he ordered U.S. Army General Jacob L. Devers not to use artillery in taking Rothenburg.  However, about a third of Rothenburg, mainly in the eastern half of the town, had to be repaired or rebuilt after being bombed in World War II prior to the arrival of the American ground troops.  The older western section from which the medieval town originated and contains most of the town’s historic monuments, did not suffer from the bombing.  Thus, most of the buildings in the west and the south of Rothenburg still exist today in their original medieval or prewar state.  While the eastern walls and towers received bomb damage, they remained relatively intact, due to their sturdy stone construction.  While buildings within the walled city reflect the city’s medieval history, this part of the city is in many ways a normal, modern German town with some concessions to the tourist trade.  Many stores and hotels catering to tourists are clustered around the Town Hall Square with many different kinds of museums there.  Rothenburg has appeared in several films, notably fantasies.  Would you like to live in a medieval city?

Visiting Bavarian Munich

On that Wednesday in August, 1977, we drove out of the rain in Salzburg into Germany and the Bavarian capital of Munich that was about 90 miles away.  Margaret was happy to be back in Germany after all the dark roads and rain in Austria.  I was disappointed, since I liked Austria so much.  We stayed at a Holiday Inn in Munich, so Margaret was happy, and we did not drive at night.  We even had time to visit the Bavarian National Museum with a beer and dinner at the famous Munich Hofbrauhaus that is still going today.  I had only stopped in Munich a few times.  I remember people drinking beer for breakfast at the train station.  Munich is the capital and most populated city of Bavaria, with a population of over 1,500,000, the third-largest city in Germany, after Berlin and Hamburg.  This metropolitan region is also home to about 6.2 million people, the third largest metropolitan region in the European Union.  From only 24,000 inhabitants in 1700, the city population doubled about every 30 years.  Munich lies about 30 miles north of the northern edge of the Alps along the rivers the Isar and the Wurm.  Once Bavaria was established as the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1806, Munich became a major European center of arts, architecture, culture, and science.  After the Nazis’ rise to power, Munich was declared their “Capital.”  The city was heavily bombed during World War II, but most of its old town has been restored, so that it boasts nearly 30,000 buildings from before the war.  After the end of postwar American occupation in 1949, there was a great increase in population and economic power during the years of Wirtschaftswunder, as the city hosted the 1972 Summer Olympics.  Today, Munich is a global center of science, technology, finance, innovation, business, and tourism. Munich is rated either first or third as the most livable city in the world, but is one of the most expensive housing cities in Germany.  In 2021, nearly 30% of Munich’s residents were foreigners, and another 18% were German citizens with a migration background from a foreign country.  Croatians make up the largest foreign group and refer to Munich as its second capital.  Munich’s economy is based on high tech, automobiles, the service sector, as well as IT, biotechnology, engineering, and electronics, one of the strongest economies of any German city.  The city houses many multinational companies.  In addition, Munich is home to two research universities, and a multitude of scientific institutions.  Munich’s numerous architectural and cultural attractions, sports events, exhibitions, and its annual Oktoberfest, attract considerable tourism.  Under the regency of the Bavarian electors, Munich was an important center of Baroque life.  After making an alliance with Napoleonic France, Munich became the capital of the new Kingdom of Bavaria.  In October 1810, a beer festival was held on the meadows just outside Munich to commemorate the wedding of the crown prince and princess, which is considered the origin of Oktoberfest.  Beer was considered essential in maintaining public health in Munich in the mid-nineteenth century.  In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler described his political activism in Munich after November 1918 as the “Beginning of My Political Activity.”  The first concentration camp was at Dachau, ten miles west of Munich.  Neville Chamberlain agreed to the German annexation of Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland in the hopes of satisfying Hitler’s territorial expansion in the 1938 Munich Treaty.  Bavaria has been dominated by the Christian Social Union in Bavaria (CSU) on a federal, state, and local level since the establishment of the Federal Republic in 1949.  Around World War I and after World War II, Munich became a focal point of German literary efforts and cinema, because of its unique styles, Gothic to Baroque.  Thus, Munich has one of Europe’s largest film studios.   Have you ever been to Munich?

Beautiful Salzburg

Thus, on Tuesday, August 9, 1977, we went driving through the Austrian Tyrolean Alps on a beautiful sunny afternoon.  There was plenty to see on our 120-mile trip from Innsbruck to Salzburg, the setting of the Sound of Music, with the Alps in the background.  We stopped 15 miles outside of Salzburg at Berchtesgaden, the retreat house of Hitler in the Austrian Alps.  About eight years earlier, I had given a talk there at a military conference on Catholic liturgy.  We just drove around and did not stop.  However, the weather was turning cloudy.  We arrived at our more rustic Austrian Goldene Krone Hotel.  In fact, there still is a Krone Hotel that has a web site called Hotel Krone 1512 that occupies a renovated 15th-century building in the heart of Salzburg’s historic quarter.  Hotel Krone’s quiet summer garden offers views of the roofs and churches of the historic quarter.  Wi-Fi access in all areas is available free of charge.  Of course, there was no Wi-Fi when we were there in 1977.  A picture of the hotel shows the old name was still there Goldene Krone on the side of the building.  The location was fine, but it rained all that evening and even the next day.  We ate dinner at a nearby café and then we were confined to our small room, the whole time we were there.  We ended up playing a lot of card games in our room.  Like Amsterdam, this was a low point because of the weather and where we were staying.  Salzburg is the fourth-largest city in Austria with a population of about 150,000 built on the site of a Roman settlement, an episcopal see since 696, while its main sources of income were salt extraction, trade, as well as gold mining.  In the seventeenth century, Salzburg became a center of the Counter-Reformation, with monasteries and numerous Baroque churches built.  Salzburg’s historic center is renowned for its Baroque architecture and is one of the best-preserved city centers north of the Alps.  The historic center has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996.  The city has three universities and a large population of students.  Salzburg literally means “city of salt.”  Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–1791), the composer, was born and raised in Salzburg.  His house of birth and residence are tourist attractions, but he left the city to go to Vienna in 1781 with his family.  Georg von Trapp (1880–1947), Maria von Trapp (1905–1987), and their children lived in Salzburg until they fled to the United States following the Nazi takeover.  In the 1960s, this city became the film setting of the family musical film The Sound of Music.  The mountains to Salzburg’s south contrast with the rolling plains to the north.  Adding contemporary architecture to Salzburg’s old town without risking its UNESCO World Heritage status has been problematic.  Salzburg is a tourist favorite, with the number of visitors outnumbering locals by a large margin in peak times.  There are many notable places in the old town.  Today, there are The Sound of Music tour companies who operate tours of the film locations.  We only drove around the town since it was raining all day.  This was the only time that we had a lot of rain.  Have you ever had a rainy vacation day?

Traveling through the Austrian Alps at night

After the Meersberg Ferry, we drove to Bregenz, Austria, in the afternoon of Monday, August 8, 1977.  We took the six-minute mountain ski lift to the top of Pfander Mountain to get a view of Lake Constance from high up.  Bregenz is the capital of Vorarlberg, the westernmost state of Austria, located on a plateau at the foot of Pfander mountain, one of the most famous lookout points of the region.  With good visibility, the view from the summit reaches from the Alps in the east, over to the Bregenz Forest, the steep mountain peaks of the Arlberg region, to the Swiss Alps and the foothills of the Black Forest in the west.  Below was Lake Constance, surrounded by the Rhine valley and the Swabian hills.  Obviously, this mountain is a popular tourist destination.  That evening, we headed east across the alps in our car.  We passed through the tiny country of Liechtenstein with only 40,000 people in the whole country.  However, this trip across the alps from Bregenz to Innsbruck was over 120 miles, so that it was bright during the first hour.  However, the second hour was very scary driving through the Austrian Alps in pitch darkness, once the sun had set.  There were no street lights and very few towns on this up and down twisting Alpine-road on the way to Innsbruck.  Margaret was really afraid, while Joy went to sleep.  I was never so happy to see the bright lights of Innsbruck as we neared the city around 9:30 PM.  Luckily, I had planned to stay overnight at the Holiday Inn in Innsbruck.  We had supper there before we went to bed.  I had spent two summers in Innsbruck in 1964 and 1965, learning German.  Innsbruck is the capital of Tyrol and the fifth-largest city in Austria, on the Inn River, with a population of 130,000 people.  Innsbruck, which means “bridge over the Inn,” is an internationally renowned winter sports center since it hosted both the 1964 and 1976 Winter Olympics, as well as the first Winter Youth Olympics in 2012.  Innsbruck became the capital of all Tyrol in 1429, with the Emperor Maximilian I living there.  During World War I, the only recorded action taking place in Innsbruck was near the end of the war.  In 1938, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany in the Anschluss. During World War II, Innsbruck was the location of two subcamps of the Dachau concentration camp.  Between 1943 and April 1945, Innsbruck experienced twenty-two air raids and suffered heavy damage.  We were happy to walk around Innsbruck in the daytime to see the old city gate, the golden roof, and the sky lifts in the background.  There would be no more traveling in the dark on the Austrian Alp highways without lights.  All our mountain travel would be during the day.  Have you ever driven in a dark mountain area at night?

Lake Constance

On that August Monday afternoon in 1977, we then drove some 80 miles south to Lake Constance, where Germany, Switzerland, and Austria meet, with its shorelines in the German states of Baden-Wurttemberg and Bavaria, the Swiss cantons of St. Gallen, Thurgau, and Schaffhausen, and the Austrian state of Vorarlberg.  The largest islands are Reichenau in the Lower Lake, and Lindau and Mainau in the Upper Lake.  While in English and in the Romance languages, the lake is named after the city of Constance, the German name derives from the village of Bodman, Bodensee.  Lake Constance is the third largest freshwater lake in central and western Europe, 40 miles long and about 10 miles wide, an important source of drinking water for southwestern Germany.  Disputes over which part of the Lake belongs to which country still exists, since wars have been fought over control of this region.  Lake Constance is in the foothills of the Alps.  I wanted to visit Rechineau Island because there had been a manuscript from that monastery, that I saw in Vienna, Austria, while doing some research.  Reichenau Island is a German island in Lake Constance, west of the city of Konstanz, with a total land surface of two miles, connected to the mainland by a causeway, completed in 1838.  In 724, the first monastery was built on the island, and quickly developed into an influential religious, cultural, and intellectual center during the Early and High Middle Ages.  The Reichenau Abbey was one of the most significant monasteries across the Frankish Empire.  Because of its historical importance and the exceptional quality of the architecture and artwork found in the island’s three churches and abbey, Reichenau was declared a World Heritage Site in 2000.  In 816 the monastery church of the abbey, was rebuilt in a cruciform basilica style, and churches dedicated to the Virgin Mary and Saint Mark were consecrated.  Two further churches were built on the island consecrated to Saints Peter and Paul in 799 and to Saint George in 896.  We visited the Church of St. George or St.  Goar.  The monastic community of the abbey produced several influential poets and authors, such as Walafrid Strabo, who served as its abbot.  We also stopped in the city of Konstanz, a university city with approximately 83,000 inhabitants at the western end of Lake Constance.  The Rhine River, which starts in the Swiss Alps, passes through Lake Constance, and leaves it considerably larger, by flowing under a bridge connecting the two parts of the city.  Car ferries provide access across Lake Constance to Meersburg, which we took.  The Germany–Switzerland border runs along the southwestern and southern edge of the city of Meersburg, a medieval town in Baden-Wurttemberg on Lake Constance, with a lower and upper town connected by two stairways and a steep street.  The name of the town means “Castle on the Sea,” referring to a castle which was built here in 630.  Meersburg is home to two castles, the Old Castle and the New Castle.  The New Castle was built in the eighteenth century, and is now a museum.  What do you know about Lake Constance?

The German Black Forest

We traveled from Offenberg to the heart of the German Black Forest to Triberg, about 35 miles away.  The Black Forest is a large forested mountain range in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg in southwest Germany, bounded by the Rhine Valley to the west and south and close to the borders of France and Switzerland, as the source of the Danube and Neckar rivers.  Historically, the area was known for forestry and the mining, but tourism has now become its primary industry.  The Black Forest is a hundred-mile mountain chain with fantastically formed trees as a symbol of an unsettled and virtually inaccessible terrain.  Originally, the Black Forest was a mixed forest of deciduous trees and firs.  At the higher elevations, spruce also grew. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the Black Forest was almost completely deforested by intensive forestry and was subsequently replanted, mostly with spruce monocultures.  The term High Black Forest refers to the highest areas of the South and southern Central Black Forest.  We spent that 1977 August Sunday night in the middle of the Black Forest, at the rustic Martini Hotel in Triberg.  We were tired after this long drive, so that we went to sleep fast.  As far as I can tell, this hotel does not exist today.  Perhaps it was too rustic, but I thought it would give a good feel for the Black Forest.  This small town of Triberg only has about 4,500 people, but it is famous because it was the first city where the deportation of Jews started.  Watchmaking was once a thriving local industry, but no longer plays a central role in the economy.  The Triberg Waterfalls, a series of waterfalls in the Gutach River, are among the highest in Germany.  The next morning, we went there to see them.  There was also a Black Forest Museum.  We went looking for cuckoo clocks, but there were none there for sale, but Triberg did have the world’s biggest cuckoo clock in the middle of town.  Have you ever heard of the Black Forest?

A trip to southern Germany and Austria

Our next adventure was a trip to southern Germany and Austria.  There would be more highway driving this time, since this trip was not like the one to the small Benelux countries, right beside Bitburg.  We took off, Margaret, Joy, and I, on Sunday, August 7, 1977, towards Saarbrucken, Germany, the capital and largest city of the state of Saarland, Germany, with about 180,000 inhabitants, on the Saar River.  Saarbrucken borders France and had been a French territory twice in the twentieth century, as it was created in 1909 by the merger of three cities.  After that, it was on to northeast France and the city of Strasbourg, the largest city of eastern France with nearly 300,000 people, about 80 miles from Saarbrucken.  Located at the border with Germany in the historic region of Alsace, it is the official seat of the European Parliament, one of the de facto four main capitals of the European Union with Brussels, Luxembourg, and Frankfurt.  Strasbourg’s historic city center was classified as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO in 1988, as it is immersed in Franco-German culture, especially the University of Strasbourg, currently the second-largest in France, with the coexistence of Catholic and Protestant cultures.  It is also home to the largest Islamic place of worship in France, the Strasbourg Grand Mosque.  We were on our way to the German Black Forest.  Thus, we crossed the Rhine River to Offenburg, a city in the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, in southwestern Germany with 60,000 inhabitants, between Karlsruhe and Freiburg, about fifteen miles from Strasbourg.  During World War I, Offenburg was one of the first cities to experience the effects of aerial bombardment.  In World War II, Offenburg was the location of prisoner-of-war camps.  Offenburg lies at the foot of the Black Forest, so that we were near where I wanted to be.  Have you ever crossed the Rhine River?

Back home at Bitburg AFB

That Friday evening, we headed back to Bitburg AFB, but not before we made a stop in Spa, Belgium, where I spent the summer of 1963, since it was only about 30 miles away from Aachen, Germany.  I drove by a couple of places in Spa to show Margaret where I had been.  We then turned further south to Bitburg that was about 60 miles away.  Finally, we arrived at the American housing area in Bitburg to spend Friday and Saturday with Tom and Rosie.  On Saturday night, we went bowling in the bowling alley on the Air Force Base, where we met some of Tom and Rosie’s friends.  Rosie introduced Margaret as her sister.  Someone asked her which of them was the older sister, since they both had baby girl toddlers.  To my surprise and the delight of Margaret, Rosie’s friend believed that Rosie was Margaret’s older sister.  In fact, Margaret is eleven years older than Rosie, since Margaret is the oldest in their family and Rosie is the youngest.  Rosie smoked cigarettes and her face seemed a little worn, but she was upset with her friend. Margaret was not Rosie’s older sister, since Margaret was eleven years older than her.  We never brought up that subject up again with Rosie.  Do you have a younger or older sister?