Spielwarenmesse in the snow

We’ve completed another whirlwind week in Nuremberg. It’s hard to believe this is the ninth time we’ve attended the Spielwarenmesse tradeshow. The highlight of this year’s event was the weather. The city experienced a near-record snowfall last Sunday, just two days before the show opened. It's hard to believe that two days earlier we'd been snorkelling in the Caribbean Sea.

Depending on who you asked, it was either the heaviest fall in two decades or the heaviest in three decades. Regardless, we arrived in Nuremberg to find almost 30 centimetres of snow on the ground. We’ve never enjoyed permanent snow cover in all the years we’ve been visiting Nuremberg.

This year, we flew Mitchell to Germany to join us for the first time.  It was an opportunity for him to explore the industry and meet our suppliers in person. We flew him into Nuremberg on Saturday afternoon so that he’d have at least two full days to acclimatise and recover from jet lag. He’s never seen snow before. As a result, he was delighted when it began falling on Sunday morning and didn't stop until the following morning. 

As happens every year, our suppliers wined and dined us again. Mitch got to experience the decadence of the Contiki Bar on Tuesday evening, followed by Cucina Italiana on Wednesday, and the infamous Pork Knuckle Dungeon on Thursday (Tucher Mautkeller Cellar is the official name). He was then invited to a European league football match on Friday night, another bucket list moment for him. I guess we’re now his favourite uncles for another month.

This evening we flew into London. Our final hours in Germany involved another hair raising close call with our flight. More about that adventure another time. We have more business meetings over the next week before we head for home. It’s been a long time on the road. 

A week of 10,000 daily steps and endless nights on the town in Nuremberg has definitely taken its toll. I’ve got a nasty chest infection, and it looks like Garry has finally caught it as well. I got my flu and COVID shots before we left Sydney, so hopefully that’s helped with some of the Northern Hemisphere’s winter ailments.

Deadly memories of Munich

Let’s continue our Eurail journey through Europe. Regular readers will recall that I spent three months backpacking through the continent with Dean Keiller, a Victorian sheep farmer, in 1990. I’m unsure why we chose Munich as our next destination upon leaving Copenhagen. All we knew of the city was its infamy during the 1972 Summer Olympics.

Munich was hosting the Games in 1972 when, on 5 September, eight Palestinian terrorists from the Black September militant group broke into the Olympic Village, killed two members of the Israeli team and took nine hostages. The hostages were later killed by the militants during a failed rescue attempt, along with five of the terrorists and one policeman.

The Olympic Games were suspended for 34 hours, and a mass was held in the main stadium to commemorate the victims. In defiance of the terrorists, the Games continued at the insistence of the IOC President Avery Brundage, who famously said, "The Games must go on!" His decision was endorsed by the Israeli government and the Israeli Olympic team.

We arrived in Munich early evening on 4 September. Our arrival coincided with the 18th anniversary of the infamous Olympic siege the following day. As a result, Dean and I made it our mission to visit the Olympic Stadium and see its arena for ourselves. I recall floral tributes lying at the base of a modest and rather austere memorial. The image of it above was sourced from the web. In more recent years, a partially enclosed memorial with exhibits and photographs has opened at Olympiapark.

Dean and I also ventured up the 291-metre-high Olympic Tower (Olympiaturm), a telecommunications tower located on the edge of the Olympiapark. Halfway up the tower, at 190 metres, sits an observation deck. It offers a superb view of the expansive park grounds and the surrounding city.

However, one location we visited in Munich has always stuck with me. On September 6, we took a local train to Dachau, approximately 16 km north of Munich. This town was home to one of the first concentration camps built by Nazi Germany. It opened in March 1933 and remained in operation until the end of the war. It was established to intern political opponents of the Nazi Party. However, in time, its mandate expanded to include forced labour, and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, Romani, Germans, and Austrians that the Nazi Party regarded as criminals, and, finally, foreign nationals from countries that Germany had conquered.

Dachau was a sobering experience. It was the first Nazi concentration camp I’d ever visited. These days, much of the complex has been demolished. In its wake lie row after row of brick foundations for the 32 wooden barracks that once stood here. At one end of the complex, a handful of administration buildings have been retained. These now house exhibits that tell the harrowing story of the camp’s history. I've sourced a couple of images from the web that give you a sense of what remains.

Dachau wasn’t Nazi Germany’s largest concentration camp, or one of its notorious “Final Solution” outposts. However, as one of the first camps, it pioneered and refined features synonymous with the concentration camp system. As a result, its activities were often highly experimental, including barbaric scientific research testing the limits of human endurance and subjugation.

For example, "high altitude" experiments subjected victims to rapid decompression to pressures found at 4,300 metres. The doctors wanted to understand what happens to a Luftwaffe pilot when their aircraft suddenly decompresses. Victims of these experiments experienced spasmodic convulsions, agonal breathing and eventual death. 

Hypothermia experiments involved immersing victims in vats of icy water or strapping them down naked outdoors in freezing temperatures. Attempts at reviving the subjects included scalding baths and forcing naked women to have sexual intercourse with the unconscious victim. These experiments killed many victims, while others were subsequently murdered to conduct autopsies.

On other occasions, victims were deprived of food and forced to drink only salt water to simulate the experience of sailors marooned at sea. Surviving prisoners tell stories of victims licking floor tiles that had been mopped in a desperate attempt to source fresh water. The list of unbelievably inhumane experiments just goes on and on.

Ultimately, hundreds of prisoners suffered and died, or were executed, in medical experiments conducted at Dachau. The exhibits on display are incredibly confronting, as are the medical records and scientific photographs documenting the camp’s inhumane experiments. Room after room of exhibits continually overwhelm the senses. It’s an unforgettable experience. One that remains with me to this day.

Although our most visceral moment was possibly a tour of Dachau’s crematorium. While its ovens were never used in conjunction with a gas chamber, they were constructed to dispose of a growing number of corpses. This includes inmates murdered by medical experiments, those killed by disease or malnutrition running rampant through the camp, and those executed for trivial misdemeanours.

On a lighter note, we also took advantage of the late-summer sunshine and spent an afternoon wandering the grounds of Schloss Nymphenburg. This magnificent Baroque palace was the summer residence of the Bavarian royal family for over two centuries. The gardens and surrounding parkland feature a stunning garden parterre and an 800-metre-long grand canal that culminates in a semi-circular, marble waterfall. 

Years later, I'd return to the palace grounds while on business in Munich. At the time, my company's German office was located in a neighbouring suburb. The eastern end of the central canal was approximately 900 metres north of Hotel Rotkreuzplatz, the hotel where I regularly stayed. I'd occasionally take a walk in the grounds with one of my regional executives as we debated EMEA's most pressing needs.

After three intense days in Munich, Dean and I boarded a train for Venice on 7 September. We scheduled a daylight journey to experience the German countryside and the Austrian Alps. Our route took us over the Bremer Pass and down the Upper Wipptal valley into Italy. We loved watching the verdant landscape and iconic villages rattle by as we climbed the pass. Above is a photo of me somewhere south of Innsbruck.

We eventually reached the shores of the Venetian Lagoon late afternoon. We based ourselves at a campground in Fusina, a coastal town popular with backpackers. From here, we caught a ferry each day across the lagoon to Zattere in Venice. I’ll share more about our time in Venice soon.

The Berlin Wall

I’ve visited Berlin on four occasions, beginning with a visit in August 1990, nine months after the city’s infamous wall came down. This first visit also kicked off a three-month backpacking odyssey through Western Europe. At the time, I was travelling with Dean, an Australian sheep farmer from Portland, Victoria.

Dean and I began our travels from Einigen, a small lakeside town in Switzerland, on 8 August. We’d been staying at Le Rüdli, an elegant heritage-listed lodge overlooking Thunersee, after finishing a three-month circuit through Eastern Europe. The Youth With A Mission (YWAM) team based here had lent our group one of two minivans we’d used for transport. I’ll share more about our extraordinary adventures behind the recently liberated Iron Curtain in another post.

Having just witnessed life after communism in Hungary, Yugoslavia, Romania and Bulgaria, we considered Berlin and its deadly wall as the holy grail of Cold War destinations. To get there, we activated our Eurail train pass and travelled via Frankfurt to the former West German border town of Helmstedt. This was as close as we could get to Berlin using our train pass. 

During the Cold War, Helmstedt was the site of the Helmstedt–Marienborn border crossing, the most important checkpoint on the Iron Curtain frontier. At the time, it was the starting point for the shortest land route between West Germany and West Berlin. According to Wikipedia, 34.6 million travellers passed through between 1985 and 1989. As a result, Dean and I decided it was the best place to hitch a ride to Berlin.

It took more than eight hours to reach Helmstedt by train, arriving shortly before nightfall. To save money, we decided to find a discreet spot on the edge of town and camp for the night. We’d then try our luck at hitchhiking across the border the following day. I use the word "border" loosely. Technically, it existed until reunification on 3 October. However, in practice, all border checkpoints had been officially abandoned five weeks before our arrival.

Dean and I pitched our newly purchased pup tent in a quiet forest, only to discover the following morning that we’d camped on the edge of a railway cutting. We later learned that Helmstedt, thanks to its strategic location, had train lines coming into town from all points of the compass. We’d arrived from the west, then inadvertently intersected another track heading south.

Hitchhiking to Berlin proved relatively easy once we knew what to do. Initially, we struggled to find a ride. Unbeknownst to us, we’d camped on a quiet rural road on the southern edge of town while the main highway to Berlin traversed its northern boundary. A passing German family eventually took pity on us. They drove us to a large roadside service centre about 7km away. It sat next to the recently abandoned border checkpoint, where the boom gates, security lanes and passport booths had been left permanently opened. The eastern checkpoint was eventually preserved as a museum, while the western complex has long since disappeared.

Once at the centre, we scored a ride within 15 minutes. A friendly, middle-aged man in a sporty German car offered us a ride. He gave us our first taste of the unrestricted speed limit on a German autobahn. He tore down the highway at speeds approaching 150kmph, but safely got us to Berlin. He also used his fancy car phone to locate a recently opened temporary youth hostel in the city's outskirts. At the time, Berlin had repurposed several former army barracks to accommodate a sudden surge in visitors. 

We spent four memorable days in Berlin, from 9-12 August, exploring both eastern and western zones, before hitching back to Hanover in West Germany. It was an extraordinary time to visit. Just five weeks earlier, on 1 July, the two Germanys had entered into a monetary, economic, and social union. Then, two months later, were formally unified. As a result, Dean and I experienced much of the communist era’s socialist culture, infrastructure and institutions before they disappeared. 

For example, we passed through the city’s U-Bahn ghost stations, which had been off-limits during the Cold War, received loose change in Ostmarks, the former communist currency and saw most of the Berlin Wall still standing in its original form. I will never forget our first encounter with the wall. 

On Thursday, August 9, exactly nine months after the wall fell, Dean and I caught the U-Bahn to Unter den Linden, near the city’s iconic Brandenburg Gate. For decades, the gate could only be reached from East Berlin, and even then, could only be viewed at a distance. As we approached it from the east, the white noise of city traffic gave way to the relentless sound of hammering and chiselling. 

As we passed through the gate’s majestic columns, a most remarkable sight greeted us. In front of us stood the wall, constructed from 3.6 metre high concrete panels capped by smooth cylindrical pipes. A barren 50-metre deep "death strip" ran along its eastern flank. The strip's bare, rubble-strewn, earth stood in stark contrast to neatly paved streets nearby. 

Directly in front of the gate, a sizeable gap had been opened up for pedestrians to pass freely. However, the wall's remaining panels had become an impromptu treasure trove for souvenir hunters. Everywhere we looked people were hammering away, trying to extract their own small concrete piece of history. Didn’t bring a hammer? Not a problem. Entrepreneurial touts were renting crowbars and chisels by the hour.

Dean and I walked south along the wall until we came upon a couple of abandoned rebar poles. We decided to join the crowd and spent an hour carving out our own piece of history. I still have a nondescript hunk of concrete squirrelled away in a tub of childhood papers and relics. Sadly, a selection of colourfully painted fragments we’d salvaged was lost when Dean's day pack was stolen months later.

We eventually followed the wall as far as Checkpoint Charlie, the divided city’s busiest border crossing, before turning toward Alexanderplatz in the heart of East Berlin. Decades later, it's the starkly divergent cityscape that I still recall most vividly. East Berlin’s buildings were drab, dated and monolithic, while those in the West were modern, colourful and stylish. Much of East Berlin felt like a surreal, faded time capsule from the sixties and seventies. The austere concrete-scape of Alexanderplatz in the east stood in stark contrast to the bright lights and designer labels of Kurfürstendamm in the west.

I remember walking down a laneway in no man’s land near Potsdamer Plaza and marvelling at rusty tram tracks abruptly abandoned when the wall went up. Likewise, the windows of buildings along the street's East Berlin boundary were filled with rendered brickwork. It was hard to comprehend that walking in this same location just nine months earlier would have had me shot and killed. 

Likewise, we explored the vacant pillboxes and checkpoint barriers that once controlled entry through Checkpoint Charlie. The immediate area, recently stripped of its security infrastructure, was stark and rather depressing. These days, a spotless, neatly finished reconstruction of a single pillbox has taken its place. Tourists now pose for cliché Instagram photos. I saw the real deal.

Perhaps our most poignant communist era encounter occurred at a supermarket in East Berlin. At the time, western consumer goods were pouring into the city’s east following economic reunification. East Germans were going crazy for these coveted products. Even more so, given that Ostmarks could now be exchanged one for one, making quality Western goods suddenly affordable.

While shopping for lunch, we encountered a queue outside a supermarket. Security guards were controlling the crowd inside by limiting access to individuals in possession of a shopping trolley. As a result, every time someone exited the building, the first person in the queue grabbed their abandoned trolley to gain entry. Dean and I tried explaining that we only wanted to buy a few bread rolls and thus didn’t need a trolley. It soon became clear that we weren’t getting in without one!

After spending most of Thursday in East Berlin, we devoted Friday to exploring West Berlin. This included the Europa Centre and a stroll down Kurfürstendamm. This vibrant, tree-lined boulevard was once the commercial, shopping and nightlife hub of West Berlin. 

At the end of Kurfürstendamm, we came upon the jagged ramparts of the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church. It was bombed during the Second World War but was never repaired. Instead, it was left standing in its partially destroyed state as a lasting memorial to the folly of war and crimes against humanity committed under Nazi rule.

We finished the day with a walk through Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate. A block or so from the former Reichstag Parliament building we came across a row of white crosses erected along the footpath. Each cross memorialised an East German citizen killed while attempting to escape East Berlin. It’s a sobering experience standing here, trying to make sense of such a senseless loss of life.

Saturday was designated a museum day. We spent the morning at West Berlin Zoo, then caught a train to the Pergamon Museum on East Berlin's Museum Island. Highlights included the enigmatic Pergamon Altar and the incredibly ornate Ishtar Gate. Decades later I’d visit the Turkish hilltop where the altar once stood. Dean then headed for the city's Olympic Stadium to watch an American Football exhibition match while I returned to our backpacker hostel.

Sunday morning, our final day in Berlin, was spent exploring the palace and gardens of Potsdam. Exactly 55 years earlier, to the day, the town’s imperial buildings had hosted a conference where allied leaders planned the postwar peace in the dying days of the Second World War. This included the temporary demarcation of East and West Berlin. Without a doubt, history comes alive wherever you go in Europe. 

That afternoon, Dean and I took a train to the outskirts of Berlin and walked to Checkpoint Bravo on the former West Berlin border. From here, we hitchhiked to Hanover, where we took an overnight train to Oslo, via Hamburg and Copenhagen. Follow this link for my retrospective post on Oslo.

I returned to Berlin three more times. First, in 1996, with my parents in tow. We were travelling together through Prague and Berlin after attending my brother’s wedding in Austria. I returned again for a long weekend while travelling to London on business in 2002, then a final time with friends from Sydney while living in London in 2008. You can read about my most recent visit here.

Each time I returned, I’d witness another transformation of the city as it progressively erased the scars of its post-war division. I count myself lucky to have seen Berlin in its truly divided state. These days, only small, rather sanitised sections of the wall still stand (including the popular East Side Gallery), the once barren Potsdamer Platz is filled with soaring glass towers, and the soulless unitarian East German Volkskammer Parliament on Spreeinsel Island is long gone. I wonder what else has changed since my last visit?

NOTE:

Sadly, Dean and I didn't take many photos during our first few weeks on the road. As a result, I've illustrated this story with a mix of images from the web and some taken during my last time in Berlin. If I find more archived images from 1990, I'll amend this post. Until then, the border checkpoint images and ghost station have been sourced from the web.

Tourists for a day

We’ve been going to Nuremberg every year for business (setting aside the pandemic hiatus) since 2016. We’d normally fly in on the day before the opening of Spielwarenmesse, an international trade show, then fly out again on the show’s final day. As a result, we’ve seen very little of the city itself. 

In 2017, we flew in a day earlier than normal and spent time visiting a few of its famous sights. This month we decided to repeat the exercise. Flights to London were insanely expensive on Saturday, the trade show’s final day. As a result, it would cost far less to stay an extra night and fly the following day. However, the only return flight available departed late evening, leaving a full day for exploring the city.

In the Middle Ages, German kings (known as Holy Roman Emperors after their coronation by the Pope) didn’t have a capital but voyaged from one imperial castle to the next hosting congress-style meetings called Diets. In 1356, Nuremberg was chosen to host the first Imperial Diet of every newly elected ruler, a tradition that continued until 1594. As a result, the town and its castle became pivotal in establishing the new leader’s authority. It was this heritage that inspired Hitler to host his infamous militarized rallies here. 

We kicked off our day with a late breakfast, before checking out of the hotel. Our first stop was Spittlertorturm, a defensive tower on the southwest corner of a medieval stone wall that still encircles the old city’s western fringe. In Summer you can climb the tower and walk the wall’s ramparts towards the Pegnitz River. During winter, access is closed so all we could do was follow the wall’s perimeter through the back streets of the old town.

Our route took us across the river and, towards the cobblestone pavers of Weißgerbergasse, a picturesque lane framed by half-timbered medieval homes. As we wandered closer to the centre of town we came across a restaurant we’d dined at earlier the week. I was surprised to see it sat in a plaza opposite Sebalduskirche, a massive medieval stone church.

As we passed through the Hauptmarkt, we were greeted by an animated midday performance in the Frauenkirche clock tower. This gothic-style Catholic church is home to the Männleinlaufen, a mechanical clock commemorating the Golden Bull of 1356. In all the years we’ve been coming to Nuremberg we never knew this clock existed.

The clock was installed in the church between 1506 and 1509. It depicts the seated Holy Roman Emperor surrounded by his prince-electors (the nobility who vote for his ascension). Once a day, at noon, a chiming bell starts the clock's sequence. A series of trumpeters and a drummer then raise their instruments and proclaim the hour. They're followed by a procession of electors who guide past the Emperor on a revolving platform.

We stopped to explore the iconic Lorenzkirche (Lawrence Church), an imposing Gothic church standing on the old’s town main boulevard. Its original structure was erected between 1243 and 1315. One of Nuremberg’s metro stations exits just outside this building, so we often pass it on our way to and from dinner. 

In 1943, on St. Lawrence Day (August 10), the building was hit by Allied bombs and was significantly destroyed. On January 2, 1945, another bomb caused the entire roof of the nave to collapse. The building was painstakingly restored and reopened in 1952.

Our final stop for the day was Nuremberg Castle. In all the years we’ve been coming to town, we’ve never ventured inside this iconic building. It sits on a rocky outcrop on the northernmost fringe of the old town. Posters and pamphlets around town are often decorated with its instantly recognisable silhouette.  

The entry fee was well worth the effort. It gave us access to the castle’s impressive Tiefer Brunnen (Deep Well), as well as its soaring keep, the Sinwell Tower. The castle itself houses a permanent exhibition about medieval Nuremberg, the Holy Roman Empire and castle life. Several rooms are dedicated to warfare and weapons of the era, including ornate suits of armour and some rather fearsome pikes and swords.

The Deep Well was fascinating. Its shaft extends more than 50 metres into the rock outcrop on which the castle is built. A tour guide brings this incredible feat of engineering to life by pouring water into the well. It takes at least four seconds for the sound to reverberate after hitting the bottom.

Garry and I both enjoyed the permanent exhibition. However, a climb up the wooden spiral staircase of Sinwell Tower was definitely the day’s highlight. The view of the old town from its enclosed turret was memorable, to say the least. However, a stiff cold breeze blowing through its open windows kept our visit relatively brief.

After a light meal in town, we eventually made our way back to the hotel to collect our luggage and head for the airport. We finally reached our hotel in London shortly before midnight. The following day we ventured into Soho for lunch with Aedhmar, my former CEO at Text 100. I’ve not seen her in person since November 2018, so our reunion was something special. 

It's hard to believe it's been almost 24 years since we first really connected. While we probably saw each other at a company event in 1998 we don’t recall meeting. We were also based on separate continents. As a result, we first spent quality time together during a two week secondment I took in San Francisco in 2000.

From lunch, we dashed back to Paddington to collect our luggage and then onto Heathrow. We gave the Cathay Pacific First Class Lounge a try as online reviewers rate it better than the Qantas lounge.  I can confidently report that those online accolades are spot on. The lounge was much quieter, with a dedicated dining room and spectacular airfield views. A few hours later we lifted off and our time in Europe was done for another year.

I'll leave you with some unfinished business. Below are images of Narrenschiffbrunnen, an incomplete water fountain installed in a small plaza in Nuremberg's old town, in 1988. Apparently, the city council vetoed donations offered to complete its waterworks and thus remains abandoned on its tiny plinth. 

According to its patron, the ship should overflow like a fountain bowl and water should bubble out of the galleon figures, the crow and the wine glass. Why the miserable characters? The 3.60 m high bronze sculpture of a little boat, filled with a rather unhappy crowd, symbolises an unsustainable world threatened with destruction.