Fallen on Flanders Fields

Taken by Britain's first ever official War photographer - Ernest Brooks  Yorkshire regiment, Broodseynde Ridge 1917
greatwar.co.uk

Easter Sunday was a rather somber affair for us this year. Instead of celebrating the miracle with a big brunch and an egg hunt we got away early in the grey of the morning to go cemetery hunting. It is only 150km between Ghent and Calais but we had decided to wind around Flanders before our 6pm sailing back to Dover. 2014-2018 have a full calender of WWI Centenary events including a huge list of BBC programming, we've just enjoyed watching a series, about a field hospital, called Crimson Fields, so we thought we'd take the opportunity to look at a few of the memorial sites.

Emil Kreiger's brass sculpture of Mourning Soldiers 'on the horizon' of the Langemark cemetery

M picked out the the sites and the route. Our first stop was Langemark and probably the most shocking. It is not the most crowded or large of the cemeteries we were to visit but in some ways the most confronting. This is a cemetery of German soldiers from WWI.

The entrance building to Langemark - looking across the Kameraden Grab to the Mourning Soldiers
The lintel gives a strong impression of entering a tomb.

 As you enter through a pink stone portal a large, bordered rectangle lies in front of you. Then you read that it is a mass grave of nearly 25 000 men, the Kameraden Grab (Comrades Grave). I struggled to deal with this number and the plot but around it are large blocks of Basalt with closely typed names of the soliders thought to be interred there. Although 2 British soldiers are listed on stones in the lawn cemetery the remainder are all German. The Belgium locals gathered them and bought them here from across the Flanders battles when the German army was pushed back and no longer able to do so. All those bodies tumbled together, often in pieces. Where descendants have visited, the raised bronze names have been polished.

Many of the bodies in the Mass grave to the right were exhumed from smaller temporary grave sites closer to the battle fields. Each plaque on the lawn has between 3-15 names engraved on them.  This memorial site was opened officially in 1932 -  how sad that in only a few more years it would all happen again.

Oak Trees - the national tree of Germany, surround the graves. The cross is a
repeated motif.  The concrete boxes are German bunkers from WWI

In a separate part of this cemetery lie 3000 Kriegsfreiwilliger (war volunteers) who were all students. They died in the first 1914 Ypres battle as they charged singing Deutschland .. which became the German National Anthem. Goebbels made the most of this in WWII by creating the legend of the strong and noble youth sacrificing themselves for the Fatherland when the Third Reich needed more troops.

M overheard a German tour guide telling his group (in English!) that the King of Belgium refused to commit his troops and withdrew his whole(small) army to safety. This didn't improve his opinion of the country after experiencing the only rude and incompetent driving on the whole trip coming out of Ghent. I have searched through many sources and can't find anything that even hints at this.  In fact I have found that King Albert personally led his troops to slow down the Germans in their Schlieffen plan of occupying France quickly so they could concentrate on the slower mobilising Russians. They had planned to take Liege in 2 days but the Belgium army held them for 11 days, giving British and French troops time to get in position. The Queen worked as a front line nurse and the son and heir was allowed to enlist underage and fought on the front line - They all survived.

This building separates the carpark from the cemetery.
It has several screens showing live footage from WWI.

When Langemark was behind the German front line in WWII Hitler visited the site as part of his tour of the area and is said to have visited the Belgian family that had looked after him when he had been wounded by a grenade near the Messines ridge in 1916.  Langemark became a legend of German heroes but I do not imagine that it made it any less difficult for family to accept that their fathers and sons would forever lie in enemy territory.
(Our German inspired term for the type of homesickness and people missing we have had is Folkelyern)

The brooding soldier at the Canadian Memorial

The battle grounds around Ypres - first battles of WWI, mid Oct 1914

In two years of fighting the territory won back by the French and English  - hardly anything at all.
image from http://www.battlefield-tours.com/Battlefields_map.jpg

Our GPS seemed to think that the address for Tyne Cot cemetery was in a beautifully wooded but otherwise empty spot. On the way we had passed the Passchendaele Memorial Museum so returned there for a look around and for directions to the biggest Commonwealth burial ground in Flanders.

In 1917 more than 400 000 soldiers fell forever into the Flanders mud within 100 days for a few kilometers of German territory. The village of Passchendaele was completely obliterated. They had a model of one of the USA kit houses that were sent over to the town after the war to provide housing for the returning refugees. This kind of charity gave life back to the people who were in the way of the front line. Most were destroyed in WWII.

During the second rebuilding of this place after WWII, trenches from the Great War were found and have since been recreated by archaeologist guided engineers. These trenches and a reconstruction of a British dugout forms part of a Museum that celebrates the lives of the commonwealth allies and also acknowledges the German losses.

Reconstructed British Trenches at Passchendaele

Reconstructed dug out.
Left: tunneling equipment  Centre: Pump to take water up to the surface  Right: bunks

Huge posters in the Museum - each has a list with all the badges of each division and battalion

WWI artillery display. Not sure about the message - Phallic symbols of strength and power, a potions lab, evil can be pretty too? So many formulae for injury and death. 

Left: An art installation by NZ ceramic artist Helen Pollock, arms reaching from the mud infront of a huge photo of what was left of a forest where the first gas attack happened.  Right: Memorabilia for 'home'

Tourist route signs and a well fertilized field

We got a map and new directions for Tyne Cot but still managed to get muddled because the map had a tiny N and an arrow to the left of the page, M had assumed N was to the top of the page (normal apparently). By using the rare road sign we were able to correct our assumptions and eventually made it to our destination. The new visitors center outside the cemetery has displays of memorabilia gifted from families and items found in the fields over the years.

As you approach, a calm clipped English voice reads out each name and the information known about that person in a great loop, without stopping during opening hours. Inside a photograph of them is screened if they have one. Breaking the enormous numbers down into these individuals certainly sets the tone for your walk around the graves. So many are engraved 'Known unto God' meaning there was a body there, often with the nationality identified but with no name. On the path down to the cemetery, Petal and M spotted a dud bomb casing that had been found in the recently ploughed field. There is a special task force in the Belgium army whose job it is to travel around the country side collecting these relics that are still being dug up. They have huge warehouses where they are stored until they can be disarmed and recycled as metal scrap. For decades after the wars Belgium children and farmers were losing lives and limbs to these 'treasures'. The bombs didn't know that the war was over.

Inscribed on walls of marble are thousands of names of soldiers whose bodies were never found or identified that gave their lives in the last gasps of the war. The grand Thiepval memorial was full already by March 21 1918 when the Germans launched their last ditch effort to win the war. Eight more months of killing until the stalemate finally pottered to a stop at the November Armistice.

Entrance

The ocean of headstones was overwhelming as an eerie light of a storm on its way glowed

This is the largest Commonwealth cemetery in Europe.  Rudyard Kipling, youngest ever winner of the Nobel prize for literature and author of the Just So stories many of us were read in our childhoods, came up with the term 'Known unto God.'  He lost his son in the battle of Loos and struggled to accept that he would never know where his remains remained. Check out this website for the full story.  http://www.webhistoryofengland.com/?p=163 

Top: A huge wall of names  Bottom: either side are a circle of Kiwis and a circle of Aussies - so far from home

Found in a soldier's diary by a downsizing granddaughter
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-15667914

Driving on towards France, the countryside is littered with grave sites, all looked after by the locals whose great grandparent's property and communities were the collateral damage. The sad horror of relentless white crosses and acres of head stones caused by nationalistic idiocy and power given by birth rather than talent would be a terrible burden to live with, yet these people mow and clean to keep the reminder sparkling
'Lest we Forget'.  Yet only 21yrs after the Treaty of Versailles, Europe was flattened again.

http://changipowart.com/archives/1203  artist unknown  Lancashire gunners hauling an 18lber through the flanders mud.

Elections are due soon here in the UK and there are at least two political groups whose advertising literature gave me the creeps - The British National Party and UKIP have put brochures through my letterbox that are full of protectionist, nationalistic fervor and scapegoating that gives me a dose of dejavu for pre-WWII history texts. Australia continues to treat refugees and asylum seekers as an unwelcome plague instead of developing social processes to help us and them cope with assimilation and psychological recovery. Let's hope that the vast majority of people will voice their impatience with this fear mongering and stand up for humanity's best solution, compassion.

All it takes for evil to prevail is for good people to do nothing. 
Attributed to Irish philosopher, Edmund Burke 1729-97

All that was left of Ieper (Ypres) after WWI
image taken from http://phdtalk.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/lest-we-forget.html

Read:

Ypres Memories by Philippe Glogowski, a graphic novel bought at the Passchendaele Museum.

TJ Editions - History Collection 2013  

The Scent of Cologne

Koln beside the Rhein

When planning our route to find the quickest way from Fussen to Cologne it took me a while to find our destination on the map - it is spelt (with the two dots above the o) Koln in its homeland. It wasn't even in the English AA map book index as the spelling I am used to. I knew it was just below Dusseldorf (such a cool word) so looked that up instead. I am continually frustrated with my monolinguistic ignorance!

Left: Skirting Munich  Right: Just past Frankfurt  Same day, incredible what a few hours & 400km can do to the weather! 

It took us about 5hrs to drive the 575Km with a few changes of motorways via A roads and one brief pit stop at an autobahn rastplatz (rest place). It passed surprisingly quickly because life is so tightly packed into Europe, the motorways travel through remarkable landscapes.

Coloured eggs for Easter at the breakfast buffet

We were actually heading for Ghent for the night but after an early morning start we decided that Cologne would be a good lunch stop. M had been through with G recently on the way to a work appointment and had bought the girls back little bottles of 4711 which calls itself the original Eau de Cologne. I have fond memories of my grandmother sprinkling her handkerchief with it. M was brassed off to find out from a travel DVD he was watching (M. Portillo's Great Continental Railway Journeys Series 1 BBC) that this was not the original at all and that a story full of intrigue and deception lay at the heart of the confusion. We decided a clarifying visit to root out this tale was a higher priority than visiting the UNESCO Atomium building in Brussels which was the alternative. And we'd be able to visit the famous Cathedral as well.

Inside the store Museum - there were quite a few in our English tour, my quick snap through the door was blurry
so I took this image from http://farina.org/?lang=en Farina's distilling equipment and scales.

Once upon a time there was an ambitious land owning family in Santa Maria Maggiore, Italy, who educated its sons in commerce and sent them out into the world to find new markets with which to fill the family coffers. They were not of noble blood but saw no impediment to the ambition of living as if they were.

One young man was sent to his uncle in Holland and became a talented merchant with a nose for a good deal. He set up shop in Cologne where non guild members were only allowed to trade in the import and export of luxury goods.  With the mighty Rhein at his doorstep the young man grasped the opportunity. He set up a warehouse and a sales salon where the wealthy and influential folk of the town could select the wares they wished to purchase. Eastern spices and fabrics, french lace and oils became popular items to display wealth and the young man's ledgers started to bulge.

His brother turned up to help in the flourishing business but had a nose for another luxury good. 

Top: Copyright tulip and signature
Below: A gift for every person on the tour

In the late 1600s the European world stank. Open drains, where chamber pots were emptied every morning through open windows, was the extent of plumbing. Baths were thought to be a dangerous trend and the immense costumes worn before the French Empress Josephine's influence were rarely washed. People of quality wore little bags around their necks in which to slip the small bodies of lice they caught crawling across themselves. Heavy musk oils and handheld pompadours of cloves,cinnamon and lavender were used to try and cover the stench of the heavy, powdered wigs, clammy pits and groins and breath sweetened with rotting teeth and gums. Church attendance, with incense added to the mix in close quarters saw many tight laced ladies and gentleman faint away.

Original 'Rosoli' bottle in green.  Clear one for sale today
RIght: Kadinsky (father of abstract art) won the competition to design a new
bottle when the company started packaging for different genders
when perfumes started to be designed for ladies and not men. This is the
masculine bottle in the museum.

The brother craved for the clean air of his country home and began to experiment with the goods in the warehouse and wrote home for  fresh citrus fruit,especially the inedible bergamont oranges, to be promptly delivered. When this was unloaded in Cologne, local mothers held their toddlers above the fences and told them to drink in the smell for it would make them healthy. Rickets and scurvy were common complaints, without known cures, all through town dwelling society. 

John Maria Farina distilled oils and mixed them until he was able to write this note home. “I have created a perfume which is reminiscent of a spring morning following a soft shower where fragrances of wild narcissi combine with that of sweet orange flowers. This perfume refreshes me and stimulates both my senses and imagination”. His chemistry brilliance dealt with the problem of the scent going off after a time by stabilising it in alcohol. He named this first modern perfume 'The water of Cologne' and it became instantly popular with the rich and famous when it was offered for sale in 1709. Marie Antionette's mother, Empress of the Hapsberg dynasty, ordered case fulls of it every month. In a later generation, Napoleon had his military boots fashioned with a pouch to hold a bottle for him to use without having to  dismount. Records show that he used a bottle a day. The Farina brothers kept to the formulae and sent back any ordered produce that did not meet their production standards. This attention to detail and the consistent perfume produced was unheard of in the day and became the by word for luxury.  (A full Rosoli bottle of 240ml for €400 in today's money)

The Farina brothers and their descendants dressed and lived like their famous customers but never let go of the practical side of their success, the chemistry or the business.

Whenever something successful happens others copy. This was certainly case in what became the Cologne battle. There was no such thing as patents as the traditional guild system managed the honesty and skill of its members.  Copyright law was in its infancy and only related to printed texts at this time. Perfume was a new craft and outside of guild control. 

Left: Petal outside the Farina store on Obenmarspforten 21  Above: The 4711 store below the Dom Hotel on the Cathedral square.       Below:  Competing advertising posters

Our historic tour guide in store

An opportunistic character, Wilhelm Muelhens, was left a recipe for a blumenwasser (floral water) by a monk relative in his will. Deciding to cash in on the most famous smell in town, Muelhens called it Eau de Cologne, because his business was in Cologne there was nothing the Farina family could do. Sneaky Muelhens made doubly sure that the Farina family could not complain by going to Italy in 1803 and paying a poor unrelated Farina family for the rights to their name. The original Farina family chased their legal rights relentlessly and the contract was found to be fraudulent. The Cologne Farinas thought their troubles were over. Muelhens outwitted them again by buying in a partner to his business with the surname of Farina.  Continuing to pursue his legal rights with his long time customer, Napoleon, Emperor of France, a younger Mr Farina was able to have his uncle's flourished signature and the red tulip always used on their bottles copyrighted. Finally Muelhens was stymied, he renamed his scent 4711, it was the address of their business, and sold his Eau de Cologne under this name from 1881.

The talk and tour at the Farina museum cost €5 each and was fascinating. They celebrated their 300th anniversary in 2009. The building and the current Farina owners are the original. On another site they have all of the family's books, accounts and correspondence which comprises the largest unbroken archives of any Cologne business. The tour included a 4ml bottle of the original Cologne, Farina's Eua de Colonge is not gender specific. The smell reminds me of the Clarins- Eau Dynamiante(€24 for 100ml) that my Aunty H gave me for a birthday one year. It also claims theraputic benefits. Farina has other perfumes for sale, M bought a little bottle of Russian wood aftershave and Petal liked the perfume from the astrology cycle they have in store for her due date before the cusp she was born on. 
In a cloud of Farina's cologne, we walked a few blocks to the gigantic Cologne Cathedral. Huge banners advertising the 'original cologne' direct you to a plush gold and teal shop opposite the Cathedral. It is easy to understand why most people have never heard of Farina when the 4711 smells fine and is marketed more intensely. It would seem that the competition between the two brands is ongoing. How do you judge who wins though - the smell that most of our grandmothers wore or the one that still has many royal warrants and regularly purchased by Lady Di and Bill Clinton? 

Inside the Dom - the outside may be dark and Gothic but the sun made a rainbow of the insides. (3 shots here)
There were so many tourists that it hardly felt like a church.  There was a roped off area at the back where the faithful could go to for confession. The red and black garbed church officials looked quite stressed when a young family started playing tip around the pews.

One of the twin towers - Cologne Cathedral.  Building began in 1248,
it was opened in 1880 That is a long term building programme!

The relics, of this Roman Catholic Dom, are bones of the three Kings - Petal is looking at the reliquary holding them and seems to be experiencing a Shrek like glow.  The pillars are covered in statues to saints and Bible characters.  

Left: disappointed Petal    Right: A very 1950s menu - a great selection of cakes and Easter goodies up front!

 On the way back to the car a few shops were popped into but the tide of human traffic was very dense (physically ...) so we decided to grab some afternoon tea and head off.  Petal remembered seeing a sign for ice cream close to the Perfume shop, which always gets Ms vote! We headed that way only to find that it was an exotic English sign for a surfie shop. The Roxy jandals are on sale for €25(AUS 37!). Luckily a beautiful old time patisserie was next door so drinks, cakes and sundaes were ushered out by a delightful gentleman who was keen to practice his English. Cafe Jansen had lovely bathrooms downstairs too which is always a plus to find when traveling.

The GPS took us out through tiny little city streets, a truck (gypsy van according to M) had gotten stuck in one of the road tunnels so we followed a couple of cars we hoped were local and ended up being able to get past the big train station covered in scaffolding and out onto the autobahn west.

We arrived in Ghent at 'B&B the Place to Be' which turned out to be in an old convent that still was gated with a curfew.  This didn't effect us too much - we had thought to go for a walk around the town but were done in from the long day. Ghent isn't too far away from Calais so maybe we'll be back through again one day.

Left:  Our B&B very enthusiastic and informative hostess gave us a great breakfast the next morning.
Right:  A facade of a house facing the convent gates.

Castles and Camps

Mural inside Neuschwanstein - embodiment of a fantasy.  Many other German folk tales cover the walls.  Very few people were invited to visit the King in his Fairy tale castle - perhaps that would have changed if it had been finished.

  Visions are very dangerous things - especially when their ideals are exclusive rather than inclusive. A vision of an optimal place of learning in a Christian environment kept me happily working insane hours with a team of very talented, dedicated people. That process has benefited many and will continue to, even through the practical compromises that non profit organisations always face. This 7 yr experience of developing a value adding, student focused High school from scratch has helped me to empathise with the complete insanity of two historical characters, that at first glance, seem very different. Obsession with a vision can do more than burn out the obsessee.

View of Hohenschwangau from N

On our last day in Bavaria we scheduled in visits to the manifestations of the madness of King Ludwig II and Adolf Hitler. The former has become a folk hero of the region and the latter a name so infamous that just joking about him had an acquaintance of Willow's German friend excluded from his university 3 weeks before he graduated from his Bachelor course - without it being conferred!

Ludwig II spent many of his summer holidays at Schloss (Castle) Hohenschwangau (High Swan district). His father (Maximilian II) found the ruins of it one summer ramble, named it as the Castle of the Swan Knights and had it rebuilt.  It is richly decorated in side with murals of the Germanic legend of the Swan Knight. Ludwig II was named crown prince mid childhood when his father became King of Bavaria. He was isolated from peers and seemed to have a distant and difficult relationship with both parents and his little brother Otto. He retreated into day dreams of Medieval chivalry and visions of true kingship which incorporated ideas of divine right with the seeking out and creation of beauty. He became King at 19yrs of age.

Swan motifs and artworks are numerous and often priceless - note N in the distance behind the fountain.
We weren't allowed to take photos inside.  The Palace was heated with ceramic stoves that were cleaned, fuelled and stoked by servants creeping down hollows in the walls so the royal family didn't have to be disturbed by this domestic chore.  No heating is used at all now to maintain the health of the amazing murals around all the walls.  Take a very warm coat if visiting in heart of winter.
The Queen's and King's wardrobes were on the floor above their bedrooms and dressing rooms - imagine the task of having to bring down the enormous concoctions they wore. There was a 'secret' passage between the King's and Queen's bedrooms.

Ludwig II was very image conscious and obviously considers his right side to be superior
Left: The young King      Right: One of the reason he gave for his reclusive habits, is that he didn't like the way he looked any more - the imposing style of the Sun King, after his Versailles visit, hid his distress.

Strategic placement of the Swan Knight's Castle

This young King was no puppet and frustrated his parliament by turning down Bismark's (Prussia) offer for Bavaria to remain neutral in the Prussian/Austrian war. Ludwig picked the Austrian side because of Bismark's anti Catholic policies. The Prussians won, which devastated Ludwig's fragile ego and his dreams of being a supreme ruler. The losers were treated with grace which allowed a reconciliation. In the Franco/Prussian War, Bavaria sided with Prussia and after victory Ludwig II suggested that Prussia's king Wilhelm II, become Kaiser over all Germans. Wilhelm's coronation was held in the Hall of mirrors in Versailles and at Ludwig's request Alasc-Lorraine was annexed by the new Germany to keep the French border further from his Kingdom. His time in Versailles bought a hero into his life, one he choose to emulate - Louis XIV, the Sun King. Here he found the ultimate embodiment of his dream of kingship. Another hero was the composer Wagner. His use of German legends, including Lohengrin - the Swan Knight ignited his childhood dreams. Now that he was not much more than a figurehead he used his position to make his imaginings real. To begin with he had Munich's Staatstheater am Gartnerplatz built to perform Wagner's operetta compositions.

Petal enjoying nature.  German purring sounds the same!

Left:  M hanging onto a very high bridge to get a view.     Right:  Willow in the courtyard of the Fairy tale castle

View of Neuschuwanstein from our hotel veranda in Schwangau

To keep Ludwig sweet the Prussians had been secretly paying him to keep his loyalty and perhaps to make this young popular King their fall guy.  This extra income enabled him to put his imagination into reality with his fairy tale building projects. He had set designers and artists paint his designs. He had planned another Fairytale castle to be built on Falcons ridge at the opposite end of the valley to Neuschwanstein but within sight of each other.

Willow and I preferred the carriage to take us to the top
while Petal and M walked up to the bridge

The turnstiles where the barcode on your
ticket lets you pass if it is the correct time

A completely artificial cave created for Ludwig's 'grotto. This alongside a  'Turkish kiosk' bought from an international industries fair and other quirks litter the grounds of Linderhof - an architectural playground.  He had a cave created joining his sitting room in N too, you passed through this to a conservatory  balcony overlooking the valley in the bridge photo above.

In 1873 Ludwig bought an island that had a disused a monastery on it.  He refurbished it and then built a new palace (Herrenchiemsee) having the decor and gardens reflect and rival Versailles. The state bed chamber is noted as being the most expensive room of the 19th C.  The only one of Ludwig's buildings that was completed was Linderhof Palace. Scattered around the enormous grounds - to keep his royal person isolated from the common man, are other little 'scenes' from his imagination.

Herrenchiemsee's Hall of Mirrors

Ludwig had come close to marrying but had jilted his cousin, personal diaries show his strong feelings and attraction to other men but had remorseless guilt because of his strong Roman Catholic beliefs and pressure from parliament to produce an heir. Homosexuality had not been punishable in Bavaria since 1813 but after Prussian control in 1871 this discrimination returned. The tour guide that took us through Neuschwanstein Castle suggested that the massive female figures painted around his bedroom were part of his self directed 'cure' and this shame intensified his natural tendency towards isolation and imagination. 

Even though Ludwig did not use state funds for his buildings, these projects soon had him in great debt.  His frustrations in every area of his life caused him to throw out his council and parliamentarians regularly; the statesmen of Bavaria were driven to having him declared insane. Ludwig was dragged from Schloss Neuschwanstein without ever having heard a performance staged on his just completed Singers Hall. A few days after his internment, at Schloss Berg, his body and his psychiatrists badly bashed body were found in the shallows of the lake.
His brother Otto had suffered from mental illness for a long time so was not considered competent to rule. A cousin became regent, his son declared himself King but abdicated at the end of WWI making Bavaria a 'Free State'.
Within 6 weeks of King Ludwig II's death his castles were open for tourists, Neuschwanstein alone has earned its cost many times over for the kingdom's coffers.

Waterfall on the way up to the bridge, the lake was low so maybe
this is just a piddle compared to normal?

Willow taking in the turrets that Disney's Cinderella
Castle was based on.  The intrepid climbers are on the
bridge when this photo was taken.

Ludwigs oppression and obsession created a legacy that is of great value, Wagner's completed operas and his extravagant buildings.

It also bought personal misery and a very sad end.

Just a note to others wanting to visit Neuschwanstein and Hohenschwangau - pre book tickets the day before! We stayed at the bottom of the mountain and got there first thing without any queues around but still we had to wait an hour before the first ticket for an English tour was available for the summer palace and they allowed 1 1/2 hours before the tour start of Neuschwanstein after the end of that.  This wasted a lot of time so we weren't able to stop in at Linderhof on our way up to Munich, although we still chose to drive the mountain road that took us past the turn off to it. There was a Bavarian Kings Museum down by the Lake which looked really interesting too but choices and priorities have to be made!  The price of souvenirs and food was predictably overrated. I was glad we had bought the mountain sheep pin for M's hat at the Weiss Church store at half the price.

Snow up on the Linderhof Road
We stopped for a snowball fight

The other Lunatic with a vision that was not as benign as Ludwig's and certainly cost Germany an awful lot more was dreamed up by another man who craved absolute power - and succeeded for a few years. Strangely it was kicked off at Versailles where the allies gave Germany no choice but to sign an agreement for repatriation for starting/losing WWI.  If the politicians of the time had remembered that Austria's ridiculous demands of Serbia (who hadn't even been behind the assassination of the heir) which Serbia had accepted to spare the bloodshed only to have Austria demand that Germany go to war against them anyway had begun the conflict, perhaps they would have been wiser in their demands and may have given no cause for Nazi's to be taken seriously. Unreasonable demands full of vitriol and revenge just fuel the cycle until a cruel and heinous vision makes sense to ordinary folk.

View from Hohenschwangau  - the Austrian Alps

Hitler's dysfunctional childhood was similar to Ludwig's as far as being able to develop meaningful relationships. If his illegitimate Father hadn't changed his name from Schicklgrube to Hielder at the urging of his uncle to take his name, and a clerk in the civic office hadn't misspelt the request, the 'Heiling' of the Third Reich may not have been quite so effective!  Ludwig was fawned upon as a future King and Adolf spoiled as the first surviving child in a marriage of relatives. Neither took kindly to reproof or advice, reacting with sudden temper fits. Adolf fantasied about cowboys and indians as a young boy leading the neighbours in after school games. The focus of this fantasy soon changed to Germanic legends when introduced to them by his Austrian History teacher and a love of Wagner's interpretation of them.  Born and bred in Austria on the border of Germany and hating his father who sent him for a technical education instead of the classical one he craved, Hitler started supporting the Kaiser in direct opposition to his father who supported the Austrian Emperor. Explains the Austrian annexation! The fantastic world of heroes and abject obedience to him that grew in young Adolf's mind was the little train that could juggernaught him to complete insanity.

Part of the Nazi vision was for an economically strong Third Reich which won the full support of the many unemployed and hungry people, slipped in with this was a form of exclusive Nationalism that envisioned a land flowing with milk and honey, peopled with fit hardworking Germans of the same colour. Hitler wasn't only dreaming about fancy buildings (he had his own architect for a pretty fancy no corrosive art museum - see the movie 'Monument Men' for a look at the plans) but of a whole nation that wouldn't ever be slighted or rejected again.

Built with prison labour.  Factories were built next to all the satellite camps to take advantage of this 'resource'.
The memorial sculpture is as stunning as it is awful. The corpses are twisted into barbed wire, the memory of their abuse forming a barrier to it ever happening again. A competition was run to select it and Nandor Glid's won.  It is about 2m wide which is difficult to see in this shot.  

The cold drizzle really bought home
how people forced to stand on parade
for hours in their thin prison uniforms
and nothing in their stomachs for days
must have thought they had arrived
in hell.

Once in power this angry man deleted all opposition.  The list was long, any one who objected was taken as a political prisoner and locked up at Dachau just outside of his adopted hometown of Munich. This was one of the first concentration camps and at first allowed visitors and if people survived their term they were let out. Artists, authors, professionals and politicians who objected to book burnings and Kristallnacht all found themselves stripped of all belongings, showered with caustic soda, shaved and pajamaed.  Dachau was a 'model camp' that other commandants were sent to for efficiency observations. Photos, personal information were all noted on individualized cards. Deaths from typhoid, starvation, hard labour(work will set you free) and experiment were listed as natural causes and those from execution or escape as suicide.

Things changed later in the war and people started being incarcerated at Dachau for ethnicity and religious views. Although a gas chamber was eventually built on the site it was never used. The executions for disobedience happened in the court of the Crematorium where the bodies were disposed of.  Out of 500 German clergy who protested SS tactics and were bought to the camp in 1944, only 82 survived the war.

When looking for the 'Dachau Concentration Camp' look for signs that say KZ Gedenkstatte or you'll never find it.

The building to the right was the Camp Commandant's. To the left are faint remains of the rail tracks bought right up to the gates of the camp.  Part of the platform still stands.  It was chilling to imagine the men thrown out of cattle cars and ordered to form ranks to march into what was left of their lives.

The punishments and medical experiments described by survivors made my skin crawl. How can one man's insanity have unleashed the horror of ungoverned cruelty in so many.  An incredible museum has been set up as a memorial. Photos, journal entries, smuggled out letters in code and much of the paperwork of the so efficient SS guards. Ever since reading my first novel set in a concentration camp I wondered what the locals had thought of the afternoon smoke.  Even without that proof of violence, in the village of Dachau (now a suburb of Munich) many of the townsfolk belonged to the Volkssturm (resistance) and assisted the few escapees. An armed attempt at liberating the camp in April 1945 became a bloodbath at the hands of SS troops.

Left: An illegal photograph taken by a Belgian prisoner of the working crematorium. There was no explanation of how.
Right: Our photograph through the bars of a gate - no access.

Left: Guard tower in the distance that looks remarkably similar to the telegraph exchange boxes dotted around Bavaria.  The ditch is a no mans land that prisoners and guards all understood that stepping foot in meant death by machine gun. Some prisoners chose this end to their misery.   Left of the people walking are the foundations - all that remains of the barracks. Two have been rebuilt as models to show typical living conditions. The barbed wire in the foreground is a clear inspiration for the close up of Glid's sculpture on the Right.

 Willow and I were only half way through the Museum when closing time came around - I was just about to enter the second half - behind Petal and M when a guard blocked my way, shook his head and said 'Nein, nein.' I know he was 'just following orders' but it made me feel angry, scared and sick all at the same time. Before I could lash out with the suppressed anger at what had happened to those who had been here in the past, I managed to get hold of my own sanity and behave with an appropriate 2014 response - thankfully leaving 1944 behind.

When it was just a political prison  - on display in the museum
I decided not to take photographs of the punishments and medical programmes that were exhibited in the museum.
I would rather dwell on the miracle that people in desperate circumstances can still have hope and create beauty.
It somehow gives you hope in humanity.

In dystopia literature, newspapers, politics and religious services, people are asked to fight for what they believe in.  I have to ask, is any vision worth the oppression and hatred it takes to force all to agree. Fight to protect against evil forces perhaps but even then only as a last resort.

There are four chapels at the end of the long avenue from the Museum to the gate to the crematorium. The one in view is the Catholic memorial. At the time of liberation this space was bursting with people. 

If little Adolf and little Ludwig had had more love and considered encouragement, perhaps they wouldn't have ended in misery. If the real world is kind and beautiful children do not need to retreat to fantasy to cope with rejection, hurt and confusion. I dread to think of the results of Syria, the Nigerian kidnappings, the Hallelujah army, misappropriated aide after natural disaster, the blocks put up against Obama's gun law amendments, stop the boat legislation...  Take care of your circle.

These Aussie girls had their first taste of falling snow on our way back to Schwangau

It didn't take too long before the snow settled.  Left: A huge farmhouse with a second story bridge to its own chapel.

See mum there will be enough for a snow man!  

Hohenschwangau with a dusting of snow.

Hoping that the road snow gauge (front left) isn't required in the morning!

Ice cream coloured streets of Fussen
as we leave Bavaria behind.

Read:
The Girl who Saved the King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson Fourth Estate London 2014
I bought this novel because I really enjoyed his debut novel 'The 100yr old man who climbed out of the window and disappeared'. See my April 10 2013 blog for details.
Same engaging writing style but I could have done with a few less 'plot twist frustrations' that were really replicas of each other. Loved how he managed to tie South Africa emancipation with Swedish Republicanism, Israeli Nationalism and Chinese human rights.  The characters didn't have the depth of the 100yr old man.

A long quote because he writes long sentences and gets to his point in a curly sort of way.

"Countries and television companies all over the world were mulling over what attitude they should take towards the birthday concert that had been arranged in honour of Nelson Mandela on his 70th birthday in June 1988.  Mandela was a terrorist after all, and he would have stayed that way if only superstar after superstar hadn't thought otherwise and made it known that they wanted to attend the concert, which was to be held at Wembley Stadium in London.
For many, the solution was to recognise the event and yet not.  It was said, for example, that the American Fox Television, which broadcast the concert after the event, first edited out any part of the speeches and songs that might seem political in order to avoid irritating Coca-Cola, which had bought advertising slots during the programme.
Despite all this, more than 600 000 000 people in 67 countries ended up watching the concert.  There was really only one country that completely quashed any news of what was going on.
 South Africa."  p197