And so we come to serious business, and by serious business I obviously mean castles. To some extent, when it comes to the whole ‘study of history’ lark, I’m only in it for the castles. As a child I had many interests ranging from dinosaurs to robots to (slightly less comprehensibly) African hornbills, and it was by no means clear that knights-in-armour would prevail. Had Playmobil been slightly less fun (people who think Lego was better need to take a long hard look at their lives), or, crucially, castles slightly less awesome, I might well be trying the patience of palaeontology, computer science or ornithology faculties to this day. But castles are great, so here I am, and even though my research interests might have wandered further afield in time and space, I still can’t shake an instinctive feeling that the European Middle Ages are the main focus of history, and everything else is just an elaborate form of context.
This is a roundabout introduction to the two big-hitter burgs of this stretch of the trip, the Reichsburg and Burg Eltz. Still, such sub-Freudian speculation about my childhood obsessions is perhaps not entirely frivolous, because the first of these fortresses is in some way a product of the same passions writ large. After a typically chequered history in which it changed hands between various emperors, counts-palatine and archbishop-electors, the Reichsburg was at length left in ruins by my destructive namesake Louis XIV during one of his periodic rampages round the Rhineland. And ruined it would have stayed, were it not for the sudden mania for all things medieval that characterised the 19th century Romantic revival. In Britain this gave us our anachronistically gothic Houses of Parliament and the spectacle of respectable gentlemen dressing up in armour and staging jousts. In Germany, a certain completist urge seems to have entered the mix which was not content merely to replicate and re-enact, but also wanted to rebuild and restore; this produced things like Cologne cathedral, finished according to medieval designs in the late 1800s after a hiatus of centuries, and the Reichsburg itself, bought by a Berlin businessman named Ravené and transformed into the rambling Gormenghast it is today. Purists may sniff at the Viollet-le-duc-ish violence of the restoration, but when wandering around the rooms decked with whatever Ye Olde looking furniture the Ravenés could find and paintings of someone else’s borrowed ancestors, it’s hard to begrudge the family their endearing flight of fancy.
The charms of Burg Eltz are of a different, perhaps even greater, order. Its appearance is what could glibly be described as ‘fairy-tale’, but in fact that is the wrong word entirely. Neuschwanstein, Germany’s most famous castle and the model for Disney’s icon, is a fairytale castle, built from scratch in the 19th century to fulfil the Wagner-inspired fantasies of a mad Bavarian King. The Reichsburg is a kind of fairy-tale, raised from the rubble as a setting for the more modest dreams of an urban industrialist to live like a medieval lord. But the attraction of Burg Eltz is instead its sheer rootedness; there’s very little that smacks of artificial wonder-working here, just the organic accumulation of architecture and oddments that comes from one tenacious family living in the same place for thirty-three generations. The treasure-chambers, flukily preserved from the attentions of plunderers and museum curators, are a glorious monument to centuries of impulse buying in questionable taste. Gilded boar-headed monsters fashioned out of novelty coconuts rub shoulders with my favourite of all pointless Early Modern gadgets, mace-pistols; meanwhile, a Cranach masterpiece hangs casually alongside family portraits of surpassing awfulness.* In truth, neither castle is really ‘authentically’ medieval, as indeed no castle can be. Nothing can exist forever in a Middle Ages timewarp (would we want it to, if it could?), and both bear the stamp of subsequent generations, making them arresting in different ways. For my money Burg Eltz is the finer, but that’s a matter of taste.
It does help that the whole setting is stunning, of course. The Reichsburg’s location is impressive enough, dominating the Mosel for miles around from a vine-covered height above the town of Cochem which just cries out to be photographed. But Burg Eltz tops even that, rearing from a crag above a secluded valley of thick woods that seem like they were ancient when the Eltzers laid the first foundation stone nine centuries ago. For best effect you absolutely have to approach it on foot; tracing paths that weave between tree-roots and over hidden streams until at last gothic glimpses of stonework emerge from gaps in the foliage, it’s easy to envision yourself as a pilgrim lost in the outlaw-infested forest depths, seeking sanctuary in the mysterious stronghold of a reclusive baron. Which is much harder to do when all you’ve done is amble 100 yards from the car park.
I seem to be getting lost in fairy-tales of my own, so other tourists are a good note on which to stop rhapsodising and come back to earth. In general, one of the advantages of visiting Germany is that not all that many other people do, and the backwater Mosel valley bears this out for the most part. Cochem therefore came as something of a surprise, being the only place in the country where I’ve encountered true crowds and significant numbers of fellow Anglo-Saxons,** along with the paraphenalia that inevitably accompanies large -scale tourism such as novelty coin-stamp machines and whole sculpture galleries’ worth of human statues busking (the town’s other buskers were rather less conventional, including a woman lying on her back knitting and another just spinning around holding two traffic cones. On balance I decided they were actually performance artists, and as such of even less use to society).
I can’t sightsee all of the time, so what else does a day consist of apart from elbowing crowds aside to look at ancient fortifications? Force of habit is a powerful thing, and it didn’t long for a routine to establish itself. Days normally start between 6 and 7:15am, depending on how far I’ve got to walk and whether I can face getting out of the tent in the rain. For simplicity, breakfast consists of dried fruit and breakfast biscuits. I have a sneaking suspicion that breakfast biscuits are just ordinary biscuits cunningly marketed so as to double the price, but I have no desire to break the placebo effect if so, so for now I’ll keep faith in their lembas-like sustaining abilities and hope that this continues to power me through to lunchtime.
After the tent has been wrestled back into its bag and lunch supplies sourced from a nearby village, the bulk of the day is obviously spent on the trail, interspersed with (increasingly frequent) rest breaks. I will meticulously plan my lunch stop, carefully estimating my current speed and scouring the map for some particularly breathtaking view or place of historical interest, and then suddenly get hungry and just eat it by the side of a b-road.
Arrival time at the campsite can range from anywhere between 3 and 8pm. Erecting the tent takes ten minutes tops, so this can leave a lot of time to kill; however, when you’re sufficiently worn out that Lying On The Floor is a legitimate quality-leisure-time activity, this is less of an issue than it sounds. The rest of the evening is normally passed reading a book, jotting notes for this, or ambling very slowly around the village in search of a beer.
Occasionally, things are livelier. Mosel campsites generally resemble colonial outposts of Dutch camper-vanners*** but in Cochem on Saturday the owners had decided to put on a bit of German kultur, and so for three hours an extremely hardy entertainer belted out a range of classics auf Deutsch to the increasingly drunken accompaniment of sixty-odd German sixty-somethings, varied occasionally with some Austrian oompah on trombone and a few English hits delivered in the kind of glorious war-film accent that so few Germans actually have (“ve are living in ze yellow submarine, ja”). I sat on the sidelines with Tony and Guy (two Englishmen I’d bumped into, who were disappointingly not haircare specialists but a sailor and an expert in tropical agriculture) swapping wry asides, the whole thing ended in a tuneless mass rendition of You’ll Never Walk Alone, and a good time was had by all.
Meanwhile, a little way downriver in Hatzenport, the village decided to get in touch with its bacchanalian side (in appropriately restrained Northern European style) by staging a wine fest. This meant more live music, this time accompanied by a few chaps in togas and wreaths posing unconvincingly as Dionysius, plus various girls in the purple-green-and-white ‘wine queen’ dresses that seem to pass for national dress around here.**** It was all very traditional and good-natured, but at this point I was starting to feel a little scurvy-stricken after a few days living primarily off bakery produce, and all I really wanted was a fruit salad. I wandered up and down the food stalls offering every kind of greasy fried treat under the sun, but inevitably the only fruit available was in liquid alcoholic form. Water, water, everywhere, and not a drop to eat…
All good things must come to an end, and the Mosel very literally does so at the ‘Deutsches Eck’ at which I arrived yesterday, where it flows into the Rhine (incidentally, I am not quite sure about the logic behind the name of this ‘German corner’. The confluence of the two rivers is indeed a corner. It is certainly in Germany. But what exactly is so specifically German about it?). With it, the first stage of the adventure comes to an end, but as ever there’s no time to look back. Like the Rhine-maidens of legend, Germany’s most famous river has a way of drawing you on, and somewhere at its distant source the Alps themselves were still waiting.
Finally, an apology; I had hoped to include various scenic pictures in this blog. I even had one of my smiling in a vaguely photogenic fashion, which is rare enough to be a collectors’ item. But although Germany is in advance of the UK in most social, political and economic measures, when it comes to digitalisation it sadly lags about a decade behind, and the only picture I have succeeded in uploading is the one here of the antique monstrosity (surely not out of place in the dustiest corner of the Burg Eltz wunderkammer) which is apparently standard issue in all German youth hostels, who incidentally also charge for WiFi by the hour. I’ll try to rectify this problem for later posts; twenty-first century has its downsides, but it would be nice to make use of its advantages once in a while.
* The whole thing comes close to deciding the vexed question of what life I would like to lead in the past, if for some reason I was exiled by Tardis from the present. Sometimes I think I’d like to be a Victorian philanthropist, experiencing the giddy first rush of modernity without all that tiresome 21st century emoting, in the comfort of a massive top hat; sometimes I think I’d opt for the scholarly serenity of a medieval monastery (not one of the really strict ones, mind. One of the lax ones they complained about in the Reformation, where the monks spent less time praying than brewing beer and fraternising with the nuns next door). But no, what I’d really like to be is a minor German aristocrat during the Northern Renaissance, rich enough to fill my castle with Dürers and whatever curio the Nuremberg goldsmiths dreamed up next, but not important enough to have to worry about questions of foreign policy more pressing than how many allegorical insults to my neighbour to include in my next literary commission.
** Though actually this term is a little problematic when used in Germany. The French are happy to blame the ills of the world on ‘les Anglo-Saxons’ of America and the UK, but it’s liable to confuse the millions of Saxons who never really got on board with the whole ‘migrate across the North Sea’ thing 1500 years ago and have been staying quietly in Saxony ever since.
*** One of tourism’s great mysteries is how the Netherlands is one of the world’s smallest countries, yet still manages to supply the majority of holidaymakers in every campsite on the continent. The sudden disappearance of the United Provinces as a great power around the turn of the 18th century has always been a bit surprising to me, but perhaps the two mysteries can solve each other; the Dutch Empire didn’t fail, they just jacked it in in favour of an extremely extended caravanning holiday.
**** NB: the lederhosen/dirndl ensemble of Oktoberfest stereotype is not actually German national dress; it is Bavarian national dress, which is a different kettle of sausages. Bavaria has aptly been referred to as ‘The Texas of Germany’, being southern, large, rich, conservative and prone to half-joking flirtation with secession. The rest of Germany tends to treat Bavaria with the mix of overwhelming hostility and very slight envy which the French reserve for Parisians, the Scots for the English, and the Russians for everyone who isn’t Russian. Though Bavaria is a very interesting subject there isn’t space to talk about it further here, as I’m not walking anywhere near it and four extended footnotes are already too many for one blog.
Not a Pony Farm 