Part 7: surprising Erfurt

BULLETIN: there has been a lot added to that Gerterode home page that I mentioned several installments ago. Go to http://www.ludwigsau-gerterode.de/ From the home page you can either click on the heading "Besucher aus den USA im Besengrund" or on the word "aktuelles" in the text. There are now many pictures of our own Leinbach group, involved in the very activities I described in Parts 4 and 5 (including one of me playing the organ in Gerterode church).

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Now to Part 7 and our day in Erfurt: Every city we visited on this latter part of the trip deserved at least two or three times the amount of time we were able to spend in them -- not to mention the ones we simply passed through and didn't visit at all.
On this day, Tuesday 5 August, we took the train from Eisenach to Erfurt, passing through Gotha without getting off. I hope Her Majesty the Queen of England will not be too cross with us for having just brushed off her ancestral city (did everyone here know that the Windsors really started out life as the Saxe-Coburg-Gotha family?). But then I had Leimbachs to catch up with, and that was more of a priority to me.

I knew there were two destinations in Erfurt I wanted to see: the Krämerbrücke and the Dom, the cathedral. I struggled with the strange map I had purchased in Eisenach -- one that folded over and over, and while there was some indication that the Altstadt had its own separate picture somewhere, I couldn't find it until much later.

So I lit out from the Bahnhof in the direction I thought would take us to the bridge, which we would then cross and use as a prelude to the grand finale of the cathedral. Well, the former East Germany is under construction just about everywhere (but then so is Harvard, so that's nothing to be amazed at), and the Bahnhofstrasse appeared to be about as inviting as the Big Dig in Boston. So already my bearings were confused.

Then I was looking for the river we would need to stay on the hither side of to get to the bridge first, but I found us in the midst of the extensive pedestrian zone of central Erfurt and was so enthralled by the atmosphere that I forgot to pay attention.

The great streets, the Schlösserstrasse and the Angerstrasse, are barred to cars, but they do have streetcars running along them. They are the quietest streetcars I have ever heard! Jay observed, then, that the tracks are cushioned with rubber where they meet the pavement. Now, there is a kind of heresy among some urban planners that people actually *prefer* to be on streets that have lots of cars; that cars add excitement to the street scene. Balderdash, I have always said to that.

And I give you Erfurt as the refutation of that argument: these broad streets, with only quiet streetcars running along them, simply bustle with life. But it is quiet, considerate life, by contrast with the relentless deadly hum of tires on asphalt punctuated by angry horn blasts that so permeates most city experience, at least in the U.S.

So before I knew it, we had not come to the bridge at all, but there spread out before us was the vast Domplatz, and on the opposite side the breathtaking composition of Cathedral and Severikirche (church of St. Severus) with the imposing five flights of a Jacob's-ladder stairway between them.

A unique feature of this cathedral is created by the fact of its being on the side of a cliff: to support the choir, huge stone walls and columns enclosing vast and spooky vaults were created; these haunt one's peripheral vision even as one is climbing toward the sublime sculptures on the famous triangular portal.

Currently the famous, lofty, beautifully lit choir of the cathedral is behind scaffolding and under restoration, so that experience must be saved for another trip. In addition the Severikirche was not open, so that interior too will have to wait. Even so there was much to see in the cathedral -- perhaps the most surprising item is the 60-foot tall baptismal font. I should think any infant whose officiating priest could find the water in the middle of all that gorgeous gimcrackery would know beyond doubt that it had really been baptized!

Back to the magnificent Domplatz, then (on one side of it is an imposing structure -- which turns out to be the equivalent of the State Capitol of Thuringia -- that is almost dwarfed by the great square), and through the Marktstrasse to the Fischmarkt. One great square after another! -- this one more contained, but with a splendid Renaissance Rathaus in it, and marvelous merchant mansions.

And finally there was the Krämerbrücke! This is billed in several places as the only bridge of its kind in Europe north of the Alps -- i.e., the only one lined with shops. I should think the Pulteney Bridge in Bath, England, might have something to say about that (is England not considered to be in Europe? is northwest of the Alps different from north of the Alps?) -- while since the only other one I'm aware of besides the archetypal Ponte Vecchio in Florence is the Rialto Bridge in Venice, this seems an odd criterion to evoke in favor of exceptionalness. Sufficient to say, I think, that only four such bridges exist in Europe (perhaps in the world? are there some in Asia, perhaps?), and this one, to my taste, is perhaps the most colorful and interesting of the lot. (It turns out, I just realized, that I have in fact now seen them all!)

At the east end of this bridge there is a church and a tower, and in spite of the heat and the warning about the number of steps, we decided that we were not yet too old to seek out what promised to be a spectacular view. We thought we could, we thought we could, we thought we could, and by Jove we made it! Jay was a bit concerned on the way up, though, as we passed the great bells. He hoped they wouldn't suddenly decide to start ringing while we were next to them. Then he said -- oh, they're fixed on frames, so they can't ring any more. I pointed out that the frames themselves were moveable. But they were well-behaved and didn't give us the feared heart attacks.

Our breath was taken away, however, when we did reach the top and carefully edged our way around the viewing platform. What a panorama! Church towers in every direction, the textbook of architectural styles from Romanesque and Gothic to late-19th century and Bauhaus modern spread out all around us, and right at our feet the fairy-tale Fachwerk (half-timbering) of the houses on the bridge itself, as well as the enticing park paths along the river -- it was hard to tear ourselves away, and our cameras were working overtime.

Finally we carefully made our way back down the steep, narrow, rickety stairs -- admonishing the bells to stay silent as we passed them -- and found ourselves on the bridge once again. The church, built in the 14th century and dedicated to St. Aegidius, is now, of all things, a Methodist church. Not too many of those in Germany.

We walked toward the charming riverside and island buildings we had seen from the tower, constantly looking back to take more pictures of the bridge itself. I'm trying to figure out why this concept of shops-on-a-bridge is so fascinating to me (and apparently to many tourists). From a practical point of view, would one want to be owning -- and living in, as used to be the case anyway -- a shop on a bridge in times of storm and high water? Exactly one year before our trip, Germany had experienced the thousand-year-floods that have become a kind of perverse tourist attraction in their own right. I don't know what it was like in Erfurt at the time, but I should think I would have been very worried if my shop were on that bridge.

I guess I'll have to keep puzzling over that one -- the question of why this is such a fascinating phenomenon. In the meantime, we walked on, and came to a hotel that I had been considering in case we stayed in Erfurt (I had rejected it as being too far from the train station, and the ones closer were too expensive). It was sort of surrounded by construction, so it might not have been the pleasantest stay.

Then I decided, as we were passing what appeared to be a vast vacant lot, perhaps destroyed during the war and never repaired by the DDR government, that I should photograph not only picture-postcard scenes but reality, and especially a potential political comment like this seemed to be. Before I knew it, we had come to the church at the edge of this desolation, and then I discovered that it was the Augustinerkirche, the church of the monastery where Martin Luther himself had been a monk. And the "vacant lot" was actually a combined archaeological and restoration site!

We paid due homage to Martin Luther's presence, looked with interest at the to-be-restored cloister, and I began to get a sense of Erfurt beyond its buildings and physical layout. It slowly sank in that this was the original home, for instance, of the Bach family, who were renowned musicians of Erfurt for a couple of centuries before Ambrose moved to Eisenach and begat Johann Sebastian.

We went on to the Anger Museum, to find it closed, but its courtyard cafe was open, and we gratefully ordered and received -- ice-cold Coca Cola. Then we enjoyed the Anger itself, yet another great plaza, this one surrounded by the massive gothic revival post office, along with Jugendstil (a/k/a Art Nouveau, outside of Germany) and Art Deco buildings -- one of Europe's greatest public spaces. (The word is pronounced ahnger, with g gently cruised over as in "singer," and it means "meadow; pasture; village green.")

All along the way were churches. What drew me to, first, the Barfüsserkirche (church of the Barefoot Friars), and then the Predigerkirche (the "Preachers' Church" -- church of the Dominican Friars, a preaching order), I'm not sure. The Barfüsserkirche turns out to have been bombed during WWII and much of it has been deliberately left in ruins. Then it was on to the Predigerkirche, and somehow it had not penetrated my mind before that this was the church associated with the great, serene mystic, Meister Eckhart. Suddenly my soul settled into that serenity, and I began to understand something of the quietness that I had felt all day, even in all the busiest commercial districts of this sizeable city (Des Moines or Akron-sized).

Another influence intruded, however, with the stained-glass windows in the choir and the north side of the nave -- composed of shards from the windows of the Predigerkirche and other churches that had been shattered in the bombings of WWII. In a state of bemusement, we wandered back to the Bahnhof, where I scarcely remember what we did before we got on the train back to Eisenach. I still remember Erfurt as a city I could definitely live in.

That night in Eisenach we had our last dinner at the Hotel Am Bachhaus and wandered the darkening streets. I took a rather neat photograph of the glowing hotel (or was that just the camera's flash?) beyond the lush flowerbeds in the Frauenplan, the square (here spoiled by parked cars) between our little hotel and the Bach House Museum itself.

Eisenach is hard to remember as a unit. It is made of profoundly individual components: the vast Wartburg Castle, perched in distant aloofness far above the city (unlike the castles of so many other European cities, which trail the houses of the town down the ridge below them to the market) -- then the churches, St. George's with the Bach associations, and the Nikolaikirche next to the great gate the Kaisertor. Several different, almost rival, commercial neighborhoods that don't really flow smoothly one into the other.

The next day we were on our way to another city that made Eisenach seem positively uniform: Weimar, called in a recent symposium the "Janus-Headed City." Except Janus only had two faces. Weimar is shattered into multiple personalities.


[composed on Mon, 1 Sep 2003 21:18:44 -0400]