Munich, Neuschwanstein and Dachau

I wish Helen had decided to come with us for a weekend in Munich - I hadn't realized how much we had been relying on her to talk for us in restaurants! We arrived in Munich and discovered that we couldn't even say "a table for two, please". Not a brilliant effort for two supposedly cosmopolitan and well-travelled people. I can always say I feel too sick to concentrate, but I don't know what Dean's excuse is.

We have walked though Munich, seen the clockwork on the tower, visited the palace, marketplace and the cathedral and decided not to do a Hitler tour. Apparently Munich is where he got started, so there are lots of walking tours around which point out the highlights of Hitler's career. We did go to the Hofbrauhaus and Dean had a litre of beer, which is the smallest glass they serve it in! The serving people really do carry 8 litres at a time - 4 glasses in each hand.

We took one day to visit Neuschwanstein (New Swan Castle) which was built by Mad King Ludwig and, exactly as advertised, has swans all through it in the architecture. Every room has a theme - one of Wagner's operas. If you knew them all, you could read all the stories around every room. From the ouside, the castle is the true fantasy castle as popularized by Walt Disney as the "Sleeping Beauty" castle. It also has the perfect setting, being built on top of a mountain, near a lake (Swan Lake, of course) and also near a tiny metal bridge over a waterfall. Since the building is less than 100 years old, it also has all the modern conveniences of electricity and plumbing, so maybe Ludwig wasn't that mad after all.

For a complete change of pace, the next day we went to Dachau, which was the original concentration camp of the Nazi regime where all the future guards and leaders of the other concentration camps were trained. Some of the stories from there were bizarre and all were chilling. I find it difficult to understand how people could do all that to other people. The medical experiments alone were sickening, let alone the actual torture inflicted. The strange part is that none of it seemed to have any point. Most of the work was make-work, like digging holes and then filling them in again, or doing star-jumps in a winter coat in the middle of summer. Pointless. Apparently because of the risk of sabotage very little real work was entrusted to the inmates.

At the end of the war, the government was keen to plough Dachau into the ground and try to forget that it ever happened, but there were some survivors who insisted on setting up a memorial there. Interestingly, the memorials very much reflect the politics of what was going on at the time. The memorials set up in the 60's don't commemorate the gypsies, homeless or homosexuals, as there were still considered "undesirables" by the government at the time. Reminds me of Animal Farm, where all are equal, but some are more equal than others...