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What with the whole "Coming to terms with the past" of the Hitler-era, Germans these days are not notable for patriotic nationalism. Waving flags, shouting "Deutschland!" loudly, and dressing up in the colors of their flag are just not things they generally do.
But apparently they make an exception for the World Cup.
Yes, on Friday the soccer Weltmeisterschaft kicked off (as it were) in Berlin. We'd arranged to meet a few friends from the choir at a Biergarten at 3:00--three hours before the game began. This tells you something about how big this event is, in that you had to show up hours in advance just to get a seat watch the game on TV in a pub. (Admittedly, what with socializing and playing boardgames, it was a very enjoyable couple of hours, but my point stands). But the real point is all the people who showed up in assorted Black-Red-and-Gold/World Cup/German national team paraphernalia, and how everyone (including the normally mild-mannered Christian and Christina) stood up and cheered and screemed and blew on horns and hugged each other every time Germany scored a goal, and even more when at the end they had (entirely unsurprisingly) kicked Costa Rica's butt. It was amazing.
Also pretty amazing is was the Münster at Ulm, which we visited with another trip by the international office the next day. This once again involved getting up at a hideous hour, to take the bus the we'd figured out would be actually running at that hour to get us to the student dorm where we picked up the bus to Ulm. This trip was somewhat less well-organized than our previous trip to Tübingen: we spent a truly unreasonable amount of time getting ourselves organized on the Münsterplatz, and then discovered that the church was closed for a service til 12:30. Ah well. We climbed the church tower while we were waiting. It's the highest in the world, and the various spiral staircases unfortunately provide near-unique opportunities for a combination of acrophobiia and claustrophobia. Some poor girl got sick on the way up... Anyway, we got incredible views, and were stupid enough to climb up the very narrow staircase (clearly not designed for the two-way traffic it was forced to deal with...) to the top of the tower.
The church (which we ended up visiting twice) is pretty incredible. It's probably the world's largest medieval parish church. Interesting features include the enormous shaft, built THROUGH several layers of vaulting, allowing you to haul stuff from the ground to the top of the tower. Also sevarl interesting altarpieces, and a couple of incredible late-medieval pupits with thirty-foot-high canopies (Ulm went lutheran, but that meant that the church never got rebuilt in the Rococo, and Luther regarded sacred art as "indifferent" and therefore not to be destroyed wholescale), and the 15th-c choir stalls (very interesting design, with descriptions of OT women and later female saints on the decani side, flanking male counterparts opposite, and assorted busts of classical philosophers.
Warning: Pedantry ahead!
Some errors made by our guide during the Tour:
-The Münster is not, nor ever was, a cathedral. A cathedral is the seat of a bishop. Like its counterpart in Freiburg, the Ulmer Münster is just a parish church...it just happens to have been expanded to enormous size in order to accomodate the entire population, and display the wealth, of one of Germany's largest cities. [Though that said, Ulm was a lot smaller than I'd expected: maybe one and a half times the size of the Altstadt in Konstanz. Maybe there's something to my estimate of Konstanz's 1450 population at 10,000?]
-The painting on the Rathaus may be Renaissance, but the architectural nits they painted in are gothic, though whether 15th c. or 19th I can't say.
-Astronomical clocks are not distinctive to the Renaissance, unless you define the Renaissance as beginning in about 1300. (Which people have done, but my that definition, the late-gothic Münster is also Renaissance.)
-People in the Middle Ages knew the world was spherical. Dante's whole frickin' cosmology is based on that fact. And there was not a big conspiracy by the church to conceal this fact. Galileo got in trouble with the Inquisition not because he said that the Genesis description of the world was wrong, but that Ptolemy's was. Amazing how these 19th century myths persist...
OK. Sorry for the rant, but tours where you know more than the guide gets annoying sometimes. (Especially when the guide then ditches you for ten minutes to duck into an antique shop). Anyhow...
We then spent several hours looking at the Ulm City museum, looking at assorted very cool medieval art (inc. another case of "The Middle Ages always viewed the Bible as taking place in their own society": the Last Supper with Pretzles), plus assorted weapons, finds from the Jean Auel era, and most of what you wanted to knoow about the history of Ulm.
Then today we went to the beach, and had fun going swimming (although we were reminded that the Bodensee is largely glacial meltwater...) and people watching. Freikörperkultur--lack of inhibitions regarding one's body--is one of the few things promoted by the Nazis to survive the Nazi era. (Along with the Autobahn, but not folk singing, more's the pity). So you have a lot of people wearing very little...Bathing suits are traditionally minimal for both sexes, and some women (esp. 40-somethings, interestingly) don't both with the tops of their bikinis.
Anyhoo. Time to log off. Off to Überlingen in search of non-traditional marriages tomorrow; Tuesday and Wednesday will be spent doing research in Karlsruhe, an expensive train ticket away. Wish me luck!
But apparently they make an exception for the World Cup.
Yes, on Friday the soccer Weltmeisterschaft kicked off (as it were) in Berlin. We'd arranged to meet a few friends from the choir at a Biergarten at 3:00--three hours before the game began. This tells you something about how big this event is, in that you had to show up hours in advance just to get a seat watch the game on TV in a pub. (Admittedly, what with socializing and playing boardgames, it was a very enjoyable couple of hours, but my point stands). But the real point is all the people who showed up in assorted Black-Red-and-Gold/World Cup/German national team paraphernalia, and how everyone (including the normally mild-mannered Christian and Christina) stood up and cheered and screemed and blew on horns and hugged each other every time Germany scored a goal, and even more when at the end they had (entirely unsurprisingly) kicked Costa Rica's butt. It was amazing.
Also pretty amazing is was the Münster at Ulm, which we visited with another trip by the international office the next day. This once again involved getting up at a hideous hour, to take the bus the we'd figured out would be actually running at that hour to get us to the student dorm where we picked up the bus to Ulm. This trip was somewhat less well-organized than our previous trip to Tübingen: we spent a truly unreasonable amount of time getting ourselves organized on the Münsterplatz, and then discovered that the church was closed for a service til 12:30. Ah well. We climbed the church tower while we were waiting. It's the highest in the world, and the various spiral staircases unfortunately provide near-unique opportunities for a combination of acrophobiia and claustrophobia. Some poor girl got sick on the way up... Anyway, we got incredible views, and were stupid enough to climb up the very narrow staircase (clearly not designed for the two-way traffic it was forced to deal with...) to the top of the tower.
The church (which we ended up visiting twice) is pretty incredible. It's probably the world's largest medieval parish church. Interesting features include the enormous shaft, built THROUGH several layers of vaulting, allowing you to haul stuff from the ground to the top of the tower. Also sevarl interesting altarpieces, and a couple of incredible late-medieval pupits with thirty-foot-high canopies (Ulm went lutheran, but that meant that the church never got rebuilt in the Rococo, and Luther regarded sacred art as "indifferent" and therefore not to be destroyed wholescale), and the 15th-c choir stalls (very interesting design, with descriptions of OT women and later female saints on the decani side, flanking male counterparts opposite, and assorted busts of classical philosophers.
Warning: Pedantry ahead!
Some errors made by our guide during the Tour:
-The Münster is not, nor ever was, a cathedral. A cathedral is the seat of a bishop. Like its counterpart in Freiburg, the Ulmer Münster is just a parish church...it just happens to have been expanded to enormous size in order to accomodate the entire population, and display the wealth, of one of Germany's largest cities. [Though that said, Ulm was a lot smaller than I'd expected: maybe one and a half times the size of the Altstadt in Konstanz. Maybe there's something to my estimate of Konstanz's 1450 population at 10,000?]
-The painting on the Rathaus may be Renaissance, but the architectural nits they painted in are gothic, though whether 15th c. or 19th I can't say.
-Astronomical clocks are not distinctive to the Renaissance, unless you define the Renaissance as beginning in about 1300. (Which people have done, but my that definition, the late-gothic Münster is also Renaissance.)
-People in the Middle Ages knew the world was spherical. Dante's whole frickin' cosmology is based on that fact. And there was not a big conspiracy by the church to conceal this fact. Galileo got in trouble with the Inquisition not because he said that the Genesis description of the world was wrong, but that Ptolemy's was. Amazing how these 19th century myths persist...
OK. Sorry for the rant, but tours where you know more than the guide gets annoying sometimes. (Especially when the guide then ditches you for ten minutes to duck into an antique shop). Anyhow...
We then spent several hours looking at the Ulm City museum, looking at assorted very cool medieval art (inc. another case of "The Middle Ages always viewed the Bible as taking place in their own society": the Last Supper with Pretzles), plus assorted weapons, finds from the Jean Auel era, and most of what you wanted to knoow about the history of Ulm.
Then today we went to the beach, and had fun going swimming (although we were reminded that the Bodensee is largely glacial meltwater...) and people watching. Freikörperkultur--lack of inhibitions regarding one's body--is one of the few things promoted by the Nazis to survive the Nazi era. (Along with the Autobahn, but not folk singing, more's the pity). So you have a lot of people wearing very little...Bathing suits are traditionally minimal for both sexes, and some women (esp. 40-somethings, interestingly) don't both with the tops of their bikinis.
Anyhoo. Time to log off. Off to Überlingen in search of non-traditional marriages tomorrow; Tuesday and Wednesday will be spent doing research in Karlsruhe, an expensive train ticket away. Wish me luck!