Category: Germany

Walking through the gardens of Potsdam

~ Dechen ~ Leave a comment

I am so glad that I decided to add a Potsdam leg to the Berlin trip. I signed up on the Sandeman Tour which was taken by the sweetest guide ever- Georgina was a Scot studying history in Germany, and I always love meeting people who have dedicated their lives to their passion! Berlin is a city that encourages young people to be really dedicated to their passion, it’s quite unlike India where for whatever reasons (well OK…resource pressure! simple economics!) the young are taught to only think about commercial ventures, or enterprises that pay off in cold, hard cash. Anyhow, coming back to Potsdam, the city of emperors.

Potsdam is within the larger-Berlin area, easily accessible on the U-bahn. You only need to get an ABC ticket that allows you to travel in this “Zone C”,and you are set.

Potsdam was the place where Prussian emperors and the aristocracy lived and played. It’s an enormously beautiful place, wooded walks and vast calm lakes, on the shores of which you can see fairy-tale castles. Every time I look at these photographs I think of the privileged men and women of the Prussian court who once frolicked here. They would have been immensely rich & powerful for their times, living away from the peasantry, surrounded by beauty. It’s truly like walking into a painting, like visualising the vast estates of Tolstoyian aristocrats, a beautiful dream-like state.

I can’t remember the name of the landscape artist who designed the parks we walked through, I am quite sure Georgina told us, but I do remember her telling us that he purposely designed the parkways to look untamed. In reality, he was guiding the visitor through every vista. One can literally stop and see a perfectly framed landscape, utterly delicious, Germanic precision with French abandon!

When I saw that enormous bush of chrysanthemums, I was reminded of Darjeeling. The flowers grow wild in the hill-town, but are sadly neglected. Like everything once-beautiful, we have just let things go to waste. It’s the curse of India, the fact that we entrust crown jewels in the hands of veritable carpet-baggers, like watching an exotic beauty crumble in old age.

Only when we reached Cecilienhof did I realise that this unassuming place was the site of the historic Potsdam Conference. That explained the communist star dominating the entrance! Sometimes when I encounter historic sites I feel a sense of disorientation- at how the world changes, how we are just a passing breeze, how we age, how we will all die…a little shudder always passes through me. And then I think about how little time we have, and how we must never waste the opportunities we have, or take in the beauty around us.

Nearer lunch, the tour took us through the centre of town. Our guide showed us a cafe where dissenting artists during the cold war used to meet, and again that blew my mind. Humanity has always had tyranny, undoubtedly the one we see in India today is just the beginning of a few years of darkness. However, there are always these little forces of rebellion bubbling far beneath the surface. Tyranny has never succeeded in completely crushing the human spirit, perhaps it crushes the individual, but never the spirit. Every new generation is an act of rebellion I think, and one day, they will remember us yet.

View of the town of Potsdam. I remember that doner kebab quite fondly! I was famished after the long walk, and this was my first doner ever. It was difficult to bite into something as enormous as this, I think South Asians in general eat much smaller helpings. But once done, it was the most satisfying lunch 🙂

After lunch we made our way towards Sans Souci, the beautiful palace of Frederick the Great. Georgina did a great job of walking us through the many Fredericks (or more precisely Friedrichs) in Prussian history, and after her tale of Frederick the Great, I was completely enthralled by this emperor. European history for me is largely through an Anglo-Saxon post-colonial cultural filter. Perhaps he was fleetingly mentioned when we read a bit about Bismarck in school. I think what touched me most was the story of his teenage crush (?) and subsequent escape with his tutor. Frederick’s father (also a Frederick) was a tough man who didn’t like the softer side of life, and when his prodigal son was brought back, Frederick Sr. had the tutor executed while the son watched. Ironically, Frederick Jr. saw more military action than his father ever did, expanding and strengthening the Prussian empire; however his heart was still artistic. At any moment he could, he used to escape into the beauty of Potsdam and to his palace that he called…Sans Souci, in French “without a care“.

It was slightly unfortunate that in 2019, May was quite chilly. Apparently in summer, those tiered steps towards the palace are covered with fruit-bearing plants, vines, greenery, flowers, sunshine. What a beautiful place for an emperor to rest

I also found out that the old emperor was often called the “Potato King”. Apparently he was the one who introduced the very important tuber into German diet. When he initially faced inertia from the farmers to take up planting this strange vegetable from South America, the emperor came upon a plan. He pretended that this was a super secret project that only the emperor could plant, and had guards watching over the fields every day. But in the night, he made sure that the security was much more lax. In a classic case of behavioural nudging, he got the peasants to be really interested in this strange spud, and so after a couple of midnight pilfering the peasants began to take to potato.

“The King is everywhere” by Robert Warthmueller, a painting I especially loved because it seems to capture that unique hold that Frederik the Great has over the German people, a genuine love and respect. At the same time, the emperor meets the people without hauteur, he is bent and frail and looks deeply touched by the simple offering of a single potato

The tour ended on a sweet note after I asked the guide about the seven or so slabs of stone, and the potatoes strewn one of those. This was Frederick the Great’s grave, here lay the great Prussia, surrounded by the graves of his favourite dogs. The potatoes were what people brought when they visited the Potato King. I must recommend you to take some too, and please take one from me, because I didn’t know about this custom until too late.

Here lieth Frederik the Great…and his dogs.

Things to do at Bonn

~ Dechen ~ Leave a comment

This is what I did, but you can obviously do different stuff!

1. Look for the nearest entry to the Rhine riverside. The river flows south to north across the western side of the city. On the north is the old Bonn town. I wish we had riversides with entries like these!
2. At the southern end of the Rhine riverwalk, you reach the UN Campus. The DHL headquarters and the Mariott Hotel are other nearby landmarks.
3. Bonn is also the birthplace of Beethoven. This is NOT a picture of Beethoven Haus! That was undergoing renovations in time for next year 2020- 250th anniversary of his birth. For Beethoven fans, there should be lots to do, including concerts
4. If you are there on the first Saturday of May, try and catch the Rhine in Flames. I spectacularly missed the 2019 flames because I was leaving on the same day. Unforgivable! Catch the one for 2020 when it should have even more fireworks, classical music and general fun. Here I did manage to catch a local band.
5. WALK! Germany has excellent and well-interconnected public transport. Tourists can buy day/multi-day tickets at stations and these can be used across buses/trains (S:bahn)/metros (U:bahn). But the roads are so picturesque, the night is a constant twilight zone and safer than most cities I have been to- I would recommend walking as much as possible!
6. Be a good tourist! When you travel in new lands, you remember the locals who were nice. Conversely if you come from a place where a lot of tourists come, you tend to remember the responsible tourists.
Be that local- Be that tourist 🙂