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180abroad · 5 years

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Day 169: Frankfurt

From a historical and economic perspective, Frankfurt is fascinating. It was one of the largest and most powerful cities in the Holy Roman Empire. It was where emperors were selected by an electoral college, and it was the home of the first trade fairs in Europe. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Frankfurt an epicenter of attempted democratic reform. Today, it remains one of the most important cities in Europe for trade and finance. It is home to the EU's central bank and one of Europe's largest stock exchanges. It's train station and airport are likewise among the busiest in all of Europe.

From a tourist perspective, Frankfurt is a bit odd. Despite being such an important city, the historical tourist quarter is quite small. Unlike Munich and Nuremberg, Frankfurt was rebuilt as a fully modern city after WWII, filled with gridded streets and steel skyscrapers. Just a few blocks around the medieval city hall and cathedral were preserved for posterity. A few hours proved more than enough for us to feel that we had gotten a good taste.

Of course, it probably didn't help that we visited on a Monday, when most of the tourist shops and attractions were closed.

Yeah, we probably could have planned our visit better, but having planned every other part of the trip to the point of exhaustion, we tried to give ourselves the gift of going with the flow for once and just seeing what happened. I have to admit that it didn't come easily to me, and I constantly had to fight a rising frustration that we were missing out on things because we hadn't planned enough. We definitely did miss out on some cool things, but that's bound to happen no matter what.

After a calm hour-and-a-half train ride east from Oberwesel, we arrived at Frankfurt's central station. With plenty of time and very little planned, we decided to buy tickets for the City Sightseeing hop-on hop-off tour buses. It was a lot cheaper than it had been in London, but there was also a lot less to see.

The entire route took less than an hour, and the commentary track wasn't nearly as interesting--a lot of pointing out which banks owned which skyscrapers. More interestingly, we did get to appreciate the city's peculiar love of odd statuary.

Still, even if the bus tour was a little underwhelming, it was a nice way to get our bearings. Plus, it dropped us off right at the entrance to the city's historic core.

The first sight to greet us there was the red-brick Church of Saint Paul. Architecturally, it is interesting for being round rather than cross-shaped. Historically, it is interesting for being the site of Germany's first democratically elected parliament.

In 1848, a wave of democratic revolts surged across Europe from Ireland to Romania. Germany (then a confederation of largely independent states) was caught up as well, and Frankfurt became the epicenter of a movement to unite all of Germany into a single democratic nation. A provisional parliament was set up in the Church of St. Paul, and for a while its success seemed inevitable.

But as it so often happens, forming a government proved much harder than forming a revolution. The monarchs and aristocrats stood aside and bided their time while the provisional parliament endlessly bickered over the details of the proposed constitution. Eventually, the parliament collapsed under the weight of its own frustrations and disillusionment. Two decades later, Germany was instead unified under the autocratic rule of the King Wilhelm I of Prussia and his ruthless chief minister Otto von Bismarck.

The church was the first historic structure in the city to be repaired after WWII, and it was honored as a symbol of Germany's commitment to a democratic future.

Upstairs from the ground-floor museum is the church's main hall, a towering and impressively airy space that is now used for concerts instead of religious services. Along the circular wall hang the flags of Germany's 16 federal states.

Moving further into the old town, we soon reached Römerberg, the old town square. At one end stands the Römer building, which as served as the town hall since 1405. It was also where Holy Roman Emperors celebrated after being coronated at the nearby cathedral. Like everything else here, the Römer was almost entirely rebuilt after WWII. As far as we could tell, they did a great job.

At the center of the square stands a statue of Justice without a blindfold, keeping careful watch over the Römer. At least, it usually does. Today it seemed to have gone on vacation--whether voluntary or not, we couldn't say.

On the ground nearby, I found a bronze memorial for a Nazi book burning that took place in the square in 1933. Around the edges of the plaque reads a quote by the 19th-century German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine. Roughly translated, it reads: "The burning of books is but foreplay to the burning of people."

I wanted to say something about how chillingly prophetic those words proved to be, but of course they weren't prophetic at all. As we've learned by this point, the Nazis didn't do anything new; they just did it bigger and on camera.

The square was fairly quiet since it was a Monday and most of the tourist shops and exhibitions were closed. After getting a last look around, we headed over the two small blocks to Frankfurt Cathedral.

The cathedral, officially known as the Imperial Cathedral of St. Bartholomew, is a hulking Gothic construction of red stone. Despite the high vaulted ceilings, the atmosphere felt dark and heavy to me. One small but fun design element involved the walls.

See how the walls are made of cleanly cut and squared red stone? Look again.

The walls are actually covered in red plaster and painted with thin red lines to give the illusion of mortared stone. Apparently this was all the rage in medieval German church design.

The church has some beautiful art and altarpieces on display, but the real reason I was so interested to visit was a small room tucked behind a small door in a side chapel, so inconspicuous that I searched up and down the transepts twice before noticing someone going through it.

It was in this small room that the most powerful lords and clergy of the Holy Roman Empire would gather to each time it came to choose a new emperor. Granted, for most of that time it was little more than a rubber stamp to continue the Habsburg dynasty, but still. Imagine if, once in a generation, the governors of all 50 US states gathered to elect a new president for life in a dark little room like this.

Turning south, we walked a couple blocks down the river Main. Walking out onto the 19th-century wrought-iron Eiserner Steg bridge, we were treated to a wonderful view of the city skyline.

The rest of our visit was mostly spent shopping. Jessica had hoped to find a scarf for a somewhat niche German soccer team, but we never did find it. I had better luck at a Samsung store, where I picked up a USB adapter to replace one I'd lost at some point during the previous week. I also made a small detour to look at some pens.

For some reason I was under the impression that Faber-Castell was headquartered in Frankfurt, when actually it is headquartered in a castle just outside of Nuremberg. Still, it was fun to visit this little shop and admire some nice pens. Upstairs, we got to play with a set of watercolor pencils.

Nearby, there was also a broad square dominated by a statue of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who was born in Frankfurt. I'd always just known of Goethe as the guy who wrote Faust, the iconic story of a scholar who sells his soul to the devil for knowledge and power.

In Germany, however, Goethe isn't any mere writer. Imagine Shakespeare and Leonardo da Vinci combined, but an even bigger deal--that's what Goethe is to Germany. Not only is Faust often credited as the greatest thing ever written in the German language, Goethe also dabbled extensively in science and philosophy in addition to writing an overwhelming volume of novels, plays, and poems.

Like Mozart, Goethe was a prodigy and recognized for his genius at a young age. Also like Mozart, Goethe spent pretty much all of his adult life far away from the home city that so proudly claims his legacy.

As we made our way back to the train station, we walked through a few blocks of clean, high-density skyscrapers, a lovely park, and then a grim half-mile of brothels and open-air drug use. There are three parallel streets leading from the train station into downtown Frankfurt, and apparently it makes a big difference which one you choose.

Back at the train station, we picked up a couple bottles of "apple wine," a local specialty for us to enjoy on the train ride back. It was basically a very dry, somewhat bitter cider, much like the cidre sec we had in Normandy.

One last bit of excitement for the day: For the most part, Deutsche Bahn--the German train service--was easily the most reliable of all the ones we used in Europe. Even the Swiss trains let us down by comparison. But as we waited for out train home to leave Frankfurt, the departure time came and went. There was some jolting and screeching, and some lights flickering on and off. And more time went by. Our glasses of apple wine were long finished. Then, a voice on the PA system announced something in German, and everyone bolted off the train. Naturally, we followed.

As it turned out, two cars of the train that needed to be separated had become locked together, and the engineers couldn't get them apart. So the speaker had told us to head over to the next train, which was leaving in just a few minutes--plenty of time for a prompt German traveler. Luckily, we had plenty of prompt German travelers to take our lead from.

Once on the new train, everything was back to clockwork, and we enjoyed a smooth hour and a half ride back to Oberwesel. We didn't get very good seats due to the last minute change. We spent the first twenty minutes or so on fold-down chairs in the bike storage area. The train emptied out quickly enough as we escaped the urban sprawl surrounding Frankfurt, however, and a quiet hour and a half later we were back home.

Overall, I probably wouldn't recommend visiting Frankfurt the way we did, but I'm still glad we went. For anyone interested in visiting Frankfurt, I would recommend either a well-planned day trip that connects its various sights or staying in the city and using it as a base to explore the nearby towns and villages along the Rhine.

#180abroad #oberwesel #germany #frankfurt #travel #history #medieval #architecture

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cosmic-irrelevance · 8 years

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the 451 dystopia/paradoxes of conviction

i've just finished reading ray bradbury's fahrenheit 451. it's a book that stroke nothing in me when i finished reading it. no scene actually made me feel anything- not when clarisse died, or montag killed beatty. shock, maybe. emotional stirring? no. but it's impact truly came after i read the book and let it simmer. it came the moment i decided that i was "done with thinking for the day" and stopped learning, favouring listening to a generic pop track instead (work from home by 5h, it works when i rly don't wanna think about anything). then it hit me. that the 451 dystopia is, in actual fact not very far from me at all. all my life, i've done good without thinking. i read my first real book outside my syllabus at 17. and i didn't even read alot until i got to university. life was fine. it was fine without thought. i liked watching tv, listening to music. in fact, when i'm tired after getting overloaded with information after school, that's all i want to do. not think. engage in more sensory experiences. 451 really shocked me otherwise. there is value in knowledge. i can't even articulate what the consequences of a superficial life is, but i know it. ive seen it before. they are in people all around me. mildred knows it. she attempted suicide. she suppresses it. i've grown more aware in the past few months, but this feels like the catalyst, the catalyst to me abhorring ignorance. ignorance destroys the garden of earth- nature and thought and relationships and empathy. ignorance brings me to the next point is kind of, the myriad of viewpoints i've been bombarded with in the past week. it kinda sheds light on something i've been wondering for a really long time, that is, why those people would vote for trump. we did a reading today on refugees and exile, and while i can't say i fully comprehend the whole reading, part of what the author (david morley) was saying is that the way people define ourselves is through excluding others. we belong here, and we do because there are people who don't. and i guess trump played on this-not sure if i can call it- basal instinct in people to want some place they can protect as their homes that he managed to garner support from the white masses. the opposing view ive heard though is from lauren's talk at the urban outfitter's event. i share the same stand as her, but i've never really thought about why. it's just, when you look at people and their individual stories and sufferings, it's just not possible for me to not want to help them. it's out of my moral compass to look at these vulnerable groups, with all due innocence, seeking a place they can hide and recover from all the trauma of having their homes destroyed, only to deny them of an asylum. i'm doing a course on human rights now, and the thing about human rights is that if you believe in it, there's no reason to deny these people the right to meet their needs with dignity. it's their rights, their rights they have on the sole basis that they are human. nothing else. and if you disagree with me that all humans deserve rights, how would you like if someone treated you like a slave? and if you think that can't happen, what do you have in you that makes you superior to these refugees? lauren's view though, is that all of these stem from self love. if you love yourself, this love spreads to others. because they are human too. they are genetically coded the same way we are. they are our brothers. they are our sisters. i 100% stand by that, but my mind will take a little while to pry open. and on human rights and activism, there's something else. lexicon seems like a line of weakness of every activist- language is, afterall the cornerstone of thought. all around activists are trying to stop us from using labels- thordis elva goes as far as to say that using the term “rapist” to describe the entity who had committed that act doesn't help in solving the problem. i don't deny that. we think, therefore, we are. but here, i guess i'm going back to the 451 dystopia. ray bradbury actually had letters written to him getting him to remove the racism (one of the MINOR antagonists in the book which montag gets back at is called Black, i'm pretty sure intentionally) and portrayal of women (mildred and her friends). to which he smartly says that that's the first step towards burning books. because people cannot tolerate other's opinions. montag could jolly well be gay, and mildred be his gay husband, and there'll be outcry saying bradbury targets the homosexual community. and if he changes his stand, that'll be akin to writing to please. and writing to please is too troublesome, too hard, he might as well not write anyway. i don't know how to reconcile these polarising stands. maybe i'll write again, when i do. i've a copy of milk and honey in my bag now, which i'm totally stoked to pull out and read for the sole reason that i haven't read poetry in a while. but i guess it's the 451 dystopia again, reminding me of something. i'm starting to be freaked at its penetration In my life. basically there's this guy, faber. an old university professor. he says that books alone aren't enough to change the world, to score beneath the surface. there must be books, leisure time to understand their meanings, and the freedom to act upon them. so i guess that's what i'm doing now. was just reading about the paradox of conviction. it's interesting, but it would've hit me harder if i actually had something i was brought up to believe. it's not to say i wasn't brought up to believe anything, there are certain things my parents believe in. my dad, for one, is devoutly anti government. it's just that i don't share their views. they weren't inserted into me before i was washed over by social studies, before i knew how to think. but i guess it gives me reason to think that things might've been different if my dad preached all of these to me earlier. bear with me i'm just rehashing the argument here: so i guess i shall go with the example that i was brought up to think that there are multiple gods (i'm buddhist, though not as devout a follower as my dad). say i have a friend. my friend is monotheistic (she's christian). just because she believes the way she does, and i do the way i do, doesn't mean that i think i have better grounds for believing the way i do. that is, i don't have evidence that there are indeed, more than one gods, which makes her belief less reliable. it's just the way things are. or rather, it's the way our upbringings are. she was raised christian, i'm buddhist. if you see where i'm going, yeah there's actually no reason for me to believe that my beliefs in buddhism are rational. and being the rational being i am, i should actually not believe in buddhism. i also know i've checkmated myself because no one says religion is rational, but what if i was raised to think otherwise? for example, that the earth was flat? i don't know what to think of this argument because firstly, i do not hold to a lot of thoughts i was raised to believe. my family doesn't communicate all that much, so most of my thoughts come from books and the media. secondly, there can be empirical data proving some beliefs better than the others. that doesn't mean either party should give up on their beliefs though. not everything has to appeal to reason. to the chagrin of every rational brain is the actor of the heart, the existence of emotions. it's like how vladimir and estragon continue, irrationally, waiting by the tree for godot. not because they believe they have strong grounds to do so (they have, indeed, no grounds at all), but because it brings them feelings of hope and purpose. i feel a tad better now that i've got my thoughts out. it's hard thinking in your brain.

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