München and the Pope's Bier

München this weekend with some of the girls – completely awesome.

Background for the trip: Germany has this thing called a Schönes-Wochenende-Ticket, which enables up to five people to use Nahverhkehr (translation: the slower, less comfy trains) for an entire day, for only 39 Euro. Considering that that’s 8 Euro per person going there, 8 going back, 20 for one night in a hostel, you have a rather inexpensive weekend trip to München.

The trip really started Friday afternoon though, when we finalized these plans to go by actually booking a hotel. Feeling very yay-cool-lets-travel-last-minute-through-Europe, we then agreed to meet up that night at around 10:30, have a few drinks, and go to this Uni-party in Kuckuck (the student bar 20 seconds from my dorm). Turns out the music at this party is the BEST most of us have experienced at a club/bar so far in Germany (translation: mostly contemporary American pop and rap, mixed with some super-popular German stuff), which meant we didn’t want to leave. Which meant we stayed until like 3:30 or 4am. Which means we just didn’t go to bed – three of us came back to my apt to crash and just stayed up chatting, showered, packed, and headed down to the bus stop at 5:50 am.

So one all nighter, two transfers, three trains, and four hours later, we arrive in München! Our weekend started off with a group of men dressed in Lederhosen confronting us at the Bahnhof, telling us we needed to cut these little bottles of Schnapps off of this one guy’s onesie-costume-thingy. When I asked him what they were doing, the guy with the Schnapps says “Ich muss heiraten,” or, “I have to get married,” which I thought was just phenomenally funnily phrased. Anyways, this was at 10:30 am and the groom-to-be was already completely hammered, slurring his German so badly I couldn’t understand it half the time, so that his friend had to repeat everything for us.

Funny start aside, we did some serious things here, mixed in with a very healthy amount of drinking Bier and eating German food.

First serious thing was Saturday: Dachau (just fyi, the next 7 paragraphs are my thoughts/impressions about that experience. Comment on this please if you have other thoughts!). I’m guessing most of you know that Dachau is a concentration camp in Germany; what makes it perhaps especially interesting is that it was the first concentration camp (established in 1933 just after Hitler came to power) and was supposed to “serve as a model for all other camps.” I knew this walking in – what I didn’t realize is that Dachau is also quite simply the name of the town where the camp is located. It was very strange chilling on the S-bahn for 25 minutes and then suddenly getting off at a Bahnhof called “Dachau,” and then seeing buses for the “City of Dachau” and etc. It was sort of chilling for me, and I wonder how it would feel to live in a town with such an infamous name.

A short bus ride later, we get off the bus at “KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau,” “Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site.” The first thing that struck me was that the pathway leading to the information center and then a few hundred meters later to the actual site of the camp was beautiful, well maintained and prettily planned. That was an uncomfortable feeling, the instant, “oh what a lovely day and a pretty path.”

The discomfort really only continued though, but not in the way I had thought it would. After literally feeling that I was going to puke after seeing the “Arbeit macht frei” door and reading that where I was standing was the path that prisoners walked, headed towards that door into that camp, I walked into the prisoners section of the camp. There, the “administrative building” had been transformed into a museum, the only barracks there were two that had been rebuilt as replicas, and towards the back of the prisoners area were religious memorials – one from the Catholic church, one Evangelical, one Jewish and a Russian Orthodox on a bit farther off.

These struck me as completely inappropriate and ironic. One, Nazi ideology was totally against organized religion; there would have been no place for religiosity in a concentration camp. There was none of the goodness/mercy/love that religion preaches inherent in a concentration camp. I really cannot understand why someone thought it appropriate, then, for these religiously-based Denkmale (memorials) to be there. Not to say they don’t have a place in Holocaust memorialization, but in my opinion that place is not in the actual concentration camps. But these are just my initial thoughts, so perhaps more on that later. (Thesis for next year…?)

So, confused by the somewhat prettiness of the surrounding area, annoyed with all of the churches/religious stuff, completely unable to actually picture that people had lived horribly as prisoners here, I started noticing that the people around me were taking pictures, and in a way that I was totally not ok with. I too, of course, was taking pictures, but of the camp and the things that struck me. A lot of the people around me were taking pictures of themselves in the camp – one man I saw asked his wife to take a picture of him in front of “Arbeit macht frei,” another young girl actually laid down against a tree in the camp and started posing. I literally wanted to slap these people, not just for completely disturbing my experience with their callousness but for being so incredibly thoughtless and disrespectful. I don’t understand what someone hopes to gain by having documented themselves freely standing next to or walking under such an iconic representation of Nazism and the Holocaust – “look Ma I was really here!” just doesn’t cut it.

My final thought is that the gas-chamber/crematorium was genuinely chilling to see. Although the gas-chambers in Dachau were never put to use, it was horrible just to see the space, to see what someone had designed in order to murder people. The very first thing I noticed there was that ceiling in that room is lower than any of the other rooms – it is a genuinely horribly cramped space. The crematorium, on the other side, had been used, and it was most nauseating to think about those prisoners who had to carry out the process of actually cremating the bodies.

Really my final thought, though, is that there is this big sign in the camp that says “Nie wieder,” “Never agan,” “никогда больше” and a few other languages – I thought this was maybe the worst part of the camp, because it’s just not true.

Moving on from that, the other serious thing we did was take a city tour on Sunday, which on the one hand was totally funny and mostly about Bier (I learned that the pope’s favorite Bier is Augustiner Edelstoff from München – naturally we tried it later, it’s delicious, and I understand why he has it imported to the Vatican bi-monthly), but also about Münchens history as the city with a very deep Nazi past – Hitler called it the “Hauptstadt der Bewegung,” or, “Capital of the (National Socialist) movement. München has over a hundred small memorials all over the city commemorating the Holocaust/War/Resistance Movement, mostly unexplained and easy to overlook – our tour guide asked us to compare for ourselves the effectiveness of such memorials (which require you to go seek out information and learn for yourself about what happened) with memoralize like the “Memorial for the Murdered Jews of Europe” in Berlin, which is not subtle but takes up a whole city block (go google pictures!). All in all, this weekend really made me start thinking about the process of memorialization.

So, all seriousness aside, we also of course went to the Hofbräuhaus (Saturday), went to an Augustiner Biergarten (Sunday), and saw tons of people dressed in Lederhosen and Dirndls (the entire weekend). Weigh in, all: should I buy a Dirndl next time we go to München? ! They’re expensive but I would have a killer Halloween costume for the rest of my life.

I also had the funny/strange experience of trying to go to church in the Frauenkirche (Münchens huge Catholic Church and the seat of the Archbishop of München and Freiburg) and ending up in a little chapel behind the altar with 18 other people, the priest, and the alter server. Mass was only 38 minutes long (beat that, parents/brothers), and it seems you have to go to the 10am Mass for it to be celebrated in the main church.

Basically in the end we decided we’re going to have to come back to München again one weekend! It’s an easy, not too expensive way to get out of Tübingen for a short weekend, and there’s so much to see, and of course so many more Biergarten to visit.

Final note is that being in a big city was really, really nice – don’t get me wrong, I love Tübingen, but München is just big and legit, with so much and extensive public transportation, so many more restaurants, a real, huge Bahnhof, and such a history. Loved it!