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A city to die for

My 12-year-old daughter and I are at the foot of Münster's St Lamberti Church, staring up at three cast-iron, man-sized cages hanging from the topmost point.
She frowns. 'You mean they were still alive when they were put in?'
'That's what the history books say,' I reply. 'The executioners tore their flesh with red hot pincers and then flung them in the cages and hauled them up to the top.'
'Total gross-out!' Chloë shrieks, before adding eagerly: 'And they just left them there?'
In 1533 Münster became the centre of the Anabaptist Uprising, part of the wave of Protestantism that swept through Europe.
Anabaptists wanted all property to be shared communally. Münster's citizens went collectively crazy - everyone converted. But the local ruler, Prince-Bishop Franz, didn't go a bundle on this (tax-free) exercise in communal living, and he set about besieging the city.
It took him two years, during which things inside Münster went downhill. Mass polygamy was instituted, public beheadings were a daily occurrence and Jan Leyden, an illiterate tailor from Holland, proclaimed himself King of New Jerusalem and took 16 wives.
It was 'King' Jan and his two henchmen who were left hanging from St Lamberti.
Today, the residents of Münster don't quite know whether to be proud or ashamed of their most famous citizens. At night, a single light burns in each of the cages - a reminder that the human spirit can never be tamed. And the surviving artefacts - including the torture pincers - are preserved in the City Museum.
But wild uprisings don't quite tally with Münster's new self-image. The moat that protected the Anabaptists for so long is now a benign three-mile promenade round the city.
And yet this is a city that also hankers after its past. After World War II, everything here was faithfully reconstructed while the rest of Germany was re-making itself in concrete and steel. But the result is a rare jewel, an exquisite 18th-century city. At the centre of the old town, dominating the flat landscape, lies Dom St Paul, the cathedral. ... more

A sprinkling of history

From the Daily Mail

On a clear day, Berchtesgaden would be breathtaking for its situation alone: a picturesque village amid vertically rising peaks.
This is Germany's most tucked away corner, a stone's throw - if you can throw stones over mountains - from Salzburg in Austria, and just a tunnel or two away from Italy.
As the Nazi leadership who flocked here in the Thirties knew only too well, a perfect day in Berchtesgaden comes close to proving God is a Bavarian.
But what do you do when it's raining? When the mountains that lend so much majesty also bring the Foehn - the warm, wet, misty wind from the south - the peaks disappear, the spirits sink and the children start complaining.
The answer is obvious: send them down the salt mines. Seriously.
To the uninitiated, a visit to the Salzbergwerk (which means 'salt mine workings') might seem to hold all the attraction of a day out at a sewage plant, but to those in the know, it is more fun, and with less queuing, than most of the attractions at Disney World.
Even my two fractious teenagers were less hard to convince than I had feared. Perhaps it was the silly pictures of the people before us dressed in old Bavarian mining costumes, squealing as they hurtled down a polished wooden slide.
Or perhaps it was just that the sensible ticketing system - you buy in advance for a tour and then simply turn up at the appointed time - allowed us to wolf down beer and sausages in the cafe opposite (it is legal in Bavaria for 16-year-olds to buy beer.)
The only sticky point came when it was our turn to get dressed for the mines: my elder son suggested that the open-fronted, grubby miner's clothes were actually an improvement on his 13-year-old brother's dress sense.
I managed to restore order only by pointing out that we all looked like a cross between shabby Teletubbies and the Seven Dwarfs' second team. ... more

Escape to Colditz

From the Daily Mail

Stepping off the tram into Theaterplatz, the stunning square in the centre of Dresden, my five-year-old son, Joseph, stared around him in awe.
'Where is everybody?' he asked. I knew what he meant.
Devastated by the Allied bombing campaign of 1945, the East German city, still in the process of being rebuilt, stands defiant.
Huge baroque buildings of fire-blackened stone - the Semper Opera House, and the Zwinger, once the palace of the kings of Saxony - loomed grandly over us, painstakingly recreated out of the rubble.
Everything is strangely quiet. Dresden is a city still in shock, whose heart was obliterated in a night.
It then fell asleep for 50 years; it is only now beginning to shake its head and sniff the air.
How was I to explain all that had happened here to my curious son?
I didn't have to. Staying in Dresden for three days taught him more about European history than I ever could.
You can see exactly where the fire storm stopped. It is as if London's Knightsbridge burned, and Hampstead and Richmond survived. ... more

Cologne, the perfect gift

From the Daily Mail

How would you imagine Christmas to smell - sweet and sticky like moist marzipan or hot, sugarcoated nuts? Nose-tinglingly spicy like steaming, ruby-rich mulled wine? Or perhaps all musky like smoky wood in a fireplace?
And in your mind's eye, isn't it always tinkling and twinkly, with frosted glass baubles and spinning trinkets glittering in tree branches above heaps of beribboned parcels?
If you've ever moaned that Christmas has become too commercial, lost its magic, is a waste of money, bah humbug, go to Cologne for a day or two and get your festive spirit restored by the stockingful.
You can buy your fantasy yuletide of yesteryear at the city's four Christmas markets - and there's not a boring PlayStation in sight. The markets, or weihnachtsmarkte, comprise scores of red and green-topped and trimmed wooden huts stuffed with old-fashioned goodies.
The Germans love their Christmas markets. Alter markt, in the heart of the old town, is renowned for its handicrafts and Christmas tree decorations; Neumarkt, perversely, is the oldest of the four and features craftsmen at work.
So, fake-fur wrapped against the cold, I went shopping and I bought a huge cone of munchy, crunchy nuts , the cutest spotty moggy mobile for catophile; fluffy fox and piggy glove puppets for niece and baby nephew, a jewel of a mille fiori candle pot for Mum, three small but beautifully formed wooden animal keyrings for assorted chums, DIY gluhwein kit for Grandma and Grandad, and a gorgeous blue-and-pink patterned vase for . . . well, me actually - but who did all the stomping around in the cold, eh?
I could have chosen sheepskin slippers, handmade sweaters, exquisite handcrafted pewter festive figures, leather goods galore, wood in all shapes and sizes, and unique but not cheap metal jewellery. Much of the merchandise you can see has been fashioned in Germany.
Some of it has less authentic origins, but most has a Christmas-of-old feel about it - batteries not required. You're looking for gifts no one will see on their High Street, and there's plenty to choose from. ... more

A town that amused Victoria

From the Mail on Sunday

Queen Victoria was amused. There's a photograph to prove it. It shows her at the railway station at Coburg, southern Germany in 1894. She had just arrived for a glittering family wedding and her normally dour face is lit with the widest of smiles.
This small duchy on the edge of Bavaria lifted the sad widow's mood. It is a key location in one of the great royal love stories. Her beloved husband (and first cousin) Albert, second son of the Duke of Coburg, was born and raised in the town. Victoria wrote: 'Albert is an angel . . . to look in those dear eyes, and that dear sunny face, is enough to make me adore him.' Soppy stuff maybe, but never was a queen so smitten.
Visit this town of 44,000 today and you find references to Queen Vic everywhere. A larger-than-life statue of the Prince Consort stands in the middle of the Market Square surrounded by rich Renaissance buildings. This was one of Victoria's first tributes to him after he died tragically young of typhoid in 1861. Well before the Albert Hall and the Albert Memorial were completed in London, she was in Coburg, in 1865, to unveil the statue.
The young Victoria wrote in 1846: 'If I were not the person who I am, my true home would be here.' In all she visited seven times, causing Prime Minister Disraeli to advise: 'Madam, you cannot rule the Empire from Coburg.'
In this, the 100th anniversary of her death, the town honours her with several exhibitions. Coburg today retains most of the old buildings Victoria would have recognised. People believe the town was largely spared by Allied bombers in the Second World War because Victoria's grandson lived here.
Her town residence - Ehrenburg's sumptuous Hall of Giants, crammed with mirrors, Italian plaster-work and marble columns - is where Victoria met Emperor Franz Josef of Austria in an early attempt to sort out Europe.
Visitors can see the queen's suite, including the first (mahogany) water closet on the European mainland - for her use only. Royal protocol demanded that Albert slept apart, upstairs. He had his own private staircase and presumably used it. Well, they did manage nine children. ... more