Posted: Sun Jan 21, 2007 3:02 pm Post subject: Where Germany is at its most German
In the Alpine thread we have firmly established that Germany hardly is an Alpine country (in spite of Bavarian propaganda trying to prove the opposite) and we have thoroughly discussed the different "ambiences" of France.
Perhaps not all of you are are aware of that Germany also has some rather different ambiences and that some parts of Germany certainly feel more German than others. Most of you will probably agree with me that the real Germany is the Germany of the Brothers Grimm, i.e. the deep woods of Northern Hessen, as here in Reinhardswald:
In the Reinhardswald you'll even find Sababurg, the alleged setting for the fairytale of Sleeping Beauty:
And in the surrounding area you'll find a faitytale landscape of peaceful villages inbedded between wooded hills and meandering river valleys: a landscape that more or less goes on all the they way southwards to the Alps:
_________________ Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. = Those who don't know foreign languages, know nothing of their own. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
But if you look on a map of Germany, you'll see that this typically German landscape, the Mittelgebirge = Central Highlands, only starts right to the north of the land of the Brothers Grimm, on the Lower Saxon-Hessian border. To the north of that line, roughly the border between Saxon and Franconian dialects, lie the the flat, flat, flat lands of Northern Germany:
_________________ Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. = Those who don't know foreign languages, know nothing of their own. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Last edited by Fredrik on Sun Jan 21, 2007 4:04 pm; edited 2 times in total
And the North German plain is not exactly ugly, it has its own charm, which, because of the flat, closed landscape often manifests itself more in details than what is the case further south: (Notice the storch!):
But it doesn't feel very German. The interplay between Plön's lake, beech forests and white castle, for example has a very Danish feel:
The architecture also has a Nordic feel to it, in addition to a quintessential Low German spirit, that often seems a bit lost in a North Germany which to a large extent has abandoned its linguistical roots:
(Husum in Schleswig-Holstein)
Apart from Schleswig-Holstein, you have to go eastwards to Mecklenburg-Vorpommern to find a kind of complete Low German Germany, like here in Greifswald:
Because Lower Saxony is often just too flat, boring and downright ugly:
_________________ Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. = Those who don't know foreign languages, know nothing of their own. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Last edited by Fredrik on Sun Jan 21, 2007 4:06 pm; edited 1 time in total
And trust me, I know my Lower Saxony, which i have passed through a lot of times en route from Norway to "Europe".
Coming from the North, either on the Autobahn or by train, you have to pass through Lower Saxony on your way southwards, staring out onto the flat monotonous plain or into the godforsaken pine woods on the Luneburg Moor between Hamburg and Hannover. It is then that you realize, that in order to create "England's green and pleasant land" the Saxons who hail from this melancholic landscape had to mix with the Celts and borrow some of their lyrical genius. Otherwise they would just have gone on constructing the depressing, scary small villages and farms you find in Lower Saxony today, with depressing names like Eimke, Uelzen and Borstel.
But before you loose yourself totally in Saxon melancholy, somewhere around Hildesheim south of Hannover, you get a glimpse of a wooded hill, you sense you are going upwards:
Or, if you follow the Weser river and enter the real Germany further west through the Porta Westfalica (Westphalian Gate), you can actually see exactly where the North German lowland ends and the hills begin:
As soon as leave the lowlands landscape starts to roll, small, picturesque villages with tall church towers appear in the valleys between the lush uplands, rivers meander through the hills, opening up vistas of bucolic delight, rolling cornfields against the background of pleasant beech forests, the whole thing dotted with small villages and the occasional castle on a hilltop. It could have been Shropshire, but it is the Weserbergland, the Weser Hills Region, the land of the Brothers Grimm. Here, just before the divide between the Saxon and Frankish tribes, Germany calms the visitor, scared by the Saxon monotony, with a glimpse of its true beauty, of its real treasures, of the land of Sleeping Beauty.....
And then the fairytale land just goes on and on untill the Alps:
(Mosel valley) _________________ Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. = Those who don't know foreign languages, know nothing of their own. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Last edited by Fredrik on Mon Jan 22, 2007 12:06 am; edited 6 times in total
Even a big city like Frankfurt am Main rests between wooded hills:
(Rothenburg ob der Tauber)
(Rothenburg ob der Tauber)
(Hohenzollern Castle)
(Tübingen) _________________ Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. = Those who don't know foreign languages, know nothing of their own. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Last edited by Fredrik on Sun Jan 21, 2007 4:29 pm; edited 2 times in total
Glad you liked the pics! I just wanted to show that there are some very different ambiences in Germany. Unfortunately, I couldn't find ugly enough pictures of Northern Germany, so you all could see how depressing Lower Saxony often looks. I guess the Low Saxons don't like it very much themselves, when they put so few pictures of their Heimat on the web!
(I know that Lower Saxony looks rather similar to the Netherlands, but in the Netherlands (and Denmark) you often find an attention to detail and small-scale beauty that is often very much lacking in Lower Saxony. Pluss the Netherlands feels "right", because the Dutch ambience is Dutch, but in Lower Saxony you often feel something is wrong. Everything is German, but it doesn't look German!) _________________ Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. = Those who don't know foreign languages, know nothing of their own. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
I don't really associate Germany with the South/Germany/Grimm brothers fairy tails imaginary only.
When I think Germany I think also (and maybe at first place) to northern Germany, the capital Berlin... Prussia. When the unity of German-speaking lands had bagan. And big cities like Hamburg, Berlin, Dortmund, Kolhn, Hannover, etc/
To me the "southern German ambiance" has more to do with the former Austo-hungarese empire and Central Europe in its fell. It is not what I imidiatly would associate with a German stereotype, even it I consider part of it.
Aha! Prussia is the German phenomena that has taken a strong hold on the imagination of you French guys....
The funny thing about Prussia was that there really wasn't very much typically concretely Prussian. It was more a diverse collection of lands united by an army and a philosophy than a nation. And since a very large part of what was Prussia lies east of the Oder on non-German territory today, Prussia isn't the first thing that springs to mind in Northern Germany, in my experience.
I agree with you that there is a certain Central European, Austrian-Hungarian ambience south of the river Main (even though Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg never were part of Austria-Hungary), but also Central Germany north of the Main feels more similar to the South than the North in many ways, i.e. there is a rather uniform typically German ambience stretching from Northern Hessen to the Alps. The divide actually corresponds rather neatly with the Benrather Line dividing Low German from High German:
_________________ Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. = Those who don't know foreign languages, know nothing of their own. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Oh Fredrik, you're making me miss Germany even more!
I have to say that I've only ever really been to Southern Germany — Baden-Württemburg and Bavaria, which was when I spent three weeks there last summer when I did an intensive German language course in Heidelberg. I've also been to Hessen when I visited Frankfurt for the day, and to Rheinland-Pfalz when I went to Speyer for the day (and also when I went to a conference at a place called Oberwesel last October). I've also driven through Thüringen, Saxony and possibly Saxony-Anhalt when I went to Poland by coach in 2005.
However, I have never been to 'proper' Northern Germany. From those pictures, it would appear that the physical landscape of that area is perhaps more similar to England/Netherlands/Denmark than to the very south of Germany. I think that this house especially looks like one of those idillic English farmhouses:
I don't think that the pictures of Low Saxony look that bad though. To me, they just look kind of 'normal'.
Yes, the house does look idyllic, Benjamin, but if you look more closely you'll see that it has not the same warm glow that a similar house in England or Central Germany would have. Lower Saxony is a kind of harsh place, sometimes even a bit scary in its dreary monotony, especially when you see pagan decorations like this, on the houses.
Remants of that pagan old Saxon voice that was violently subdued by Charlemagne, but still lives on in silent defiance...
(A similar voice in Northern Germany is that of the all the expelled Pomeranians and East Prussians who settled in the area after WWII and bear a similar silent grudge in their hearts. The influx of all the expelled refugees further endangered Low Saxon and added to Northern Germany's brooding identity crisis. In Schleswig-Holstein it also destroyed the fine balance between Danes, Germans and Frisians many places.)
Sylt is indeed a very beautiful place, except for its capital Westerland, which is a concrete monster, the Frisian version of Benidorm! _________________ Wer fremde Sprachen nicht kennt, weiß nichts von seiner eigenen. = Those who don't know foreign languages, know nothing of their own. (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe)
Yes, the house does look idyllic, Benjamin, but if you look more closely you'll see that it has not the same warm glow that a similar house in England or Central Germany would have.
Well, I'm sure it would still have a warmer glow than farmhouse in Scotland:
I'm being unkind — it's not usually that bad really. Actually, maybe I should start a thread like this about Scotland, in attempt to dispel the myths of it being an amazingly wonderful and holistically beautiful place that's all lakes and mountains. But maybe I should wait until October, by which time I would probably have moved there.
I don't really associate Germany with the South/Germany/Grimm brothers fairy tails imaginary only.
Really? I suppose that's one of the things that usually lurks in the back of my mind when I think of Germany -- dense fairytale forests. Probably because when I was a child in Germany, the house we rented in the last place I lived (Staffort, outside of Karlsruhe) was at the edge of a field with a dark forest just beyond it.
Of course, along with half-timbered houses and cuckoo clocks, I also associate Germany with sleek modernity, such as Porsches and stainless steel cookware. My dad's house in the Eifel was far more spacious and contemporary and Ikea-esque than his place in England, which had a much more stuck-in-the-fifties feel.
I've not been to Germany before and to tell you the truth, this country seldom looms large in my imagination. I have to concur with Monsieur Fab that the northern urban landscape springs to mind when I think of Germany. Images of soldiers in Prussian helmuts goose-stepping down the broad boulevards while German Madchen in their aprons wave their handkerchiefs at their brave combatants.
However, the marketing campaigns of the local German Tourism Office here has given us a very Bavarian impression of Germany with Oktoberfest being celebrated with mock beer gardens as well as waitors dressed up in lederhosen. I once attended a poor Oktoberfest imitation thought up by a rather unimaginative pub owner - he served us Beck's in mugs.
Anyway, dreamy pictures, Fab. How long have you been residing in Germany already? _________________ Hillary Clinton is an acquired taste which I have clearly yet to acquire.
really nice description and pics of Germany, Fredrik!
You seem to be a true connoisseur of my country, even more so than some of my own Landsmänner
Have you already been to all of those places?
The place where I live in Central Germany is rather less spectacular considering the landscape!
The forest is still the most important feature in German landscape, as a recreation area highly appreciated - maybe less so in some parts of Northern Germany. That was one thing I REALLY missed when i've lived for several weeks in Ireland, lol
_________________ Jeder hat ein Recht auf meine Meinung!
When I think of Germany, one of the first landscapes that comes to mind is the Black Forest. I have this picture of a wooded highlands in the south, and a more clear, flat, agricultural, plain landscape in the north, that is very snowy and cold in the winter months. _________________ Operation Northwoods - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods
Favorite languages = English/Spanish
Followed by Italian/French/Dutch
landscape in the north, that is very snowy and cold in the winter months.
It's the other way around, actually. The south of Germany has a continental climate, i.e. cold snowy winters but hot summers, compared to North Germany with an oceanic climate, where the winters are rather mild and the summers are cool!
_________________ Jeder hat ein Recht auf meine Meinung!
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