Frankfurt

Well it’s been a while since I made my last post, but I’m back with more German travel exploits. But first, some other news

I successfully made buttermilk biscuits here! It was a little hard finding Crisco, but the grocery store near me had it hidden in the back along with all the imports. I also found out that Germans just drink buttermilk, so I thought their version was different and got dickmilch(thick milk). Turns out that's just a solid curd and buttermilk is in fact normal buttermilk.

And here are a few of my latest acquisitions

A couple of magazines from the 1936 Olympics

An old guide to tube radios from 1933

Pamphlet from the US military government explaining imperial units from 1948

Two small ads for Deutsche Bank from about 1940-1942

I also got an older tube radio, a Philips Philetta 54. I wasn't sure about picking up electronics here, since I'd need a transformer to use them in America, but most German tube radios are designed to accept either 220V or 120V.

Onto travel, I decided last weekend to visit Frankfurt. So I got up early on Saturday morning so I could catch the 8am train.

Böblingen at 7am

And after about an hour and a half we were pulling into Frankfurt HBF

Frankfurt HBF

They had a tent set up on that platform

My first stop after leaving the station was the room I had rented for the night so I could pick up the keys for later. I had looked into getting a hotel or hostel, but Frankfurt’s were a bit more expensive than the one I stayed at in Nuremberg. So I went on Airbnb and for the same price as sleeping in a room with nine other people, I got a private room to myself.

Tram to the apartment kinda felt like a time warp 

After taking care of that, I headed down to the old part of Frankfurt to see the cathedral with the Kaiserdom.

Kaiserdom

I then walked up the very long and steep staircase to get top of the Kaiserdom, where there’s a small observation deck. In a city that’s dominated by modern skyscrapers, the Kaiserdom still holds its own when it comes to height.

Door to the staircase

Staircase going to the top

Frankfurt Skyline

View of the Main river

After coming down, which was actually pretty hard since there’s only one very narrow staircase, I went into the cathedral itself.

Entrance to the cathedral

Inside the cathedral

I then walked over to Römerberg, where the old city government was based. I also got some frankfurter sausages and apfelwein for lunch at cafe here.

Frankfurters in Frankfurt

After finishing up lunch I walked across the Eiserner bridge, which has a lock thing going like that bridge in Paris.

Frankfurt has a “Museum Embankment” on the other side of the river, which is a big line of several museums covering just about every topic you could think of. I decided to visit two of these museums, the Deutsche Film Institute and the Museum of Communication

The Deutsche Film Institute was most about the progression of film technology, rather than German film in general, but I still enjoyed it. They had a lot of early optical illusions and machines that lead to the creation of film as we know it.

Deutsche Film Institute

Original Lumiere Camera/Projector

The Museum of Communication was excellent, featuring German radios, TV’s, phones, telegraphs, and mail memorabilia. They also had a special exhibit on German advertising which was pretty good. I thought it was interesting how after the war every German company’s advertising was basically “We’re Back!”

Interesting sculpture in the lobby

Volksempfangers from the 1930's

Old style automatic switchboard, you could hear from across the hall

This one looks familiar

Enigma Machines

After I was done with the communication museum, most of the museums were closing so I decided to head back to the room for a bit. There I looked up a movie theater playing the Hateful Eight in English, so I decided to do that for the night. For what I thought about the movie, I thought it was great! 

Theater I went to to see The Hateful Eight

The next morning I got up early so I could head to the outskirts of Frankfurt to see the Ernst May House. Frankfurt has all of these big suburban developments that are great examples of early modern architecture and this development was one of the first in the 20's

Ernst May House

It was a nice place to walk through, which is good since the house with the actual museum in it is pretty far away from the U-Bahn station.

I then headed into downtown Frankfurt to see some of the more central sights.

Deutsche Bahn Headquarters

Frankfurt HBF from the outside

Giant euro statue in the financial section

I then went back to Römerberg and went into the Paulskirche, an old church that was also once host to a German parliament before Germany was a unified country. It was burnt out during the war, so the sanctuary was rebuilt in a much more modern fashion.

Foyer on the ground floor, the sanctuary's above it

Inside the sanctuary

Sanctuary ceiling

Plaque for JFK, who spoke here during his tour of Germany

Next stop was the Frankfurt Historisches museum, which as it turned out was less about the history of Frankfurt, and more about the various collections that have been donated to it over the centuries. According to the museum there's a tradition of collecting in Frankfurt, sounds right up my alley, and collections of all kinds have been donated to the museum over time. It's pretty interesting if you like seeing a variety of different objects and art all at once. 

I crossed the river again to the museum embankment and headed to the Architectural Museum

They had an interesting exhibit on a German modernist architect named Ferdinand Kramer. I hadn't heard of him before, but after fleeing Germany in the 30's he helped to kickstart modular housing in America. After the war he went back to Frankfurt and redesigned the Frankfurt University's campus, which had been leveled during air raids. 

Inside the exhibit

After this museum it was just about time for my train back to Stuttgart, but I had enough time to stop by the old opera house first.

I also noticed this giant neon ad as I was walking down the platform for my train

Newspaper Ad in Frankfurt HBf

Nürnberg

Last week I started working at my internship again, luckily though I had another week after my Mom and brothers had left. So I spent most of that week just resting, as stores and museums have some weird hours in the lead up to New Years. I visited a few antique shops around Stuttgart one day and picked up this world atlas from 1936.

I also found out that Canada is apparently world renowned for their burgers.

For New Years, I only had to go outside to see fireworks since people were setting them off in the streets. It was also kind of interesting going through New Years about three times, once for myself, another six hours later for my family in Atlanta, and then another one three hours later for my friend in California!

Since I still had time to do something, I decided to travel a bit before going back to work. Eventually I settled on going to Nuremberg, or Nürnberg in German. Since museum and shop schedules were mostly closed on New Years day, I decided to head up on Saturday morning and return Sunday night for work.

My journey began extremely early, it had to if I wanted to get on the 8:00 AM train. Once on the train though there wasn’t any trouble, except for the conductor having a bit of trouble scanning the ticket on my phone. After that was settled it was just a two and half hour train ride to Nürnberg HBF. There was a bomb scare in Munich’s train station for New Years so before our train arrived at the main Nürnberg station, we stopped to allow a few police to walk through the train.

Morning at Stuttgart HBF

Typical interior of a Deutsche Bahn train

Nürnberg HBF

After getting off of my train, I immediately got onto one of the S-Bahn trains heading south for my first stop in the city, Dutzendteich. Better known to the world as the site of the Nazi Party Rallies.

After I got off the train, my first site was this Burger King located inside a former power station for the rally grounds

Former power building turned Burger King

Then I headed over to the Zeppelin Field Grandstands, where the rallies actually took place. Today the grandstands are completely open to the public and serve as the stands for a racetrack and football field. The US actually used them for the latter until troops left Nürnberg in 1994. The stands are in an extreme state of disrepair due to years of neglect. There are actually signs saying "enter at your own risk" since there's a chance you'll be hit by masonry falling off the facade. Currently, there's an effort going on to assess the damage and eventually repair the grandstands since the surviving Nazi structures as they've been registered as historical buildings since the 1970's

Coming up on the back of the stands

This portion was fenced off as part of the restoration project

This door enters the halls inside the grandstand, which are closed to the public

So as someone who is very much into WW2 history, it was amazing seeing this monumental structure. Reading about Nazi architecture, the primary factor that gets brought up is the immensity of it and I don't think you really understand that fully until you see it person. Even with the columned galleries removed from the structure, it's an amazing sight to see.

After that I went over to Kongresshalle, located only a short distance away.

This was to be a meeting hall for the Nazi party, and it's size matches that. Only the outer structure was completed before the war, while the incomplete middle section would have been the actual meeting hall.

Incomplete interior

It was used for a variety of purposes after the war, and there was even a proposal in the 70's to repurpose the entire structure into a shopping mall. Today it holds a museum on the history of the Nazi party and serves as an education center for combating it. 

The museum's entrance is specifically designed to clash with the original architecture

Interior shot, what people would have walked through before entering the hall. The model is for a different stadium that was never built.

Exterior of the Kongresshalle

The museum was excellent and had a lot of information about the party's rallies in Nuremberg and the different buildings that were built around the site. It also mentioned that Hitler made most of his money off of the royalties from Mein Kampf, which I just discovered became public domain this year. Previously the state of Bavaria held the copyright as when Hitler committed suicide, his entire estate transferred to them. Germans do not mess around with copyrights.

After that I went over to what remains of the Lutipoldarena, which is not a lot. What was once this,

Is now a big park

The only portion that remains is the Ehrenhalle, Hall of Honor or that part in the foreground in the old picture, which is now a memorial to everyone who died at the hands of the Third Reich.

My next destination was the Hall of Justice, made famous for being the site where the Nuremberg trials took place.

Hall of Justice

The building, and in fact the Courtroom 600 where the trials took place, are still used for their original purposes, so the museum is located in the attic of the building. 

Inside the museum

The museum is thorough, maybe even to a fault, but it provided an extremely detailed timeline of the first Nuremberg trial and how the procedures were decided. They even listed the controversies regarding the accusations that the trials were unfair. There were a couple of artifacts from the trials, including the benches that the defendants sat on. Courtroom 600 was also open, luckily I came on a weekend when it wasn't in use.

Courtroom 600

It's pretty much unchanged since the trials. What amazed me was how small the room was, it was amazing that they managed to fit all the trial personnel in there, let alone an audience.

Back wall of the room, during the trial there was a balcony here

It was pretty late after I finished up in the courtroom, so I started heading to the hotel I reserved. I decided to try staying in a hostel near the train station, which was exactly what I expected. A bed and nothing else, which is all I really needed anyway.

I just put everything valuable in a safe and then left first thing in the morning. When I left I discovered that it had snowed a bit the previous night, and it was still coming down pretty heavily. 

Remains of the Christmas Market

My first stop for the day was the Imperial Palace, located at the highest point in the medieval section of Nuremberg. 

Imperial Palace

There I got some good views of the entire city from this watch tower, which was one of the few parts of the palace not destroyed during the war. 

View from the tower

I also got to see the well that the castle used, which is impressive because it's 50 meters deep through solid rock.

I then went to the Nuremberg toy museum, which I didn't really know a whole lot about going into really. The place was incredible though, having not only the toys that were originally made in Nuremberg, but an extremely detailed history of the evolution of different types of toys.

Toy version of the tower I was just in

Amazing how creative tin toys could get

It's equally amazing how creepy old toys can be

A steam powered brewery toy, possibly the most German toy in existence

Model train set of Omaha, Nebraska

Some of the original Lego toys

They also had a collection of toys made during the war years

Class warfare, maybe the most German board game. Though it probably has to share that title with Anti-Monopoly

They even mentioned video games! It's always nice to go to a museum and see that you own what's in one of the cases.

My last stop for the day was to the Kunstbunker, or art bunker. This is the location where all of the movable art of Nuremberg was stored during the war, in order to protect it from destruction from bombing. 

The bunker was built from existing cellars in the rock and expanded, this location was ideal since it goes right under the hill of solid rock that the Imperial palace is built on.

Blast doors to protect the art from bomb shockwaves

Hal with a couple examples of bombs that were dropped on the city

Along with just seeing the bunker, they listed some of the important objects that were stored here such as the Imperial Regalia from the Holy Roman Emperor. Albert Speer's original blueprints and documents for Party buildings were also stored here, along with art stolen from Poland. 

When I was done in the bunker, it was time to get to the train station for my train back to Stuttgart and my visit to Nuremberg was officially over. Overall it was a great city to visit and I'm glad I took the time to go there.