Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Germany and Ingolstadt

I made a lot of special arrangements for this trip and had some high hopes. Even my high hopes were exceeded in so many ways.  My flight to Germany went well though I didn’t sleep very much.  I arrived in Munich at 7:30am and slowly found my way to baggage claim.  After getting Euros out of the ATM, eating a sandwich and some German chocolate, I walked around the airport and took pictures of the buildings and the giant covered plaza out front.



The German train system is just as wonderful as I remember.  The trains are always typically on time and they are very quite since they are almost all powered by overhead electric power much like our light rail system in Denver.  The trains are very frequent and usually pretty clean. When I was waiting for the train from Ingolstadt to Nuremberg, I was talking with a German social worker named Simon who said that the trains are frequently late.  The trains occasionally had some problems but overall I still think that they still have a great system since you can get almost anywhere by train. I got on the train at 9:30am and got to Ingolstadt Hauptbahnhof (central train station) and walked the two miles to the Enso Hotel next to their hockey arena.  I didn’t realize how popular hockey was in Germany but apparently lots of cities have teams.  I tried to stay away for awhile but eventually I took a short 5 hour nap.  Woke up and walked to a doner kebab stand (they are kind of like gyro sandwiches but spicy chicken or lamb) then went back to the hotel, watched a some German TV and then slept for most of the night.  I woke up around 5am and headed to the Backerei (bakery) down the street for a Schokoladecrossaint (chocolate crossaint) and then walked into the Stadtmitte (city center).

It was foggy and around 50 degrees but the fog made everything look good.  It cleared up when I got into the old part of Ingolstadt and I stopped in at the Moritz Cafe at the Rathausplatz (City Hall Plaza) and had some coffee and a roll.  The waitress was originally Irish but have lived in Germany for 24 years so I talked with her awhile.  The fog was gone and the light was better even though it was still cloudy (nublich) so I walked around and took pictures before my meeting with former mayor (Oberburgermeister) Peter Schnell.

Peter was mayor from 1972 to 2002 and a member of the German parliament prior to that.  He was actually one of the youngest when he was elected. I felt very lucky to be able to spend parts of two days with him.  I learned a lot about some of the issues in Germany and German perspectives on life and politics.  We met at the Moritz Café at the Rathaus (City Hall) at 11am and between my broken German and his broken English, we communicated just fine.  We talked about American-German political similarities and differences for awhile as we drank coffee and waited for Ingolstadt’s planning director to come down and meet with us.  Peter and I discussed the need for everyone in our societies to work toward the future and the betterment of humanity.  Some of the news that fed into that was the extensive coverage of the execution of the prisoner in Georgia.  There were posters everywhere calling for the stay of his execution.  Most Europeans see execution as a barbaric and old practice given how much death and killing there was here during the previous two world wars. As I talked with many Germans, they still have a big sense of guilt for the last two world wars.  The older politicians that I met seemed to feel a great sense of regret even though they were very young children by the time the war was over.  Even Fabian, a 26 year-old that gave me a tour of Nuremberg today, had a lot to say about how terrible things were.  I will talk more about Fabian later.  Overall, I learned a lot about how the massive destruction during the war affected the way German society operates today and how it affected the shape of their cities.  Nuremberg was nearly 60% destroyed and so they had an opportunity to modernize when they rebuilt.  Fabian told me about how much the American GIs did to help rebuild Germany after the war and it took a long time for Germany to rebuild.  According to the chief planner in Erlangen, even in Berlin and Leipzig, there are still some areas that sit vacant after being destroyed over 65 years ago and were never rebuilt because German refugees moved to southern Germany to escape the Soviets near the end of the war.  I never brought up World War II but was frequently part of the planning discussion because it reshaped German cities and gave an opportunity for redevelopment.

Peter Schnell told me a lot of stories about his life and a lot of history about the town.  He is in his mid-70s and was nine years old when world war two ended.  During the war, his family was living out in the Bavarian countryside near Neueberg (sp?).  One day, he was with a nine year-old girl and they went to the bakery to get a cake.  They were carrying it between them and suddenly a plane flew down and started to shoot up the town.  Bullets rained down around them and a bullet passed through the cake that they were carrying.  While they were happy to be alive, they were very upset that the cake had a hole ripped through it and they had to go back and get another one.  I understood that many grew up with these events happening frequently and so they were used to it.  His family (and other Germans as I learned) were war weary well before the end of the war.  They were very happy when the American soldiers came and said they were all very nice.  For Peter, the most amazing about the soldiers coming was seeing a black soldier because he had never seen anyone other than a white man before.  Ingolstadt was heavily bombed during the war because it was a major military center in Bavaria.  This left a lot of places for new buildings but as with many German cities, they decided to rebuild with a similar style to what was there before.  After the war, lots of Germans fled the Soviet controlled areas and moved into Bavaria so this added to the existing housing shortages.  I also learned that because many of the men were dead, women did a lot of the rebuilding in German cities and this dramatically changed the role of women in German society as well.

One the the biggest impacts on Ingolstadt has been Audi.  Audi had been in east Germany and moved to Ingolstadt.  They began to rebuild their company in 1949 within a former military building.  Unfortunately, I have to pause here.  It's late and my internet connection is not very good for downloading pictures.  Tomorrow morning I will take the train to Munich and then fly to San Diego.  More to come soon!

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