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We had breakfast with the usual crowd and they all commented to Marion that they saw her as the boat docked and thought she looked very tired and they weren’t surprised when she didn’t make it to dinner. I guess I need to pay closer attention. I thought she looked fine. Oops.
We got to Regensburg first thing in the morning. Pretty much right as we went out to breakfast. And since the tour wasn’t until 1:30, we took the opportunity to walk into town and have a look around. It seems like a nice place. We skipped the cathedral area since we figured the tour would cover it. The town is not quite the medieval look and feel we’re used to. Which was a nice change actually. We found a really nice art store and spent some time in there. Then wandered around looking in shops and heading down alleyways and generally getting lost. It’s a pretty town, with lots of interesting alleyways and ‘nooks and crannies’ as our guide later said. Luckily, when it was time to head back for lunch, Marion knew which way to head.
We had time for lunch and a quick rest, then it was time for the tour. We took the extended tour which included a bit more history of the Jews in Regensburg. Our guide was Inge – who is half Norwegian and half Polish but married a German man. She’s lived in Regensburg for 11 years (and is still treated as an outsider from the sounds of it). I guess the accents in Germany can be quite region specific. She said she could not understand people from nearby regions who speak a form of German that’s completely different.
The town was originally a Roman settlement on the outskirts of their realm. The Danube was the northern boundary so they built a huge fort there to protect the border, at the point where the Regen River meets the Danube and the town was named for the river. The fort was the size of 50 football fields (i.e. BIG). There were 6000 soldiers garrisoned there, plus many thousands more civilians who lived nearby. Across the river was a different realm and to this day, even though the area on the other side of the river is now also Regensburg, they don’t like each other, to the point where our guide said a friend of hers has stated he would never marry someone from there. Not above long standing (and petty) arguments here in Europe. In fact, the main area of Regensburg (where we were) has a city symbol of two keys. So when the other side became a city (years later, something I’m sure gets pointed out to them), they made their symbol three keys. So there… nyaah!
The Romans bugged out around 400 AD. The city became a big medieval center. Although close enough to Italy that the style was heavily influenced by them and the city is referred to (by Germans, but I suspect not Italians) as the northernmost city in Italy. But there’s definitely an Italian style to the buildings and even though it’s older than I think anything we’ve visited so far, it doesn’t *feel* as old as say Rothenberg did.
There was lots of trade up and down the Danube so the city took part in that and prospered for a while until Munich and some others surpassed it. The good news from an historical perspective is that that meant there wasn’t a lot of development after a point and the city center is largely unchanged from those times (and hence a UNESCO World Heritage site). It also had the good fortune to not be a major industrial center and was spared being bombed into rubble by the allies during the war.
A couple of standout buildings – the oldest (they claim, but it’s disputed by Nuremberg) continuously operating restaurant (or possibly specifically sausage restaurant) in Germany at 500+ years old, the large ‘salt house’ where salt was kept (a major trading item in the day and hence the expression of someone being worth his salt) and of course a large cathedral (St Peter’s) in the middle of town. It is quite large and unlike Cologne, you can go in and wander around. Unfortunately it’s *very* dark in there and hard to get good pictures. But they have the world’s largest hanging pipe organ (it’s suspended from the ceiling). I really hope our buddy from Texas is getting a chance to see what a big pipe organ looks like so he can adjust his perspective.
We finished our tour at the cathedral but before we got there, we went to the main square, where we saw the Rathaus, which was an interesting building in that it was built in the style of the patrician’s houses to indicate that the business people ran the place. The patricians built their homes with tall towers, the higher the tower, the richer you were. So the Rathaus has a tall tower as well, even though there’s no real purpose for it. And since homes had ballrooms, the Rathaus does too. A quite large one actually. It tends to be used for large meetings rather than dancing since why do you need a ballroom in your City Hall, other than because you’re a bunch of pompous blowhards trying to show off (and after all you need a bigger City Hall than those assholes on the other side of the river right?)
From there we wandered the streets a bit, hearing a bit about the history, the architecture, and a fair amount of personal information from Inge, who tended to talk non-stop in a stream of consciousness sort of way. Some people on the tour didn’t like it but I found it an interesting insight into German culture (i.e. what living with a German guy was like). Better she than me is the conclusion I came to. She described it as “learning to understand cultural differences”, which I suppose is true. But she is clearly more enlightened than I am.
The extended tour promised some insight into Jewish life in Regensburg and there was a bit. As Inge said, there really isn’t anything I can actually show you because it’s all been destroyed. Which was telling in of itself. The first trouble came in 1519 when the Jews were expelled. The Black Plague was in town and the Jews were blamed. Inge explained basically the same reasoning (but not as well) as the guide did in Bamberg – they needed a scapegoat to blame the disease on. The Jews were given 4 days to move. They generally moved across the river and lived there for another 50 years until they were expelled from there as well. She didn’t say why.
As Inge pointed out, while this was clearly a nasty thing, it wasn’t a standalone event. Jews were being expelled all over Europe – by Spain and Portugal during the Inquisition in the late 1400’s, by England in the early 1300’s as well as all over Germany. She pointed out that while the Jews in Regensburg were merely expelled and their land taken, in Nuremberg when they wanted the land for the main market, they killed all the Jews and took it. So I guess the Jews of Regensburg could count their blessings.
The Jewish Quarter was razed and they built a church there, although not covering the area of the synagogue as originally planned (ran out of money) and sometime after the war, an artist put a cement sitting area there in the shape of the former synagogue as a memorial, creating a gathering place where people can sit, talk, and play, rather than a stark memorial, and I think it works. The townspeople also destroyed the cemetery (where 2000 graves had been) and enjoyed that so much that some people decorated their homes with the gravestones. We saw one such example. Marion, ever the optimist, said maybe it was put there by someone who was protesting the destruction. Maybe, but that’s not the way I’d bet.
At some point later, when they realized that there were certain items of trade the Jews could get that they could not, they decided that maybe Jews weren’t so bad after all and allowed 100 or so back in. This group ultimately grew in size to about 500. Then the Nazis came along. About half the Jews left before the troubles began. Of the remaining 250, only 15 survived the war. There are now about 1000 Jews living in town and with any luck will continue to do so without incident for many years to come.
We came across a few more gold markers in the street from Gunther Demling on the tour as well. In one case, a group of five outside a house. This was even more poignant than the one in Bamberg since it was clearly a husband and wife and a husband, wife and daughter (the Erlichs and the Nussbaums). We came across another one on our walk back to the boat.
We’re in port here until 10:30 pm or so. We haven’t decided whether to go back into town after dinner. We’ll see.
7/2/14
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