Tübingen & Hirsau, Germany
My first full day with a rental car allowed me to soak up several towns and the Baden-Württemberg countryside on a driving route northwest of Mössingen.
I’d barely gone a few kilometers before I pulled over and got out of the car to explore the village of Nehren on foot. It’s an old place, first mentioned in a document from 1086. Even the birdhouses looked the part.
Further north, I spent a good part of the morning in the university town of Tübingen. With more than 25k college students, it was a lively place with people walking all over and bikes whizzing by.
I climbed the church tower for an overview of town and then wandered through the crooked cobblestone alleys of the Altstadt. As a college town, Tübingen escaped damage during the war due to its lack of heavy industry.
Tübingen has many interesting stories if you know where to look. The fountain capped by Neptune on the Marktplatz is a reconstruction. After the war, the town’s mayor had scrap weapons melted and replaced the weathered sandstone original with metal. That’s poetic considering even church bells were melted down during the time of the Third Reich to build weapons.
As your eyes took in the wealth of half-timbered houses in the Marktplatz, one window stood out. Its white frame didn’t match the rest. Legend has it that years ago, the desperate owner of the house “sold” one of his rooms to the owner of the neighboring house to buy bread.
Inside the Stiftskirche (collegiate church), a carving of Moses at the end of a choir stall shows him with horns. Why? A translation error of the Hebrew word “keren” was used to describe his face after returning from Mt. Sinai. “Horns” was the translation rather than “radiant/beaming”.
Being a university town, you see political messages expressed through stickers placed all over old downspouts. I didn’t know the background on these but they seemed like tiny bits of art to me.
I still find it interesting how Germany confronts its troubled past. Here was an exhibit I came across walking along a quiet street. Born in Tübingen, Theodor Dannecker rose to the role of SS Hauptsturmführer and played a central role in orchestrating the Final Solution. Dannecker was arrested by the United States Army at the end of the war and committed suicide in December 1945.
After soaking that in, I was ready to get out into the countryside. I drove a bit further north to a quiet valley and came across Bebenhausen Abbey. It was built in the late 1100s and was amazingly preserved. I walked around the old abbey walls and studied the scale model inside the modest museum.
Even here among the old trees and chirping birds, heavy history was present. At the end of the first World War in 1918, as revolution broke out in Germany, the King of Württemberg, William II and his wife, went into exile here.
The small church cemetery also yielded a surprising range of monuments to World War II soldiers from the rank and file all the way up to General Field Marshall Ritter von Greim. In the closing days of the war in Europe, Hitler appointed him commander of the Luftwaffe (German Air Force) in place of Hermann Göring, whom he had dismissed for treason.
I hit the road again and headed west to the city of Herrenberg. It was one of the places I’d wanted to visit but was limited in time by the train. Having a car allowed me to drive right near the center of town.
If you park in an area without an automated voucher machine, you place your Parkscheibe (parking disk) on the dash after you rotate it to the Ankunftszeit (arrival time). It shows how long you’ve occupied a space. There are time limits and a ticket is placed under your wiper if you stay there too long.
There are more uplifting aspects to driving in Germany too. Along the shoulders of the roads I came across self-service flower beds where you cut your own selections and put money in a stall on the honor system.
As I continued west into the fringes of the Black Forest, I stopped in the town of Hirsau. I’d been here for a short while back in the late 1990s while traveling by train and didn’t have enough time to explore its abbey ruins. In fact, I clearly remember running back to the station in a panic.
As I remembered, it was a beautiful and peaceful place. I was thankful to have the opportunity to experience a site like this without worrying about missing the last train out.
Hirsau was like many places in Germany that I imagine look very similar to how they did a hundred or more years ago. Look at the two photos below. They’re both the same pic from this afternoon. I made a black and white version and added a bit of shading to the edges in Photoshop. That scene could be 1919 or even 1869 with very little imagination.
I started the morning with just a vague idea of the direction I wanted to go today. No itinerary. It was enjoyable to follow the road and stop when I saw something interesting. Who knows where the road will lead tomorrow?
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