Germany with Scott 2008; 27 Apr 2008

We should have done something!

Flying overnight, then driving and sightseeing, then staying up till midnight, we should have;

1)gone to bed earlier,

2) set an alarm clock,

3) both of the above.

And so, we woke up at about 10:30 in the morning, not unreasonable, since that was 4:30 in the morning back home - but it serously interfered with the plans we had for that day. But, some of those daily plans were interchangeable, so after a period of getting organized, washed, shaved, and awake, we set off.

First on the order of battle was lunch.

We went off to the family restaurant of the Voland's in the nearby village of Limbach, again one of the places my father used to frequent. We lunched at an outside table, only slightly interupted by a rider and horse, who parked just beside us, while the rider got a beer through a window into the dining room area. (Germany is much less uptight than we are about animals and food; dogs are almost always welcomed with their owners in restaurants, unless they are a nuisance and won't just lie under the table), but I must confess that this was a new experience for me. See pictures for this day (and others) at http://longworth_mueller.fototime.com/

Then, we drove off in the general direction of the town of Ebrach (except that I got confused, the last time I visited there was 6 years earlier, and we actually headed for Burg Ebrach). As we were using Scott's Tom-Tom GPS, the difference was not immediately apparent; one gets authoritative directions, which one follows without question (except when, as frequently happened over the whole trip, one runs into roads closed by construction, but the detour instructions, available at the push of botton, are equally authoritative). The GIGO (garbage in-garbage out) principle applies; if you give the GPS the wrong destination, you are not going to get to where you want to go. We ran into this problem several more times, not always caused by my dozziness. The major problem is the German reality; many towns, some quite close together, have the same name. The locals have no problem; they know where they are going. But if you are not a local, and you put the name of a destination into a GPS, you may be offered a menu of destinations, all with the same name, each one qualified with some descriptor (such as; near , or, in the valley of , or, in the district of ) That again is all very well for the locals, but usually not much help for those of us who are not intimitely familiar with the fine points of German geography.

But, eventually, we did arrive in Ebrach, and the detour through Burg Ebrach was not a waste of time, as the entire countryside was worth seeing.

The attraction in Ebrach is Kloster (Convent) Ebrach, a former Cistercian monastery, which has long been secularized, and is now a a youth prison (a very imaginative use of an old building; it already has lots of single rooms - monks' cells - communal dining room, administrative offices, etc.) But the conventual church is still open, and is one of the treasures of Oberfranken (Upper Franconia) church architecture - it is now a parish church, which presents certain problems, more on that later.

Most notably, the church has three organs! Each one is played from a separate console. Processional music was written specially for this church and its instruments for use on high festivals, and some of it was recorded last century, a recording which is, alas, no longer available. There are however other recordings of the orans in this church that one can buy there Architecturally, it is in that late baroque style called "roccoco"; very ornate, and almost overdone. One of its features is marble pillars, except the marble is actually plaster of paris, coloured to look like marble - not because that was cheaper, but because it was actually more epxensive! It is one of Germany's treasures, and is protected as a historical monument, which may not be a good thing for the local parishioners, since they will be expected to carry a good deal of the preservational freight!

June and I visited this church in late Summer of 2002, six year ago. At that time, one almost couldn't see the interiour; they had just begun a major restoration, and the entire interior space was covered with scafolding and protective plastic. This time, all that was gone, except that all three organs had been removed for rebuilding. Talking with one of the parishioners who was there as a guide, it will be three more years before they are back in uninterupted business! (And, they are fundraising as best they can; the German and Bavarian governments are providing a major percentage of the restoration costs, because this is a national treasure; however, the governments are not interested in paying for anything related to actually maintaining the building as anything other than a museum, like a place where people worship, and so the loal people, for whom this is their church, face enormous costs.

Thus, it was very gratifying to see, that, within this enormous convent church, the local congregation had carved out a worship space sufficient for its needs. At the crossing, an altar and ambo, both of solid bronze and modern design, had been placed, surrounded on all sides with chair-seats (ingeniously interlocked and yet re-arrangeable), seating perhaps 200 persons - the church itself would seat at least 2000. Thus, they had created a relatively intimate worship space within an otherwise too large bulding.

After a quick supper of sausage and beer we left Ebrach, in the direction of Pommersfelden, but detoured via the near to Pommersfelden (within 2 km) town of Steppach. This is where my father managed the local dairy for the Bayerische Milchversorgung (Bavarian Milk Supply) in the late 1940s -1960s. This was the place where I spent a number of happy Summers, riding the milk collection trucks with my step-brother Karlheinz, helping out around the dairy (in retrospect, if we hadn't been the boss's kids we might not have been tolerated as much). Sadly, the dairy has been closed, and is not being maintained - and becoming a ruin or slum. Don't know who actually owns it, but they don't seem to care.

From there, back to Pommersfelden, and Schloss Weissenstein. After an exterior (we were too late for interior) walk-around, we went back to the "Gruener Baum", and a very nice dinner in the restaurant there.

And this day we hit bed early!