Darmstadt

Cousins in Frankfurt

On Friday, October 26, we took the train from Munich to Darmstadt, a city near Frankfurt.  Ron has been here a number of times because his ancestors come from this area of Germany, but this is my first time.  Ron has two distant cousins here whom he has met and stays in email contact with.  They hosted and fed us often during our stay.  However, on our first night, we ended up being on our own, so we used the opportunity to go to the Opera – The Tales of Hoffman by Offenbach.  The Staatstheater is a very nice modern building and the Opera is very reasonably priced.  This is not an opera I was familiar with, but I enjoyed the music and production very much.

Waldspirale

Saturday we woke up to snow falling – quite unexpected as the previous weather had been pleasantly mild.  Nonetheless our cousin Andi and his wife Akiko showed up and we did a walking tour of Darmstadt, which is a pleasant small city.  Its claim to fame is as a center of the Jugendstil movement, the German branch of Art Nouveau, because of its arts colony called Matildenhoehe.  There was an interesting exhibit at the Museum Kuenstlerkolonie about the movement, and there are a number of houses in the area built in that style around the beginning of the 20^th century.  There is also a Russian Orthodox church built there for the wedding of Nicholas II of Russia to Alexandra of Hesse.  This couple and their children met an unfortunate end after the Russian Revolution of 1917.  Later we also saw the Waldspirale, an avant-garde apartment building by Friedensreich Hundertwasser, a modern architect, in 2000.

True love

Andi and Akiko also took us into Frankfurt the next day.  We walked across an iron pedestrian bridge over the Main River which I was amazed to see had hundreds, possibly thousands of locks attached to it.  I had recently read that this is a new fad based on a scene in a best-selling young adult novel.  A couple in love has their initials engraved on a lock; then you affix the lock to a bridge and toss the key into the river, and your love will last forever.  Some towns are disturbed by their historic bridges being defaced, not so much by the locks but by the graffiti of disgruntled lovers after it turns out not to be true eternal love.  I didn’t see any graffiti on the bridge. 

Goethehaus

The main attraction of our walk around Frankfurt was a visit to the Goethe house, where he was born and grew up.  The actual house was destroyed during the war but rebuilt.  Goethe’s parents were well to do, and the house was a well done re-creation of their life style.  My favorite piece was a large Grandfather clock that included an image of a man with a dancing bear.  When the clock needs to be rewound, the bear falls over on its back.

1806 Wetteroth house

That afternoon we had tea at the house of Ron’s other cousin Sabine.  On a different day Sabine took us to some town archives to do further research on some of the ancestors.  On our own, we also went out to the outlying villages of Greisheim, Babenhausen and Altheim, where various Wetteroths had lived and worked since at least 1725.  Ron had seen all these places before, but they were new to me, and I very much enjoyed them.  Many of the houses are built in a half-timbered style, and some of the towns are very quaint with narrow streets.  The countryside is pleasantly rural. 

Altheimkirche

I have enjoyed Germany.  However, we took the snow and the subsequent cold weather as a sign that it was time to head south rather than stay in Middle Europe.  Our next stop is the South of France where there is a Quaker Center near Nimes.