High Germany and Bavaria
Looking down, I could see a scarlet banner with the swastika on its white disc fluttering in one of the lanes, hinting that there was still trouble ahead. Seeing it, someone skilled in prophesy and the meaning of symbols could have foretold that three quarters of the old city below would go up in explosion and flame a few years later; to rise again in geometry of skyscraping concrete blocks.
A Time of Gifts
SOUTH OF HEIDELBERG, SUBTLE DIFFERENCES CREPT INTO THE country. My journey towards the Austrian border was characterised by incremental shifts in landscape, dialect, wine and beer, modulations that occurred so gradually I hardly noticed where one characteristic ended and another began. Perhaps the most perceptible change was in colour. Behind me lay the browns of the riverlands, and the weeks ahead would bring the whiteness of the winter south, but the uplands in between revealed themselves in sky blues and pearl greys, opalescent clouds looming over landscapes that felt much larger than those of before. The hills were energising. Despite a dull and vaguely ominous ache in my left foot, throbbing in time with each step, I pushed on south as the light grew dim, arriving as darkness fell outside the gates of Bruchsal’s ornate and ludicrous schloss.
This palace was my first encounter with the German High Baroque, an intimation of the Catholic south. Paddy had slept in this rococo pile as the guest of the resident Bürgermeister, but since then the building had been destroyed by Allied bombs – these scrolling red and yellow walls were a perfect replica, built from plans discovered in the ruins. There was no bed for me here; the place was now a museum. Instead I stayed in a modern apartment with an engineer called Thomas, and my first act was to slip in his bathroom and snap his toilet seat into two perfect halves.
Despite this destructive arrival, he negotiated me into the palace in the morning before opening time. The halls and corridors were slathered in pink and grey marble; pillars dripped with vomits of gold, and ceilings writhed with fleshy cherubs and plump, rosy-nippled women. The feeling it produced in me was one of intense claustrophobia, a reaction altogether different from Paddy’s, who found it enchanting. I could dimly imagine the ‘sensation of wintery but glowing interior space’, the sense of magic he had felt, but for me it was outweighed by the decor’s sheer grossness. The war wasn’t the only time an invading force had torched the place: peasants had previously sacked it during a revolt in 1502. At ten o’clock, as the lights came on and gold dazzled up every wall, it wasn’t hard to imagine why.
The land beyond Schloss Bruchsal rolled upwards into the gentle humps of the Baden hills. The sky, massed with clouds lanced through with yellow sunbeams, resembled the ceiling frescos of the schloss, lacking only chubby babies dancing in the heavens. In the suburbs of Bretten, perhaps not far from where Paddy had been sheltered by dialect-speaking peasants – ‘smoke had blackened the earthenware tureen and the light caught its pewter handle and stressed the furrowed faces, and the bricky cheeks of young and hemp-haired giants’ – I stopped to eat in a kebab shop. When I mentioned I was walking to Turkey they gave me free lentil soup and bread, glass after glass of sugary tea; hospitable peasants these days, it seemed, were more likely to hail from Anatolia than Baden. The balding, bespectacled manager shook my hand as I left, and other Turks smiled kindly at me, as you might when a stranger says he wants to be an astronaut.
Regularly along that road appeared little tin signs showing the silhouette of a woman driving an antiquated vehicle, with the words ‘Bertha Benz Memorial Route’. Innocuous as they seemed, these markers commemorated a journey of unimaginable significance. In 1888, Bertha, wife of engineer Karl Benz, test-drove her husband’s prototype automobile on this road from Bruschal to Pforzheim. This seemingly unassuming jaunt was the maiden voyage of the world’s first car. Even Karl was dubious about attempting the rough carriageway of the time, but by driving between the two cities, his wife proved that the automobile was a viable form of transport.
Just how viable, neither she nor Karl could have imagined. Less than fifty years later, in logical extrapolation, Germany would give that first car’s descendants the world’s first motorised highways. Hitler’s road-building programme kickstarted a new era of transport infrastructure, speed and communication; before long, autobahns rolled across the continent. Every motorway, dual carriageway, flyover, overpass and underpass I’d been forced to navigate had sprung directly from the first drive of the Benz Patent Motorwagen Number 3.
This was emerging as the crucial difference between mine and Paddy’s journeys. In the early 1930s there were cities and there were towns, and, at least in Germany, industrialisation had gone some way towards filling in the gaps. But between these urban areas were roads largely unadapted to cars, country lanes designed for horses rather than horsepower engines; there existed nothing like the networked tangle I was forced to navigate, laced by auto-bahns, landscapes that had been torn up and reconstituted for cars. When Paddy walked, around seventy miles of autobahn had been laid in Germany; as I followed eight decades later, there were seven thousand. The effect on the landscape was obvious, but considering the wider impacts – the collapse of distance, the shrinking of the map, the homogenisation of cultures, the rampant individualism, the urban expansion, the suburbs and exurbs, to say nothing of climate change – I felt this road should be marked by more than a few tin signs. A cenotaph might have been more suitable, a tomb to the Unknown Walker.
Appropriately, the ominous ache in my ankle grew harder to ignore. Each time my foot came down on the hard-impact surface – Frau Benz’s indirect gift – pain pulsed in my heel. I resorted to the old trick of wrapping bandages around my feet, but this grew less effective every minute I travelled. Diverting to a forest path, I came upon a peculiar sight: in a clearing, miles from anywhere, an enormous pile of fresh bread, tomatoes, apples, bananas and pears lay apparently abandoned. There was nobody in sight, and after deliberating for a while I ate some of it. Walkers can get as superstitious as sailors: over the next few weeks, when everything seemed to have gone so wrong, I sometimes melodramatically wondered if I hadn’t stolen something cursed.
Beyond the forest lay luminous meadows, and a wind-blown descent into Pforzheim. In an Apotheke I sought some miraculous cure for my pain; the apothecary told me I could only rest, but as I left she threw me a packet of Ibuprofen. It was a day of unlikely gifts: first lentil soup, then pain pills.
In Pforzheim a young and rather nervous tattoo artist put me up in her flat. The walls were covered in designs of mustachioed men and eyeless madonnas weeping drops of blood, sabres and muskets and cannon smoke like nineteenth-century woodcuts. She said she would sleep until the next afternoon and I could let myself out in the morning, but when I awoke it was clear I was in no state to travel. I loitered guiltily in the flat, hoping she wouldn’t mind.
The day went by. A storm hit the town, apocalyptic sleet and lightning zinging past the windows, and when it cleared the streets outside smelt of metal and ionised air. I felt uncomfortable asking to stay longer, and left in the darkness early the next morning, trying to convince myself my foot was better. If anything, it was worse. My priority now was finding somewhere to shelter me until I recovered – I needed another orphanage – but Stuttgart, my next destination, was a long day’s walk away. Unless, I thought, I compromised: I would take the train halfway.
This seemed a momentous decision, and I didn’t know if it was right or wrong. Even the thought of resorting to transport could be the start of a slippery slope, and everything about it felt bad; but the facts remained that it hurt to walk, Pforzheim was a dismal hole, and I needed shelter. As my train pulled out of the station, I despaired at the betrayal. The landscape flying past was meaningless scenery and the weather was only colours in the sky, not experience or sensation. I disembarked in Ludwigsberg, a small town to the north, determined to hoof it the rest of the way, regardless of the pain.
Before long I was limping again, practically dragging my foot. On Stuttgart’s outskirts, in a peculiar interzone of woodlands, barns and pastel-coloured tower blocks, with a mixture of grief and relief I gave up for the second time. I hopped on a streetcar to the station and waited for a train to Ulm.
The defeat was total now. My Stuttgart bed had fallen through, and a couple called Dierk and Dora had invited me to stay in Ulm, fifty miles further on, for as long as I needed. The plan made sense from every point of view but the purity of my walk. It meant compressing two days’ journey into fifty-seven minutes, and it felt like treachery. I hobbled round and round the station, compulsively eating Milka chocolate bars in a pathetic attempt to cheer myself up.
The only thing I saw of Stuttgart, the high-tech power-house of Germany’s south, was a field of rubble. Outside the station, a demolition zone was enclosed by a chain-link fence covered in thousands of placards, political cartoons, Dalai Lama portraits, plastic flowers, teddy bears, laminated photographs of police blasting people with water cannons, and yellow stickers with the words ‘Stuttgart 21’. It turned out to be a protest about – of all humdrum-sounding provocations – the proposed redevelopment of Stuttgart railway station. At an information booth a grey-haired lady explained to me that the project was deeply controversial, involving the felling of three hundred trees. Her anger clearly went beyond plans for redesigned transport infrastructure. The local politicians were corrupt, she said. The police had cracked down brutally on protest, even blinding a man in one attack. Just as the Occupy movement wasn’t really about the banks but about a wider discontent – Pepe’s words came back to me, ‘the cars, the buildings, the roads, the ugliness’ – the banners on that fence sprung from deeper grievances.
She asked if I would come to the protest the next day. I said I’d be in Ulm. ‘Ach, the Ulmer people,’ she muttered. ‘They would like to see this plan succeed. But not us. Not in Stuttgart.’
This was a distraction from my own woes, but it didn’t last. Minutes later, another train jerked me out of time and place again, a dislocation from the hills and forests streaming past. The state of Baden-Württemberg flashed by in a series of broken images, a postcard book of Swabian Scenes, and before I’d had time to adjust I was on the Bavarian border.
Dierk was waiting at the station. Stocky, short, with jugged ears and a wide, laugh-lined face, he bounded enthusiastically to his car in a pair of rubber shoes with individual toes, which made him look distinctly like a goblin. The house he shared with Dora was an electric grotto of lights that speckled the ceiling like stars, pulsing from red to green to pink to purple in a slow hallucinatory loop; stuffed seagulls dangled above a table of some rare hard-wood. Viking helmets crowned the mantelpiece, and when I turned on the shower the shower-head glowed with pink LEDs. Amid this kitsch I would begin my recovery.
Dierk and Dora’s first act of healing was to take me to their regular Friday-night tavern, where I was introduced to a table of boozy faces. We had crossed the Danube from Baden-Württemberg to Bavaria – the city of Ulm straddled both – and gone were the dainty 0.2 litre glasses of Düsseldorf and Köln, gone the elegant green-stemmed goblets of the Rhine: this was a land of hefty mugs, clumped boisterously together to roars of ‘Prost!’ Sauerkraut was delivered, and a hog’s leg the shape and size of a charred log, and the barman regularly appeared – ‘he is the one who killed the pig you ate’ – to dole out complimentary drinks. My welcome was a homemade ‘hot bear’, liquor distilled from beer, topped with cream and nutmeg. It was fantastically strong, and absolutely delicious.
In the morning Dierk took me to visit the urbane Dr Prinzing, who diagnosed Achilles tendon sprain and proscribed a week’s rest. ‘You shouldn’t be walking on roads,’ he scolded, ‘this is what has harmed you.’ There wasn’t much choice, I tried to explain: Germany was covered in them. It was the fault of Bertha Benz… but I didn’t want to sound like a fanatic. Proof of EU residency got me free ultrasound therapy and even a course of acupuncture; the doctor went further, fixing me up with an ankle support and orthopaedic soles. I praised European integration.
Outside rose the famous Ulmer Münster, the tallest church spire in the world, needling over the city like forgotten technology from an alien civilisation. ‘Many people say it was a miracle it wasn’t bombed,’ said Dierk as we left the surgery. ‘Everything else was smashed flat, the whole medieval city. But my father was a navigator in the war and he said it was no miracle. The RAF kept it standing to use as a landmark.’
Dierk was an Ulmer born and bred, a repository of anecdotes. ‘This guy knows all about local politics,’ he said as we passed a tattoo parlour. ‘He’s an old friend of mine. The politicians come here because he is an expert in intimate piercings.’
‘Your politicians have intimate piercings?’ I tried to imagine the sober-looking leaders of Germany jangling under their suits.
‘Not just the ones in Ulm. They come from München, from all over Bavaria. Tattoos too. He organises parties with prostitutes also. Here, we are on the border between South Sweden and North Italy.’
‘South Sweden and North Italy?’
He grinned; it was clearly a favourite joke. ‘Baden-Württemberg is South Sweden, because that’s where northern Europe ends. Bavaria is North Italy. It’s a different culture.’
I asked where he fitted in: was he South Swedish or North Italian?
‘Neither. I’m from Ulm. We are Swabians.’
Swabia was taking shape in my mind as a kind of German Somerset; its dialect was famously gnarled, rooted in deep peasant culture, and Swabians had a certain rustic look about them, a roughness and readiness that Dierk seemed to encapsulate. It was something I understood better when, on Prinzing-loaned crutches, I was able to hobble around the Münster several days later.
The church had been constructed not on the order of pope or king, but by the people of the city themselves, an act of pride and passion. Generations of stone carvers had continued their parents’ work, crowding the gutters with Wasserspeier, water spitters, in the form of griffins, lions, elephants, dragons, monkeys, fishes, hounds and boars, and the joyous irreverence of the carvings gave a sense of the cockeyed humour that must have thrived in the region. Murals depicted not only thieves and prostitutes being flung into hell but priests and kings as well, and in the Last Supper, the artist had included himself as a thirteenth disciple, angrily demanding more money for his work. One gargoyle was an ostrich that shot rainwater out of its arse, in the direction of the house belonging to a woman who had spurned the carver’s advances. I wondered how the carver would have felt to know that house would later be obliterated by incendiary bombs.
‘Scarlet-cheeked women from a score of villages were coifed in head-dresses of starch and black ribbon that must have been terrible snow-traps,’ wrote Paddy. ‘They gathered around the braziers and stamped in extraordinary bucket-boots whose like I never saw before or since … A late medieval atmosphere filled the famous town.’ But only a fragment of ancient Ulm had survived the firestorm, saved by a network of canals that stopped the flames from spreading. The Allied raid was as devastating as the Nazi bombardment of Rotterdam, and achieved an architecturally similar homogeneity. The few remaining timber-framed buildings looked like listing arks, ready to keel over at any moment. From the quays below, Swabian traders had once embarked down the Danube in box-shaped boats to the Black Sea. I would catch up with the ‘Ulmer boxes’ later, on the Hungarian border, but incapacitated as I now was I found it hard to believe I would get much further.
My ankle’s condition barely improved, the pain ballooning morning and night. Without the crutches, it was an effort to cross to the other side of the room. Dora advised folk remedies, bandaging cottage-cheese poultices to draw out the swelling. I thought of Siegfried, the Achilles of the Rhine, and wished I could have smeared my heel with drag-on’s blood rather than cheese.
As the week crawled by, I fought down depression. Prinzing couldn’t say when I’d be fit to walk again; injuries like this could take months to heal. This idea drove me into a state of near-total anxiety and I was overcome with bleak thoughts of simply giving up. I upped my Ibuprofen dose, taking 800 mg a pop, which gave me a full, fuzzy head and slight euphoria. Blizzards occurred outside the double glazing and I longed to be out in the snow, to feel the cold and the wind.
Dierk and Dora flew away on holiday after a week. They arranged for me to stay with friends, a young couple called Michi and Waldi, who, in the same open-hearted spirit, offered me their spare room for as long as I needed. Being in their company was a cure for my dismal moods, and one painstaking day at a time things started to improve. The throbbing diminished every morning; tentatively I discovered I could put weight on my foot, ascend stairs without pain, take myself out for cautious limps around the block. My first small triumph was climbing the hill that rose above their flat; at its summit lay the fortress of Kuhberg, a Nazi detention camp, but I associated that grim place only with relief.
Prinzing delivered his prognosis as the fortnight drew to a close. The tendon wouldn’t fully heal for weeks, but if I started slowly, with hiking poles to take the strain off my foot, I might risk walking on. The best thing would be to cycle for the first few days, which would circulate blood to the foot without giving too much strain.
‘You can borrow my bike,’ said Michi. ‘Ride it as long as you need, then leave it somewhere where I can come and pick it up in the summer.’
I asked if there was any limit to her generosity.
‘The limit is Vienna,’ she said.
So it was settled: I would leave on Monday. My joy was overwhelming. Cycling was a compromise, but at last I’d be moving again; it was a modern variation of Paddy’s journey on borrowed horse over the plains of Hungary. To celebrate, Michi and Waldi took me to a Ritteressen, a fake medieval feasting hall, where we drank tankards of mead and ate pure fat off wooden platters while the host, a portly man dressed as a monk, encouraged tables of wildly excited students to drink themselves silly. We watched in horrified fascination as he fitted a chastity belt to a giggling student nurse, and forced her to down a stein of beer before giving her the key. Then he locked another student’s head into an iron pig mask, into which he poured bottles of beer while the other diners pounded the tables to a chant of ‘schluck, du Sau!’ Michi translated this, with some reluctance, as ‘swig, you sow!’
A woman sitting at our bench turned to me with a concerned expression. ‘Have you been in a German restaurant before? It is not always like this.’
Monday came, and I tethered my rucksack, with my brand-new hiking poles, to the rack of Michi’s mountain bike. We hugged one another goodbye and I freewheeled down the hill.
There was a ritual to observe before I left the city. I couldn’t go without climbing the seven hundred and sixty-eight spiral steps of Ulmer Münster, my own small victory parade. The staircase corkscrewed upwards like the calcified intestine of a dragon, a greater and grosser relative of the gargoyles teeming its walls. There below me was the city, obliterated and resurrected – an altogether different roofscape from the one Paddy had seen, but, blurred by height, ‘the foreshortened roofs of the town shrank to a grovelling maze’ much the same – while distantly, behind the winter haze, lurked the invisible Alps. Great heights have simplicity: behind me was how far I’d come, and ahead how far I had to go. I traced the green-brown ribbon of the Danube until it twisted out of sight; and then I descended, mounted my steed, and chased after it.
Within minutes the Münster was behind me, a rapidly shrinking needle of stone, and the city was whisked away into the folds of the river. It felt magnificent to be moving, whipping past hydroelectric plants squatting over the water they had quelled, disturbing waterbirds so white they looked like gaps in an unfinished painting. In Günzburg the streets were festooned with bunting for Carnival season. This was Bavaria and the dialect had shifted: the bread rolls in the bakery were not Brötchen but Semmel, and rather than Guten Tag the greeting was Grüß Gott, ‘God greet you’. After those stationary days, speed was exhilarating and addictive. The only way to overcome any lingering reservations about replacing my feet with wheels was to throw myself into it, to enjoy it to the fullest extent. It was an absolute pleasure, therefore, to rush down the last green hill into Burgau, where I had shelter that night.
In the morning the landscape was white. After so many mild weeks, winter had come at last.
Snowploughs were out on the roads, piloted by identically chubby men who nodded solemnly as I passed. A leering car-park attendant was putting the finishing touches to a well-endowed snow-woman, smoothing the breasts with a mittened hand. On either side spread furrowed fields, the bordering pine woods etched in white as if dry-brushed. My tyres scored interweaving tracks of slush, shattered thin puddles. I ventured onto smaller lanes, out of the snowploughs’ jurisdiction, churning through inches of powder that snowballed around the brakes and had to be frequently cleared. Soon I was beyond all roads, cutting a virgin path through forest, and when I stopped for thermos coffee the only sound was the soft collapse of snow from sagging branches.
Cupping my coffee in gloved hands, steam curling in the air, I felt a happiness so immense it almost couldn’t be contained. The world was reduced to its simplest parts: things revealed themselves as they were, not what I expected them to be. Germany resolved itself in my mind, announced itself as real and whole, and perhaps for the first time on my walk I understood that I was actually there.
Revelations such as this would arrive infrequently, always sudden, always startling. I would realise that days had passed and I had been plodding along, letting one thing lead to the next, grown comfortable in certain rhythms of motion and of thought; then abruptly, the skin of the world would peel away without the slightest warning. I stared in astonishment, assembling the facts: I was in Bavaria, in a pine forest under snow, winter had begun at last, and I was alone. Each of these recognitions brought its own thrill, and when I pedalled on again I felt as if I had stepped through a hidden door.
The forest ended at a village where I bought fresh semmel and a pretzel, the staple of Germany’s south. Dierk had said its three holes represented the Trinity, but the twisted shape looked older than that, a symbolic love-knot or entwined tree roots, something pre-Christian. Bavaria was Catholic country again – the roadsides scattered, as around Kevelaer, with candlelit crucifixions – but an earlier, more pagan sense underlay the religiosity. There was a feeling of deeper tradition, a stauncher conservative culture. In every village rose a tall wooden pole, painted with blue and white diamonds or stripes, topped with fir trees or sacred hearts and adorned with crests that depicted aspects of village life: blacksmiths, butchers, firemen and farmers were all represented. These were maypoles, annually renewed. And what was a maypole but a totem pole, the symbol of a tribe?
In the baroque city of Augsburg I stayed with Alexander, a combined hair stylist, ayurvedic chef and opera producer; his next production was Der Ring des Nibelungen, Wagner’s fantasy of the legends I had heard on the Rhine. He fed me ethical super-foods and I spent a day poling round the streets with my aluminium sticks, acutely aware of how many other people seemed to have crutches, canes and other walking aids; we exchanged gloomy, understanding glances, as if members of a secret fraternity. The city was a resplendent hive of arches, pillars and balconies; its cobbled streets were laced with canals and gave off an aura of affluence and self-satisfaction. ‘This is an obstructive city,’ Alexander said dismissively. ‘All its energy and creativity is drawn away by München. In the sixteenth century Augsburg was thriving and München was a backwater. Then something changed. München boomed, while Augsburg stagnated. This stagnating energy remains. Augsburg thinks it’s rich and proud but it has an inferiority complex, a jealousy of success.’
After another day on wheels I sighted München the next afternoon, a mass of towers bristling on a grey horizon. Having broken through its defensive rings of railways, roads and infrastructural sprawl, I came to a halt in a quiet square walled in neoclassical stonework. The last pool of sunlight drained and a chill rushed through the streets, a blue blast of frozen air spreading from the shadows. I pushed my steed through snowbound parks and boulevards of severe façades, feeling very small between the buildings. ‘The draughtiest city in the world,’ wrote Paddy, and I was inclined to agree: there was nothing colder than a stone city on a cloudless winter’s night.
München was the birthplace of Nazism and its spiritual home. When Paddy was here Brownshirts were carousing in the beer halls, and the first concentration camp had recently opened in a village called Dachau ten miles to the north. ‘The proportion of Storm Troopers and S.S. in the streets was unusually high,’ he wrote, ‘and the Nazi salute flickered about the pavement like a tic douloureux … sentries with fixed bayonets and black helmets mounted guard like figures of cast-iron and the right arms of all passers-by shot up as though in reflex to an electric beam.’
Now I meandered past yuppies and punks, hipsters and tramps, immigrants and students, a pair of elderly Arabs in keffiyehs daintily lifting the hems of their robes over slushy puddles. But the week before, the police had fought to separate a hundred neo-Nazis from three hundred anti-fascist protestors in one of these same squares. Kettled behind police lines, the skinheads had provocatively blasted out the theme tune to the Pink Panther, the unlikely anthem of a racist group who had murdered Turkish kebab-shop workers over the past decade.
For two nights I stayed with the affable Holger, whose taste in interior decoration revolved almost exclusively around kitsch and vintage erotica. His flat was like a pornographic version of Heidelberg’s Roten Ochsen inn: every surface was covered in a lifetime’s collection of cheerful smut, ranging from Orientalist harems to lusty sci-fi alien vixens, statuettes of coy nymphettes, Hindu goddesses, African queens, round-breasted Indonesian dancing girls, plastic comic book figurines, 1960s nudey magazines, miniature Priapi, Victorian porn, even an assortment of antique dildos posing as art objects. In a city so tainted by fascism, there was something glorious about it. It was the height of degenerate art; the Nazis would have burnt the lot.
Leaving this steamy den the next morning, I explored on foot. I’d heard much about Bavarians from Germans in other parts of the country, an antipathy perhaps analogous to how many Americans feel about Texans. ‘Bavarians are… special,’ Michi had said, while Michaela in Krefeld had given a revolted account of how they consumed white sausages: ‘They squeeze them out of their skins like toothpaste. They eat them for breakfast. It’s disgusting!’ With this in mind, I made straight for a tavern to order Weißwurst and Weißbier, white sausage and wheat beer, on the traditional side of midday. The Weißwurst were served in a lion-headed tureen, floating in parsley-infused water, resembling waxed specimens from a medical museum. I didn’t squeeze them out of their skins but ate them quickly, washed down with beer, and tried not to think about it too much. The interior of Sankt Kajetan church, which I visited afterwards, looked distressingly similar: fatty white columns twisting and bulging like contorted sausages, angels and cherubs sculpted from pure fat.
My real destination that day was the famous Hofbräuhaus, where Paddy had drunk himself senseless in 1934. This cavernous beer hall was a nexus of converging stereotypes – lederhosen and oompah bands, woodcock-feathered Alpine hats, buxom barmaids and foaming beer steins – a temple to Bavarian gastronomic excess. Paddy had gone to town on the place: ‘Hands like bundles of sausages flew nimbly, packing in forkload on forkload of ham, salami, frankfurter, krenwurst and bratwurst and stone tankards were lifted for long swallows of liquid which leapt out again instantaneously on cheek and brow … features dripped and glittered like faces at an ogre’s banquet.’ Now the ‘feasting burghers’ had been replaced by American exchange students, Japanese tourists sipping coffee rather nervously and smiling politely at the drunks. The Hofbräuhaus seemed about as authentic as the mock- medieval feasting hall with the chastity belt-wielding monk; a theme park, a pastiche of Bavarian culture. There was even a gift shop selling branded baseball caps.
Not getting drunk wasn’t an option, however. The very atmosphere brought on a feeling of instant intoxication. The drinkers were seated at trestle tables running the length of the hall, served by blondes with bulging breasts and pretzel girls posing for the cameras; one of these professional wenches delivered a glass as long as my forearm, and my table filled up with boozers who trammelled me to the furthest end, with no possibility of escape.
It was only four o’clock in the afternoon. I became sunk in boozy gloom that peaked around the middle of my second giant glass, and by the time I’d started the third it was lessening with every gulp. The alcohol flipped a switch, and Paddy’s description sprung to life as if a ghost-train ride had commenced: suddenly my table-mates were shovelling down dripping lumps of knödel, sawing through Bible-sized slabs of meat, and the tubas and trombones kicked up a plodding, ponderous tune, intestinal tract music, geared less towards dancing than digestion. An abortive attempt to leave was thwarted by a sinister black-bearded character who motioned me back to my seat with a steak knife – ‘Bier, Nick, Bier!’ he growled and I wondered vaguely how he knew my name – and inebriated songs started up at adjacent tables. This wasn’t a cultural experience that could be comprehended sober, much less enjoyed: the beer made sense of the oompah band, and the oompah band made sense of the wider Hofbräuhaus, the clunk of the weighty mugs and the bellowed conversation, while the tourist tat was a diminishing smudge on my peripheral vision.
I had only seen a portion of the vast emporium. As I wandered from room to room the space unpacked itself, passageways segmenting into passageways, stairways expanding to other floors with warrens of smaller chambers. In these narrow ulterior rooms, time slipped backwards. These tables were lined not with tourists, but with elderly men cramming their cheeks with meats and pickles from greasy plastic tubs, playing cards with unfamiliar decks of acorns, leaves, hearts and bells. Extravagantly mustachioed and bearded, they were dressed in extraordinary costumes of lederhosen and leaf-green waistcoats adorned with gleaming brass medallions, rope-banded felt hats bristling with the feathers of forest birds, an abstract visual code like the symbols of sylvan freemasons. Blue eyes rolled grumpily as I passed between the rows; I wasn’t sure I was welcome here. These clothes weren’t worn for my benefit, or that of any other spectator; there was strength in their absurdity, and their almost deliberate ridiculousness felt like a mark of cultural pride, an emblem of apartness. When I woke the next day – rottenly hungover, surrounded by vintage porn – it felt like I’d blundered on the secret rites of a tribe.
I’d fared better than Paddy, at least, whose ‘hoggish catalepsy’ had resulted in the loss of his notebook, stolen by a pimply youth while its author drank himself unconscious. After splashing water on my face I loaded up the mountain bike and, my own book safely stowed, left Holger’s and headed out into driving snow. More had fallen in the night and it was still falling. Cars groped their way down the streets in furrows of filthy slush. Across a bridge guarded by snow-shouldered statues, on the far bank of the river Isar, I was immediately out of the city.
Cold air and movement were excellent remedies for my Katzenjammer, the thumping in my head. I pedalled precariously through a white forest, snow drifting in small flakes and settling in my beard. Parents were dragging chubby children on toboggans like sacks of potatoes. Very black crows circled the Isar, and very white swans floated on it. A deep impression of silence had fallen over the land.
Riding a bicycle in these conditions was like being on a very unsteady, unpredictable animal that bucked at the slightest tremble of the handlebars; even moving my head at the wrong time was enough to throw me off. The snow changed everything, imposing its own terms on the world, and I skidded and lurched haphazardly through morning and afternoon. This would be my last day on wheels: after another night’s freeze these roads would be impassable. Michi’s bike was a hindrance now and would have to be abandoned. All I could do was hope that these four days had been enough and my ankle was strong enough to walk.
Half a day southeast of München came an architectural shift. The houses resembled Alpine chalets, barn-like buildings with carved gables dripping like wooden icicles, the eaves piled with blue-shadowed drifts. The villages smelt of wood smoke and horses. Sturdily wrapped men and women knocked ice off their boots outside yellow-lit bakeries; there was a cosseted, gossipy, provincial air. Above the villages misty forests rose into higher ground, the texture of pines like a wolf’s matted fur in a picture book. Dimly recollected images of the previous night – those jaunty woodcock hats and brass-festooned jerkins – fell into place like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. This was the spirit those lederhosen-clad old men were channelling, never mind the Hofbräuhaus. This white, wolfish land was Bavaria’s genius loci.
In a village called Holzolling a woman named Luisa had offered me a bed. She was a friend of Francesca, the girlfriend of Claudia, Kerstin’s sister – I needed a mnemonic to remember all this – the last of the Meyer family connections that had served me so well on the Rhine. She lived on a horse farm in the Mangfall Valley, and by the time I found the place the snow was indigo with night, and even with my winter gloves my hands were frozen to the curve of the handlebars.
Luisa was in the yard hefting sacks of horse food. I pitched in and was rewarded with slabs of black bread and cheese, and a mug of Earl Grey so good it almost made me cry. A rangy woman with strong blue eyes and a face nipped by wind, she had abandoned graphic design to move out here to follow her dream of breeding Trakehner horses. Once the horses of the Prussian nobility, one of the most popular breeds in the German Empire, Trakehners had almost been wiped out in the Second World War: requisitioned, machine gunned, eaten by starving refugees or frozen to death on the long flight west as Russian troops advanced. Now Luisa was trying to save the breed from decades of decline.
‘When I came here, at first the locals thought I was a silly rich girl, coming from the big city,’ she told me. ‘They learnt to respect me when they saw how serious I was. But farmers don’t like horse people. What can I say? I don’t like farmers much either. They don’t like us because, since the war, horses have not been necessary. They are only used for carriage rides, or pulling beer barrels in Oktoberfest. They are seen as a luxury, and farmers resent the good way we treat them.’ The grooms she employed weren’t German, but Hungarian and Romanian. ‘Eastern Europeans still understand horses, especially Romanians. Horses are part of life for them. I’ve tried hiring locally, but the boys round here aren’t interested. They are looking for office jobs in the city.’
My bedroom smelt of hay and fresh bread; I opened my eyes to roosters crowing, horses stamping in the stalls. After breakfast I wheeled the bicycle to the barn, its duty done, to wait for Michi to collect it when the weather was warm. Luisa waved me off from the stables as I took my first tentative steps, learning the rhythm of the hiking poles, walking now with my hands as much as my feet. The poles took pressure off my weakened ankle, and although the tendon would still throb at the end of each day, like an insistent memory – it would continue aching for weeks – this felt like a new start.
Now began the misty uplands that crept towards the Austrian border, hazing in and out of forest and snatched-away horizons. These were my last days in High Germany, and my happiness at walking again was magnified by the knowledge of approaching a new country; a hushed, slightly breathless sense accompanied those miles. I followed the Mangfall, a noisy blue river bubbling with yellow pools, past riverside houses with no sign of life, their occupants apparently in hibernation, snuggled up like Moomintrolls in darkened rooms.
Rosenheim was a small, smug city with aspirations of being Italian, with pastel buildings and archways and coffee shops in cobbled squares. On clear days, I was told, there was a fine view to the Alps – a mountain called the Wildkaiser, the Wild Emperor, to the east – but, as on the days before, the range was hidden by the murk. Past Rosenheim I got lost in a mess of lakes, frozen ponds, heathlands and anonymous villages, locating myself at the Inn, a river famed for its green water, flowing like a stream of arsenic down towards the south.
A lengthy tramp uphill brought me to tiny Söllhaben, where Paddy had slept a night. It was a place of rather dull houses with woodsheds stacked with an intricacy that hinted at neat, obsessive minds; but once past those, a silent and secretive landscape spread away. Using my poles to steady myself in unexpected drifts, I practically waded into a valley of grey pines dusted white, the faintest intimation of mountains glowing under a golden sky. The snow played tricks on my senses. I kept hearing soft explosions that sounded like someone walking behind me hitting a barrel with a hammer, which turned out to be the rhythm of my trousers brushing together. The uniform whiteness was dizzying; I was unprepared for the visual relentlessness of winter. At one point the road ahead turned an unearthly green, and cars that passed irregularly did not seem to get further away, but shrank to a rapid vanishing point in nothingness.
On the frozen shores of the Chiemsee lake, I’d hoped to get a ferry to the other side – I still felt I was owed a boat ride after my snubbing on the Rhine – but no ferries ran that route in the depths of winter. Instead I stayed a night in Prien in a chalet buried under snow, and in the morning I continued south, skirting the lake, east past Röttau, through woodlands shimmering with ice. The temperature was plunging now and there were rumours of a great cold coming in the days ahead; people spoke of it in hushed, respectful tones, as if it was an important guest whose visit must be endured. The only sounds in those white forests were far-off axes chopping wood and the shuddering reverberations of woodpeckers, engaged in similar winter work. My breath poured out like steam from a ventilation shaft, and when I thought of the approaching cold a feeling of sheer lonely delight almost overwhelmed me.
‘Vague speculation thrives in weather like this,’ wrote Paddy. ‘The world is muffled in white, motor-roads and telegraph-poles vanish, a few castles appear in the middle distance; everything slips back hundreds of years.’ So it did for me. In the sinisterly named village of Marwang I stopped for Helles beer, and put away a sizzling mass of dumplings, potatoes, pork and cheese swimming in hot oil. Around the bar sat a group of farmers with faces as knobbled and gnarled as the gargoyles of Ulmer Münster, staring with a mixture of sorrow and shyness, unsure what to make of me. Their conversation sounded like a blend of German, Italian and Welsh, a peasant accent unlike anything I’d heard before. Every home had the cryptic sigil 20*C+M+B*12 chalked over the door. Caspar, Melchior, Balthazar 2012, I decoded: a salutation for the Three Wise Men.
The Alps lay tantalisingly close. Whenever there was a break in the trees I squinted south, hoping to see them, but the horizon stayed sullenly sunk in the same white gloom. My route lay along their northern flank, and it was possible I’d skirt them by miles without ever seeing them appear. But as my mind formed that thought – as I reconciled myself to their absence – I looked up and there they were. One peak then another gathered shape before my eyes, sharpening into perfect focus and then trembling out of existence, as if trying to make up its mind whether or not to establish itself in solid form. It felt inconceivable that things so huge could come and go so quietly. I stopped walking, determined to concentrate every part of my energy on them. Like shy animals they froze, then rapidly merged back into the sky. I waited, but they never returned. The whole vision couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes, but when I walked on, my journey felt immeasurably greater for it.
‘They come and go like that all the time. Sometimes we feel the mountains decide to go somewhere else for a day, as if they have a secret meeting place, and we are not invited.’ Adrian and Helga, my hosts in Traunstein, had spent years living in the Alps before returning to the lower world, and they understood my sentiments. In Romania and Bulgaria, I would hear other mountain people talking in similar ways.
We drank wheat beer after dinner, and they taught me that in Bavaria glasses were clinked at the bottom, not the top. ‘Weißbier und Frauen stößt man unten an’ went the phrase, roughly translated as ‘wheat beer and women one bangs below’. Thus lubricated, the conversation swung to the subject of Bavarian uniqueness. Even though Bavaria combined every stereotype of Germany, as demonstrated by the Hofbräuhaus, Bavarians had more in common, culturally and spiritually, with their neighbours across the Alps than their compatriots on the Rhine. There was even a secessionist movement for an independent Alpenrepublik of Upper Bavaria, Alpine Austria and Tyrol, the mountain people united in a single Catholic state. This was a fantasy, a conservative utopia, but the thought experiment was intriguing. Despite the EU’s unhappy convulsions the German federation seemed strong, although maybe it was only money that glued its cultures together. If the federation ever dissolved and an Alpine Republic seceded, what would be more natural than for the states to assume their ancient forms, rallying for protection and comfort around local dialects? Might there be another Bardische Revolution, a Swabian revolt? I envisaged the Rhineland castles springing back to life as the strongholds of modern robber barons, stretching chains across the river once more to tax the shipping. It was an enjoyable fantasy for my last night in Germany.
The great cold had arrived, as predicted. After half an hour’s walk the next morning, leaving the last friendly houses below, the water in my flask had frozen into a solid block. My beard and moustache had hardened into knotted clumps of ice that were too painful to remove, icicles of snot-water dangling from my nose, and the ink ran sluggish in my pen when I stopped to write. I passed through forests so deep in snow that the trees looked like melted candles; even the barbs on barbed-wire fences wore tiny caps of white. Growths of icicles hung from the roadside crucifixions, and frosted pine branches had been placed at the bleeding feet of the Christs like offerings to a forest god.
The snow was less in evidence on the leeward side of the hills. Disappointment filtered in when its perfect whiteness was broken up; something in me longed for it to get more and more extreme, to build towards a winter without end.
Yet the dreary-looking town of Ainring carried its own excitement. The smoky twilit land beyond – I could hardly tell if the grey squared blocks were fields or segments of a city – was the third country of my walk. Austria lay down a nondescript road that looked like it could only end at a suburban cul-de-sac, but brought me instead to the green Saalach river, where nothing stirred but a ginger cat picking its way along the bank. Over the footbridge, a battered tin sign informed me I was entering an Atomkraftwerkfrei, nuclear-free, Republic of Austria. Immediately over the river, the outskirts of Salzburg began.
There was little sense of transition. Bavaria and Salzburgerland formed the intersection of a cultural Venn diagram, and the gathering darkness masked their differences. It took two hours of tramping the streets, huffing clouds of frozen air, to find the house I was looking for; Alexander from Augsburg had given me the address of a friend, and by the time I arrived cold had seeped into my very core. Gudrun lived near the Salzach river – the Saalach was its tributary – and entering her warm apartment was like sinking into a restorative bath. She fed me pumpkin soup and black bread, and it seemed that no combination of pleasures could have been more perfect.
I stepped outside the next morning to a bright, bone-freezing day, the wind so cold it was like a slow fire burning at the ears. A curious herd of snow-covered mountains nuzzled the streets. The Salzburgers were natty dressers, the women in fur-trimmed coats and mufflers, the men in elegant leather gloves and black trilbies or Alpine hats, tapping along in polished shoes under the arches of grand stone buildings, trailing plumes of cigarette smoke. I got the impression they dressed that way in order to impress the city itself. It was a place of domes and stairways, ironwork and elaborate façades, architecture so proud of itself that even the McDonald’s ‘M’ was displayed in a heraldic crest held aloft by a rampant lion. Mozart, Salzburg’s most famous son, was referenced everywhere, mostly in the form of truffles displaying his smirking face; in a few hundred years, perhaps, the great composer would be misremembered as a long-ago chocolatier.
Gudrun set me on my way with a bag of these truffles the following day, and I left the white-stoned city along a suburban road heaving with morning traffic. The nearby hamlet that Paddy had stayed in, ‘too small for any map’, was on the map now and much the worse off for it, absorbed into the Salzburg commuter belt that I escaped by half sliding, half falling down a long hill into the snow-scape below.
At that temperature there was no soft ground. Tarmac was my friend again, hard and flat being preferable to hard and bumpy. Ploughed fields and frozen molehills were particular perils for the ankles, and snow, I was finding out, was never a uniform surface. It looked simple enough to traverse, but my body had to work twice as hard to a rhythm of step-sink, step-sink, with the steady schoosh-schoosh of powder flying off my boots. A shortcut plunged me into a gulley surfaced with a frozen crust that collapsed when I took too heavy a stride, sinking me thigh deep. I could only proceed with tiny bird steps, concentrating on keeping my body as light as possible, but whenever my mind began to wander – even starting to hum an old tune – I would crash back through the surface.
After several hours of this my strength gave out and I threw myself down, too frustrated to go on, gnawing despairingly at a half-frozen sandwich. Sometimes giving up was the best strategy. I heard a snort, saw steam in the air, and out of nowhere appeared two riders on horses as hairy as dogs. I leapt up from my hole in the snow, brushing the crumbs from my ice-beard, gesticulating like a desperate goblin. The two purple-faced, fur-hatted men expressed no surprise when I asked for directions – I think if they had, I would have despaired entirely – merely pointing me on my way as if I was doing nothing unusual. Somehow this brief visitation gave me the strength to continue.
The next few days were a tug-of-war between wilderness and cosiness, the hardships of subzero walking interspersed delightfully with bouts of homely Gemütlichkeit – a quality translated as ‘snugness, warmth, the feeling that you are accepted’ – an evolutionary survival strategy in winters such as this. In the village of Windbichl, which truly was a hamlet too small for any map, another friendly house opened its doors and the ice in my moustache dissolved in a scalding shower. After schnitzel and sauerkraut the Starlinger family took me out to watch an Eisstock tournament. The game resembled curling, played on a pitch of ice down which the players slid Stocks, heavy wooden pucks banded with dented iron, to hit the Taube, ‘dove’, at the far end. Something about it felt familiar and I realised where I’d seen it before: exactly the same activity is taking place in the background of Breughel’s ‘Hunters in the Snow’, a painting used, oddly enough, on the cover of one edition of A Time of Gifts. Apart from the fluorescent tubes lighting the scene, nothing about the picture had changed in four hundred years.
The tournament was competitive, but they charitably interrupted play to let me have a go. Much was made of showing me exactly how to grip the handle, how to bend my knees just so, and on my first attempt I sent the stock winging down the middle to hit the dove square on: a perfect shot. I expected hearty congratulations, but everyone looked a bit upset at my beginner’s luck. The next stock was taken away from me and I wasn’t allowed another turn.
Beyond Windbichl, I was back in wilderness again. Forest stretched to the next town and after a village called Unterfeitzing – even the names growing wilder now – the road I’d been following simply ended. I entered the woods up a track of ice that must have been a stream in the summer, and once that had petered out, for the first time on my journey, no path of any description lay ahead.
Following the shivering compass needle, I tried to maintain a straight line northwards through the trees. It was less navigation than an act of faith. My eyes kept inventing imaginary tracks, which led me in all kinds of wrong directions, and my feet automatically took me along the contours that suited them best, no matter how dogmatically my brain tried to keep them straight.
This brief encounter with pathlessness was a fantasy of freedom. But there was something else there too, and I was surprised to identify it as an undercurrent of fear that surfaced as soon as I sensed what genuine aloneness might be like. There was no one to help me find my way, no manmade things to guide me out. All I could do was keep going and trust that I reached the end of the forest before darkness fell.
The trees thinned. Ahead was a clearing and telephone poles, half a dozen farmhouses scattered down a white hillside. The sight of inhabitation brought a rush of relief, but at the same time, with equal force, regret and disappointment. Suddenly the adventure had ended. Now I couldn’t go wrong if I tried. The freedom had been an illusion; it seemed absurd that I’d felt anything remotely like fear, with civilisation just over the next rise.
This was a feeling that would return again and again on my journey. Perhaps all adventures are like this: flirting with the wilderness but knowing we can’t truly enter it, wanting to lose ourselves in imaginary realms like we once did in childhood stories, in the part-remembered, part-confabulated landscapes of Paddy’s books, but being afraid to go too far in, so far we might not come back.
But walking brought freedom closer. And in that winter, walking alone through a snow-covered landscape seemed like the greatest happiness I could know.