Three weeks after arriving in Germany, I finally feel secure
enough here in Frankfurt to begin venturing elsewhere, and this Saturday I made
my first Tagesexkursion (day trip) to the city
of Marburg.
Marburg is a university town nestled in the hills of Hessen about
an hour’s train ride north of Frankfurt. It’s a city very much in keeping with
the idea of “German town” that prevails in the American cultural imagination:
medieval castle, narrow cobble-stoned streets, traditional timber-framed houses
known as Fachwerkhäuser. You wouldn’t
know any of that, though, judging only from the Marburg-Lahn train station. In
fact, when I first got off the train from Frankfurt on Saturday, I thought
there had been a mistake: either I’d got off at the wrong stop, or I’d misheard
or misunderstood C. when I thought she’d recommended Marburg as a nice city for
a day trip. The station is currently undergoing renovations, so it’s a mess of
spray paint and plywood; when you step outside you’re immediately assaulted by
the stench of construction and the racket of highway traffic passing overhead.
And there’s nary a cobblestone to be seen.
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| Elisabethkirche |
Round a couple of corners, though, and get past the initial,
uninviting layer of takeout restaurants and vacant office spaces, and you find
yourself face-to-face with Elisabethkirche,
a fine example of Gothic architecture—apparently one of the first instances of
the style outside of France. Because it’s an upstanding evangelische institution, the interior of Elisabethkirche is not quite as ornately decorated as you typically
find among its Catholic cousins—(“That would be a fun game,” I observed to J., the
fellow ETA I met up with in Marburg, “looking at pictures of church interiors
and trying to say, based on the picture and nothing else, whether they’re
Catholic or Protestant.”) But the stained glass windows are second to none, and
the church still beats almost anything you can see in the U.S. hands down.
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| A street in the Altstadt. J and I had coffee at the cafe on the left. |
From the church, it’s only a few more minutes zu Fuß before you get to the Marburg Altstadt (“Old City”). Here is where things
get fun: the Altstadt is where you
find the maze-like grid of narrow, cobblestoned streets lined with Fachwerkhäuser housing cafes and
restaurants and bookshops. Because the Altstadt
is built on a hill—in fact, it’s also called the Oberstadt, or “upper city”— a lot of the cafes and restaurants
offer views of the city below and the hills beyond while you drink your Milchkaffee or eat your Pfannkuchen mit Hünchen (pancakes with
chicken—sound strange, but that’s what I had for lunch, and it was super
tasty). The Oberstadt is also
exclusively a Fußgägerzone (pedestrian
zone)—one of the first such zones in Germany. There are elevators that will
take you from the foot of the Oberstadt to
the top of it, but J and I made the whole trip through the Altstadt to the Marburger
Schloss on foot—in the grand scheme of
things maybe not the most impressive of climbs, but my glutes are feeling it
nonetheless.
Atop the hill, then, standing sentinel over the Altstadt, sits the Marburger Schloss. Originally
built as a fortress in the 12th century and in ensuing centuries serving
as the seat of the Landgraf of Hessen, today the Schloss doubles as an event venue and the University Museum. Fun
fact: in early October 1529—483 years ago almost to the day that we were there—the Marburg Colloquy, a meeting of important
Protestant thinkers, including Martin Luther, meant to resolve a question about
the Lord’s Supper, was held at the Marburger Schloss. The view from the castle
was definitely one of the highlights of the trip for me: overlooking the roofs
of Marburg and the outline of hills on the horizon, I experienced a moment of
“presence,” of simple consciousness of where I was, when I was, what I was
doing. It may seem like a silly, hippy-dippy-modern-dance kind of observation
to make, but I’ve spent so much time in the last few weeks feeling out of body
and out of place, it was a huge relief to finally feel so grounded again.
On the whole, I am quite pleased with how my first day trip
in Germany turned out. It was very much a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of
situation: I didn’t buy my train ticket in advance, didn’t read up too terribly
much on the city or what there was to do there. While this approach definitely
would not work out for me on longer trips—like the Herbstferien adventure I’m currently trying to plan—for a daytrip it
worked out just fine.
Of course, no venture for me—whether in Frankfurt or
elsewhere—has been without some mishap or other, and Marburg was no exception.
A few days before, I’d Facebooked J. to let him know I was coming up, and we’d
agreed to meet at the Marburg Hauptbahnhof
(main train station) and spend the day in the city together. My train from Frankfurt
let me off at Marburg-Lahn about an hour before I was set to meet up with J.,
so I promptly set out to find my way to the Hauptbahnhof—not
exactly understanding why a train from Frankfurt would not go through the Hauptbahnhof, but not thinking enough
about it to stop and ask someone either. An hour of aimless wandering and one
very ill-advised bus ride later, I was completely and hopelessly lost. I got a
phone call from J wondering where I was, I told him that I was looking for the Hauptbahnhof, and he promptly explained
that Marburg-Lahn was the Hauptbanhof. Once I knew the place I was
looking for was a place that I’d already been, it was easy to retrace my steps,
and once I found J, the day proceeded without incident.
In the scheme of potential travel catastrophes, a small
misunderstanding and a little disorientation is pretty minor, and I’ve become
so used to being lost in the past few weeks that my impulse is no longer to
panic, as it was the first few times it happened, but rather just to laugh at
myself. I’m choosing to see the fact that I no longer disintegrate into a
puddle of panic the moment I’m not sure of where I am as a definite sign of personal
growth. Who knows? I may even get to the point where I enjoy the challenge, having lost myself, of having to find myself
again.
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| View of Marburg from the Schloss |
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