Bob:

Based on some maps and a discussion with Heinke and Gustl about their visit to the Harz 15 years back, we decided to drive to the eastern side of the Harz region and visit Quedlinburg, a city that is a UNESCO World Heritage Site for houses with "Fachwerk" architecture. "Fachwerk" is the German term for the half-timber or post-and-beam construction method that was common in the late middle ages. So after breakfast we drove East by Northeast through the mountains and then, surprisingly quickly rolled out onto a broad, level valley. We found free parking a bit outside the central district, so we just parked there and walked into town.

The old half timber houses were there just as promised. We turned off the main street as soon as we saw them, and we were astonished at street after street, block after block of these ancient houses. I would guess there were a least a square kilometer of these old houses in all, and possibly as much as a square mile. Some of the houses had the date of construction carved into the main beam above the first floor (sometimes with some kind of saying or proverb), and all the dates I saw were in the late 1600s. So seeing all those old houses packed together like that gave me some inkling of what the city of Quedlinburg might have looked like around 1700.

Some of those streets, by the way, were amazingly narrow and crooked. In fact, one street reminded Monika of Pompeii because the center of the street appeared to be exactly wide enough for a set of wagon or carriage wheels. Presently that street is, understandably enough, closed to vehicular traffic, but even back in the 1700s it must have been a one way street for horse-drawn vehicles.

Monika:

Bob:

A good proportion of these old houses, maybe 20%, were either unrestored or in the process of being restored. The unrestored houses were often in pretty bad shape with the roofs falling in and the main beams rotting away, and I wasn't even sure some of them were restorable. The houses in the process of being restored showed me exactly how difficult it would be to do that work right. The triangular shaped openings created by the diagonal cross beams all had to be filled with carefully shaped fragments of bricks so that the outside wall was complete and even. What a job for the bricklayer!

Despite the difficulty, most of the houses had been completely restored and apparently all of that work has been done since the reunification of Germany in 1989. The restored houses were typically nicely finished in some color that contrasted with the dark, old wood of the posts and beams. Some were amazingly narrow, maybe 9 or 10 feet wide, and that reminded me of the narrow townhouses from the Colonial Period in Alexandria, Virginia. In Alexandria the houses are narrow because the property tax laws of the time emphasized the street footage of each house. I wondered if the narrow houses in Quedlinburg were built that way for a similar reason or for some entirely different reason.

An awful lot of those old houses, even the restored ones, were out of kilter. In fact, some blocks had each house standing bravely upright at a noticeably different angle than any of its neighbors. Being used to the absolutely uniform construction of modern houses, that was jarring. The floors of the upper stories were occasionally sagging down in the middle, probably due to the inescapable effects of over 300 years of the the weight of the floors above. Other houses really seemed to be leaning over on their neighbors, and I'm pretty certain that was NOT an optical illusion! Can you imagine living in a place that is so out of plumb and out of square? Doing any type of interior work or remodeling must be an absolute nightmare because each and every piece would have to be custom cut and shaped precisely to fit the existing structure. I would have very much liked to have toured the interiors to see how even or uneven they looked from the inside. That said, I'm sure the owners are happy to have an authentic piece of German history dating from the late Middle Ages and really don't mind the inconveniences that come with it.

Monika:

Bob:

We of course stopped whenever we saw an antique bookstore, and while Monika was looking for a particular old German tome she ran across a book of "New German Folks Songs". I heard her chuckling, so I asked her what was so funny and she showed me the table of contents. One song was a "Hymn to the USSR" and another one was entitled simply, "Lenin"! Of course, the book was from 1950 when this part of Germany was firmly under the military and political control of the puppet Communist regime sponsored by the Kremlin, so the laudatory songs to Lenin and the Good Old Union of Soviet Socialist Republics were understandable. President-for-life Putin is currently attempting to reconstruct the USSR, of course, but it is unclear to me whether he will be successful or whether this is a case like Humpty Dumpty where all of Putin's horses and all of Putin's men won't be able to put it back together again. Time will tell, but I do think that Poland, the old East Germany and many of the new EU countries have gone so far down the road to democracy and political freedom that they would not welcome the return of Soviet tank battalions with open arms, but rather openly armed, which is quite a different thing.

We finally reached a fountain down near the river that depicted the notification of Heinrich I of Germany that he had been chosen as King by the electors. The elected king is shown bent over trying to catch some finches while a duke and archbishop try to crown him, which just made him look ludicrous. The poor woman leaving the scene of the coronation empty handed and the scribe with his back turned to the whole thing completed the tableau, but for me the propagandistic aspects were very heavy handed indeed. Conversely, when we next visited the city castle that had been turned into an abbey school for royalty and saw how the upper classes really lived in stunning luxury in a time of widespread poverty and destitution, the burning resentment of the lower classes that fueled the Russian Revolution became a lot more understandable. Europe has such a tangled past!

If you like to see how the rich and famous lived in the Bad Old Days, however, the rooms of the abbess, who was the sister of Friederick the Great, would give some indication. The parquet flooring was beautiful and the interior decorations and plaster work were all exquisite. The use of the abbey as a school for the rich and royal young girls was, for me, an indication that European culture was slowly starting to recognize women as potentially more than royal brood mares even as early as 1100 A.D. That change in the role of women in society has certainly accelerated over the centuries to become a near equality of the sexes in Western Europe and the U.S. Gender equality, however, seems to put Western cultures on a direct collision course with Islamic fundamentalists who want to march women back into the chattel status they had in the first millennium when Mohammed was concocting his view of the world. I surely hope Turky succeeds in accomodating the Muslim religion to basic Western values before that conflict causes more casualties.

Monika:

Bob:

These were rather deep and somewhat depressing thoughts, but fortunately on our drive back to our pension we saw somebody on a small roller coaster like device careen across the sky on the right side of the road, and we decided to stop and investigate. It turned out to be something called a Rodelbahn which was a kind of luge type of sled but on a roller coaster platform. The great thing, from my point of view, was that the rider could control the braking of the thing and thus control the speed. Generally I don't like roller coasters, and in particular because I feel totally out of control. But here was essentially a roller coaster with control, and I was eager to try it. The first time through Monika and I went separately and I went kind of slowly because I was holding my camera in one hand trying to take a movie of the entire experience and I didn't want the camera to go flying off a curve! The second time down, however, Monika and I went on the same sled and I let her sit in the front and take the movie while I sat in the rear and controlled the brake. With each of us specialized like that, we went like a bat out of hell and had a wonderful time, which was just what I needed to blow the philosophical cobwebs out of my head. Much buoyed by that, we returned home, had dinner, and quietly worked on the computer and our puzzles for the evening.

Monika: