How I Spent My Spring Vacation

I’m back home since last Tuesday night, back on East Coast time, and nearly caught up on sleep, after an intensive 12-day journey with Al to Germany. As is my way, I packed a lot into our itinerary, based in part on more research for Novel 2, which is set in Weimar Germany, and in part on things I’ve always wondered about and wanted to visit, and in part on catching up with good friends there.

We flew direct to Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany’s financial center, and used it as a hub for day trips by train to various points of interest, including Kassel, home of the Brothers Grimm for most of their adult lives; the Rhine River Valley, speckled by castles, hillside vineyards, and lovely towns; Worms (pronounced Vorms, rhymes with forms), which was a famed center of Jewish intellectual life in the Middle Ages and is home to the oldest Jewish cemetery in Europe; and Heidelberg, a renowned university city and site of castle ruins.

From Frankfurt, we took the 4-hour high speed train to Berlin, and had a guided tour of the Schöneberg district, where my mother grew up around the corner from Albert Einstein, and the location of JFK’s famous “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech in 1963; visited a variety of spectacular museums, where we saw art by Paul Klee and Gerhardt Richter; as well as learned about life in East Berlin and under the surveillance of the Stasi secret police. We also visited a wonderful puppet museum with an extraordinary collection and curators who filled me in on some history I’d been seeking.

On top of that, we had a lovely and meaningful visit with our friends, who treated us to delicious meals and took us to another beautiful and historic Jewish cemetery, the largest in Europe. Last Monday we took the train back to Frankfurt, stayed overnight, and then flew home. I was exhausted, but it was well worth it. And that’s the very short version of our travels.

What do all these things have in common? I’m thinking a lot about German folklore and how it informed culture and society in the 1930s, as well as the heritage of German Jewish communities. I’m also thinking a lot about art and censorship, which are central to my novel. And I’ve always wondered about castles on the Rhine. Fun fact: they were built by princes who wanted to collect tolls from ships traveling up and down the river—the very definition of robber barons.

I’m still processing all that we explored. I will be thinking about this trip for a long time. Grateful we could go and return home safely. Here are just a few pics of what we saw. Enjoy!

Evelyn Herwitz blogs weekly about living fully with chronic disease, the inside of baseballs, turtles and frogs, J.S. Bach, the meaning of life and whatever else she happens to be thinking about at livingwithscleroderma.com. Please view Privacy Policy here.