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Little old towns not designed for cars, and illiterate tourists that don't yet understand the less common road signs make for a comical enough combination. Add an early morning marathon and you end up with a scene straight out of the Grizwald's - at least that's what I imagine we looked like, creeping down an ever narrowing street in the citroen, before opening out, red face, onto the town square. Any earlier and the marathon runners would have only added to the sea of confused faces tracking us as we crept the Citroen across the square.
Well atleast it was a light hearted way to start "Nazi" day. First we headed the Documentation Centre at the Nürnberg Rally Grounds, or Dokumentationszentrum Reichsparteitagsgelände if you like tongue twisters. Built at the grounds of the incomplete Nazi congress hall, the museum houses one of the most interesting installations on a single topic that I've seen. The exhibitions documents the void in German social and economic fabric that allowed the Nazi party to emerge. How Hitler himself rose to such incredible strength along with his cabinet. The systems for compliance and control once the agenda turned so bitter. The Holocaust itself was impressively dealt with, a few select images of the atrocities depict life size images lit up visible only through a number of tunnel entrances in a long hallway. It was easy enough to filter it from the kids, but striking enough to register it's point.
Reducing the topic to something a nine year old can make sense of brings forced far reaching metaphorical discussions in the car. I don't know how much of it sunk in, but you could see Maz really taking in the twisting of despondency to support and ultimately the blind belief that enabled such depths of ugliness.
To lighter things, Gab missed out on visiting Käthe Wohlfahrt in Rothenburg so whilst in Nürnberg we went looking for their local store. Parking was crazy and a few blocks from where we parked we found out why. The whole town was closed for the day and everyone had turned up to turn every corner of the old town into a market/festival. Everything Bavarian was on display, from Wurst to White Asparagus. We ended up strolling from stall to stall for an hour or so - blissful!
From Nürnberg we headed to Dachau. Gab and I had been debating the amount of Nazi history the kids would take in, and Dachau was at the pointy end of that debate - I imagined scenes from those Auschwitz documentaries that you could never talk the kids back from. However there was no need. Dachau has very little human imagery, tremendously powerful and haunting, the scale more than anything else left it's mark on the kids. Beyond the remaining prisoner barracks is row upon row of footings from the previous buildings depicting the massive extent of this operation. I caught max staring out the window lost in the scale.
On to Munchen, I gave the family 3.6 minutes to dump their stuff and off we headed the old town. A beer at Augustiner was the warmest welcome the city could give anyone. A perfect afternoon, Gab shopped for a bit whilst the kids and I pub crawled our way to Marienplatz - where the weight of opportunity cost crushed me. We'd spent the last hour slowly snaking through the crowd. But when we finally arrived at Marienplatz we found out where everyone was coming from. The whole square was laid out with beer benches, beer tents a stage and oompah band - every Munich brewery was here! We set ourselves up on a table at the edge and poked fun at the bierleichen, up until I joined them :)
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