Making sense of the madness

Nuremberg is the second-biggest city in Bavaria after Munich, and there’s lots of reasons to love it. Like so many German cities, the architecture is gorgeous. There’s a big fortress on the hill where you can walk up and watch the sun set over the red rooftops of the old town.

It’s the spiritual home of lebkuchen, and that, in my opinion, would be reason enough on its own to go there and never leave. The city also boasts Germany’s most celebrated Christmas market, and is reputed to have the best sausages in the land. Gingerbread, glühwein, bratwurst – what’s not to like?

But the city of Nuremberg has a dark past. If you played the word association game with people outside Germany, I’m guessing the first thing the name “Nuremberg” would conjure up would be the infamous Nuremberg rallies.

Bavaria was the spiritual home of the Nazi movement, and Nuremberg was praised to the skies as “the most German city in Germany”. The city received its ultimate “compliment” when it was chosen as the venue for the Nazi Party rallies in the 20’s and 30’s – giant gatherings of the party faithful, replete with fearsome military displays, kooky pseudo-religious rituals, and of course, fervent adoration of the infallible Führer.

The huge parade ground of Zeppelinfeld (Zeppelin Field) was specially built on the outskirts of Nuremberg by Hitler’s favourite architect, Albert Speer, to host these party rallies. Special railway stations were constructed to deal with the influx of thousands of enthusiastic visitors, and giant tent cities would sprout up on each occasion to accommodate them.

When the Nazis were finally defeated in 1945, Germany was split into four parts, each ruled by one of the major Allied powers (America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union). Bavaria came under US military control, and one of the most iconic images of that decade is the footage of the American forces blowing up the giant swastika towering over the Zeppelinfeld.

(From Wikimedia Commons)

After the war, the Allies began an intense campaign of “denazification” to destroy Nazism as comprehensively in an ideological sense as it already had been militarily. An Allied unit called the Psychological Warfare Division was set up to instill a sense of “collective guilt” among the German people – that the atrocities of the period were the fault of the entire nation, not just the Nazi elite. Graphic films of the concentration camps were screened across the country, and ordinary Germans were conscripted to exhume mass graves and rebury the corpses of the victims.

Then there was the question of what to do with the prominent party buildings commissioned by Hitler. Should they be ignominiously destroyed and forgotten, as Hitler’s body was by Soviet troops after his suicide in Berlin? Or should they be preserved as a reminder never to allow history to repeat itself? You could plausibly argue for both sides.

In the case of Nuremberg, it was decided to go with the latter option, and I think they’ve done a good job. You can still walk on the Zeppelinfeld today, and it’s interesting to see what the government has done with it. Instead of destroying it completely, they’ve selectively taken down some of the more imposing parts of the structure (the big swastika for example, and some of the towers around the grandstand). The bleachers have been abandoned to nature and are overgrown with thick weeds. The Nazi pretensions to grandeur have been belittled by turning over what remains to much more mundane uses. The main marching area has been converted to football fields (and is occasionally a venue for large concerts). Can you imagine having to play your weekly soccer game here?! It would be surreal.

If you stand on the balcony from where Hitler used to speak, you look out over a truck parking lot, separated from the football fields by a four-lane stretch of road where a group of petrolheads were doing wheelies in the snow when I came here a second time. It’s a deservedly ignominious fate for a soapbox that spawned so much cruelty and suffering. Well played, Nuremberg.

Right next door to the Zeppelinfeld, the half-finished Kongresshalle (Congress Hall) also remains intact. It’s the largest Nazi-era building still standing. But it’s been converted into the Dokumentationszentrum (Documentation Centre), a museum chronicling the rise, rule and fall of the Nazi party. The exhibition is absolutely outstanding. You come to understand how Hitler managed to bring an entire nation of ordinary people unquestioningly in line with his extremist agenda. This is certainly something you cannot miss when visiting Nuremburg.

A few weeks before I went to Nuremberg, I visited Dachau, the first concentration camp built by the Nazis (it’s just outside Munich). It wasn’t exactly a fun day, but it was educational. My experience in Berlin was the same. All throughout Germany, the horrors of the Nazi era have been unflinchingly documented.

Not to excuse what happened, obviously, but you have to give this country a ton of credit for being brutally honest about its past and trying to understand how it was allowed to happen. You don’t see the same mea culpas from many countries who still chastise Germany about the Nazi period, yet have had equally shameful periods in their own past, and way longer to come to terms with them. I don’t see a slavery museum on the Mall in Washington DC, for instance. And Australia still celebrates its national day on the anniversary of the arrival of the First Fleet, dispossessing the original inhabitants of their land and beginning two centuries of their decimation and misery.

There was a neat ending to the Nazi period for Nuremberg, though. During the denazification period, the city became the scene of what are now known as the Nuremberg trials, in which the big wigs of the Nazi party who still remained alive were tried for their war crimes. Incredibly, many of them denied all knowledge of their own party’s policy of systematic genocide, even though they had signed with their own hands the orders that brought these horrific acts about. The Dokumentationszentrum has video footage from these trials, and it’s pretty gobsmacking to watch these guys baldly lying about their involvement. What utter creeps.

It’s a shame that after two visits to Nuremberg, I just spent an entire entry talking about Nazis. It really is a beautiful city, I promise. I’ll have to go back there a third time and come back with a blog post that’s solely about lebkuchen and sausage…

Banana bread diplomacy

I love my life here in Munich – the job is great, learning German is an everyday adventure, and the city provides a never-ending supply of new things to explore. But I have to confess, there some things I really do miss here.

One is the wonderful circle of friends I had in Seattle. Although I’ve made some good acquaintances here and my colleagues are awesome, my, ahem, developing German skills make me feel pretty socially retarded at times.

To be honest, I think I like my own company a little too much, or I probably would have put more effort into meeting new people. I spend a lot of time on my own here (hence the blog name). But sometimes, a gal just wants to call someone up and go for some pad thai, y’know? Around holiday time, I had to stop going to the Christmas markets after a while, because walking around by myself seeing everyone drinking glühwein with their friends was kind of depressing me.

By extension, another thing I miss here is being able to feed people. I adore cooking, and these days it’s not as easy to find willing guinea pigs for whatever recipe I’m dying to try out. I have to be a lot more judicious with my grocery shopping and cooking to make sure I don’t end up throwing out half the contents of my fridge every fortnight. My backlog of “to try” recipes is growing by the week.

A seemingly unrelated dilemma helped me make baby steps towards rectifying both these deficiencies: the bananas in my fruit bowl were starting to go soft. And there is really only one right answer to what you should do when you have overripe ‘nanners: make banana bread.

So I baked some bread, and ate three giant delicious slices with impunity because I was running 22km that afternoon. (If you’re wondering why runners run, that’s one of your reasons right there. If you love eating, I highly recommend you learn to love running – your life will instantly attain new levels of awesome.) But then I still had 9 giant slices of banana bread left, and they certainly weren’t going to fit into my belly, nor were they going to still taste good for my colleagues on Monday.

Then, I remembered something. During my first couple of weeks in Munich, I had met a random Canadian PhD student who’d been here for two or three years. She told me that she’d spent her first six months in Germany holed up in her lab and her apartment, too scared to strike up any non-essential conversations on account of her terrible German. One day, she finally decided enough was enough. She spent the morning baking, and walked up and down the stairwell of her building, ringing on doorbells and handing out brownies.

“Oh”, I said, “I didn’t know Germans did the whole randomly-pop-in-and-say-hello-to-strangers thing. It doesn’t seem in line with the national character, does it?”

“Oh, it totally isn’t!” she said. “They all looked at me like I was dangerously insane. But they liked the brownies. And now they all say hello to me on the stairs. I’m the girl on the second floor with the brownies.”

In a burst of resolve, I decided that I would go downstairs and offer my neighbours some of my banana bread. It couldn’t be that bad, right? I think the people who live below me are students, because there are four names on each apartment door, and I’ve never seen anyone in the building over 30. And students are generally nice. So I grabbed my container full of ‘nannery goodness and walked down one flight of stairs.

And suddenly, I was terrified. For about five minutes, I just stood on that fourth floor landing, silently freaking out. I sidled from one door to the other, trying to decide which set of names looked the friendliest.

I finally decided on the apartment directly below mine, since one of the names on the door was Irish – possibly an exchange student? If so, maybe this mob would be more patient with my craptastic Deutsch. And even if they weren’t, offering them some banana bread would at least assuage some of my guilt about the fact that they have to hear me walking across my creaky floors at 5:30 every morning.

After picking a door, it took me another full two to three minutes to muster the courage to ring the doorbell. I started to imagine that someone inside was looking through their peephole wondering what the hell I was doing out there, and that made me even more nervous.

Finally, I grew a pair (not literally) and hit the d0orbell. I heard some movement inside, and then a muffled female voice: “Ja, hello?” Crap, they weren’t even going to open the door. Oh, shit. Oh, shit.

“Er, hi. Mein Name ist Urmila, ich wohne auf der 5. Stock. Ich hab’ viel zu viel Bananenbrot gebacken. Möchtest du ein Stück?”

(Hi, my name’s Urmila, I live upstairs. [I totally piecemealed that sentence using my limited vocabulary.] I made way too much banana bread, would you like a piece?)

Oh lord, I thought, please let there have been less than three grammatical mistakes in that ad lib. And should I have used “Sie”, not “du”? I can’t tell how old the person behind the door is. Help?!

There was a pause. And then the door opened to reveal a girl around my age (so “du” was okay – phew!). She looked a little bemused, but not in an omg-is-she-a-stalker kind of way. I held out my tray full of banana bread in appeasement for the way I’d just discombobulated her mother tongue. And then, in German, she invited me in.

I walked into her living room, and she told me that she’d been asleep. Oh bollocks, bad start. But she didn’t seem to mind. She took some banana bread, and we chatted for a few minutes. As I headed out (leaving another couple of pieces for her roommates), she invited me to a Fasching party at their place that evening. She was a nice girl!

I walked back up the stairs to my apartment and sat down at the kitchen table. That encounter had gone better than I thought, but I really didn’t have the wherewithal to go knock on any more doors. It was exhausting.

This is the real reason I haven’t made any friends, I thought. I’m happy to yak for 45 minutes in terrible German to a random shopkeeper in Regensburg, because I’m never going to see them again, and therefore I don’t really care how stupid I sound. But when it comes to trying to make friends, you don’t want someone’s mental index of you to be “that foreign girl who talks like she’s in kindergarten”. And forcing a German person to speak to me entirely in English in their own country seems like a cop-out – I don’t want to do it. I’d rather be friendless. (Like I said. I like my own company too much.)

So I’ve made it into a Catch 22 situation (or, as I heard a German once call it, a “hen and egg problem”). If I don’t learn to speak German, I won’t make any friends. But if I don’t make any friends, who am I going to practise on?

It’s really hard, trying to make a connection with someone in a language you’re still learning. You can’t express your personality, you can’t pull out the anecdotes and idiosyncratic figures of speech that make you you. Hell, half the time you’re asking the other person to talk slower just so you can understand what they’re saying. You just have to plough on, knowing full well that you probably sound like an idiot, and hoping the person will appreciate your efforts and be patient with you. The entire process is totally humbling. But each step, each small achievement is also very satisfying.

As my manager at work once told me in a totally different context, I have to stop being such a perfectionist. I can’t keep standing in the background too scared of making mistakes to even open my mouth.

So I might have only given away a third of my banana bread today, but I’m still happy with my baby step. I have to keep pushing myself out of my shell, no matter how much my pride gets dented. The ultimate reward is well worth the - *gasp* – mistakes. Let’s see how this Faschingsparty goes – no pressure, no diamonds…

Excuse me ma’am, I think your epidermis is showing

I arrived in Germany for the first time in the dog days of summer, and it didn’t take too many trips to local parks and lakes to confirm that people here are quite comfortable in their own skins. FKK (Freikörper Kultur, or “free body culture”) is alive and well in Germany.

It’s quite noticeable after several years on the more prudish side of the Atlantic. The city parks here have a designated section for nude bathing in summer. (Nude senior citizens playing volleyball – I promise it’s a sight you won’t easily forget.) Watching the screens at the gym one morning, I saw a news story featuring uncensored footage of topless Ukrainian women leading a protest march (don’t ask me, I had no audio). And in a recent nationwide poll of attitudes to the new full body scanners being deployed at airports around the world, most Germans are fine with having a stranger seeing the outline of their naked body.

In a nutshell: nudity is not such a big deal here.

It makes sense when you think about it. We all have arms and legs and body hair and private parts – so what’s to hide? In a secure, modern, civilised society, what are we trying to protect ourselves from, exactly? When you consider the gratuitous violence that’s par for the course in Hollywood, it seems almost laughable that Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction could cause such an uproar.

Of course, there’s a difference between being able to accept that logic intellectually, and actually putting it into practice. Old hang-ups die hard.

During my first three weeks in Germany, I was somewhat mortified not to be able to find a gym where you could shower in the privacy of a cubicle. In America and Australia, you’ll see one or two people walking around the locker room in the buff, but they’re the exception rather than the rule. And there’s always a private shower. I was brought up the Indian way – I don’t walk around naked in front of other people, even if they are all women. I just don’t.

So when I finally found a gym with shower cubicles, I joined, even though it cost almost twice as much as the cheapest gym in my area. All was well again in the land of Urmi’s maidenly modesty.

That is, until the day I came back sweaty and exhausted from my workout, grabbed my gym bag, and headed to the showers, only to find that – *gasp* – the entire cubicled section was closed for repairs. The only bathing facility available was the tiled 4x4m prison-style shower room, with shower heads spaced three feet apart along each wall.

Oh, how my heart quailed.

I was already running behind schedule, so there was no time to decamp to the privacy of my apartment. And I’d hit the gym hard, so there was no way I could skip the shower and be sure that my colleagues would leave the office alive that afternoon. So I was in a little bit of, ahem, hot water.

Slinking back to my locker, I took a few deep breaths, shut my eyes tight (I don’t really know why), and changed out of my gym clothes. I opened my eyes  and peered around. No-one was giving me a second glance.

I walked over to the shower room holding my ineffectual little square of gym towel that is small enough to fit in my gym bag, but not big enough to cover me up. A tall, blonde, athletic Aryan amazon sauntered past me nonchalantly, and I wanted to go hide in a corner. But I steeled myself and moved on. Onward to the Dusche (it’s going to take me a while not to find that German word funny).

There were already two other women at opposite ends of the shower room. Both were facing the wall and getting on with things. I set myself up in the far corner, trying to stay inconspicuous in the eyes of whatever bogeyman my vivid imagination had decided was watching me.

And then, at some point while standing under the hot water, I simply stopped caring. We were all just a bunch of people trying to get through our Monday, and worrying what anyone thought of me in here was about as ridiculous as wondering whether my fellow commuters on the U-Bahn were taking notes on my choice of shoes. I stopped comparing myself to everyone else, and stopped fancying that anyone else was comparing themselves to me.

I’m not saying I’m about to go join the nude volleyballers in the English Garden. But I’m a little less uptight than I was last week, and I’m pretty sure that’s a good thing.

Cool runnings

I have a small confession to make: I’m one of those weird people who likes to run. I spent my single-digit years watching my parents run the City to Surf every year, until one day in Year 6, I convinced my dad to take me one of his weekend jogs. I’ve been running on and off ever since.

2009 was a high watermark in my running career. I ran my first half marathon in San Francisco. I was in the best shape of my life, and would enthusiastically spring out of bed before 6 each glorious Seattle summer morning to enjoy some miles before the sun got too high. But I’ve always had one weakness: I’ve never run through the winter. Each year, when the days get short and Seattle’s thermometer starts to dip below 45 degrees Fahrenheit (7°C), I hang up my joggers for the season. Running in the rain for 6 months is no fun.

So perhaps it was a rather foolhardy move on my part last October to sign up for my first ever marathon, in Vancouver in May. At that point, there were still leaves on the trees, the beer gardens were still open, and daytime temperatures were comfortably in the teens. I guess after a typically sublime Seattle summer and an autumn spent drinking beer under the lime trees, I had managed to forget what winter actually feels like.

And then… it got cold. Kind of batshit insane cold.

The first stage is always denial. I went and hid in the gym all November and December, taking shelter in the fact that my 18-week marathon training schedule only started after Christmas. Ah, sweet procrastination.

But then the holidays came and went, and it was time to stop being such a complete and utter wusser. As a wise, 100% genuine Münchner colleague of mine told me: “there’s no such thing as bad weather – only bad clothing.”

My baggy trackie-dacks and jumper weren’t going to cut it in Munich, that was for sure. I had to shell out for some proper cold-weather running gear. This is what you’ll see me decked out in these days for a run:

• My green knitted tuque that makes me look like a homeless lady
• A moisture-wicking t-shirt (I now understand the catchphrase “cotton kills”), under a breathable fleece, under my trusty old REI rain jacket
• Stupendous ninja-style running tights with racing stripes, which cost me almost as much as the rest of my clothes put together. But they are worth every penny, god bless them: miraculously warm, and if I am ever hardcore enough to run the Polar Circle Marathon, these are the pants to whom I will entrust my life.
• Moisture-wicking gloves, with woollen gloves over the top.
• 2 pairs of long socks, and running shoes.

The first time I put on this outfit, I went over to the mirror, fully expecting to look as sleek, athletic and stylish as the runners I saw in Montreal last Christmas, cranking out hill repeats on Mont Royal in -20.

… I’m sure you already know how this ends. I possess no such natural elegance. To be exact, my ensemble had more of an eclectic, hobo-meets-lycra-goddess-meets-Paddington-Bear’s-goth-phase aesthetic. As I shuffled out into the street, an old lady hurried by me with the sideways glance you give someone who looks mildly dangerous.

You might think I’m exaggerating about how I look, but I don’t think so. The following has happened to me three times:

It’s still dark, I’m pounding down the street, probably inadvertantly emitting random words of whatever song I am listening to on my Zune. A young woman is walking alone in the twilight about half a block ahead, and, hearing my quick footsteps and strange vocal gymnastics, quickens her pace. Pretty much oblivious to everything but my body and the music, I continue full steam ahead.

When I’m about 10 metres behind her, the girl turns her head slightly and catches in her peripheral vision the apparently terrifying sight of me bearing down on her at 8:45 pace. The poor girl clutches her bag even tighter and starts to run. It’s at this point that I usually realise what’s happening and have to control my laughter. I barrel past the wretched high-heeled fruhaufsteherin and give her a cheery “Morgen!”. She looks sheepish but relieved, and slows back down to a walk.

-

After a couple of weeks of acclimatisation and clothing refinement, I got comfortable with running in the cold. It’s only the first few minutes out of the house that are hard. As I step out into the street, the sudden cold is like a slap in the face. But then after a few seconds, the only thing that’s really freezing is my feet. I haven’t figured out how to keep my feet warm when I can only wear so many layers of socks inside my runners. It’s fine once I get going, but every time I stop at a traffic light, I swear can feel the bridges of my feet creaking.

Sometimes, there’s a wind blowing. Oh good lord. That wind slices straight through every layer.  I could be wearing a bikini for all the good my layers do in a breeze.

But as my body slowly starts to warm up and I hit my stride, I start thinking how nice it feels to be out on such a crisp winter’s morning. Munich always feels big and bustling, but this is one time I have the city to myself. The sidewalks are practically deserted at this time of the morning, especially on Mondays. Only the occasional Volkswagen trundles down Ludwigstrasse. Munich’s Starbucks-style coffee chains, which were even open on Christmas Day, are yet to crank out their first Doppel Espresso. Sometimes I make it a point to run past the Wimmer bakery, which opens at 6:30, just to get a whiff of the croissants.

The sun won’t be up for an hour or so. For this surreal 60 minutes before dawn, the sky is a deep, arresting shade of royal blue (or mauve if it’s cloudy). People rave about sunset, but to me there is something just as magical about running in l’heure bleue. The sky is subdued yet radiant, the calm before the storm of urban activity ahead. Running at this time of the morning is sublime.

When I run on the weekends, the dark isn’t as much of an issue, and I can choose the warmest part of the day. (That is, I get to run in –2 instead of –10. Ha!) But there’s still another challenge. Unless there’s a been a consistent string of days either above or below freezing, there is almost always ice on the sidewalks. For the record, I am the world’s most uncoordinated person, and that’s a fact, so I don’t need any help tripping over my own feet, thanks very much.

Initially I put an embargo on running while there was any snow on the ground, but it didn’t take me long to realise that if I really followed this rule, I might as well drop out of the marathon altogether. It’s been snowing at least once a week here since early December, and we’re a long way yet from spring.

So I finally bit the bullet and went for my first run on snow. The feeling under your feet is that of running on sand, but with a lot less give, thank goodness. The main challenge is to stay upright when you accidentally hit an icy patch. The trick to this seems to be the same as with skiing – just keep going. Against all your instincts of self-preservation, you have to keep leaning forward and ploughing on when you feel your grip on the ground start to loosen. It’s the only way. 

Once I figured that out, running after the snow fall was simply wonderful. All the local parks and soccer pitches were vast fields of undisturbed white. I ran past a huge cemetery named Nordfriedhof that was full of big old gravestones and big old trees. These old European cemeteries look beautiful any time of year, but covered in a dusting of snow, they look particularly picturesque.

The most fun part was running through Munich’s Olympic Park. The home stretch of my first snowy run went over Olympiaberg, a big hill built over the rubble of World War Two air raids. There’s a cobblestone path up over the hill, popular with dog walkers, old couples and tourists getting the panoramic view out over the city. On this day, it was all kids out with their sleds, squealing with delight on each ride down the slope. Oodles of fun to watch.

By the time I got home, the cold wasn’t bothering me at all and I was navigating the ice like Torville and Dean. The best way to banish an excuse forever is to break through it once. None left now! Onward and Vancouver-ward!

Home sweet home, take 2

As my grandma pointed out when we Skyped on Thursday (I challenge any other septuagenarian to match her technological skillz), it’s been a while since I posted here. Once my folks left town, January was busy with a weeklong trip to Seattle, and packing up and moving to my new apartment. I also got stuck into my training schedule for the Vancouver marathon in May, which I am going to say diverted some of the creative juices from my brain to my legs. I have a few blog posts in the works, but they aren’t in a publishable state yet. Stay tuned.

I absolutely adore my new apartment, in the university district of Maxvorstadt. The day after I arrived in Munich back in August, I walked to my first day at work, from my hotel near the Hauptbahnhof (central train station) to my new office in the north of Schwabing. That hour and a half’s walk took me past the museums, university buildings and student hangouts of Maxvorstadt. I knew already from that day that I wanted to live there.

I didn’t end up finding any vacant apartments there at that time, so I found a place closer to work. When my stay in Munich was extended, I had to find another place to stay once my first lease was up. This time I managed to find a little attic apartment right in the heart of Maxvorstadt. I couldn’t believe my luck!

So in I moved at the end of January. I had to get all my stuff up five storeys without an elevator – luckily I had my lovely friend Radhika and her husband to help me out in that department. For the first few days, I felt strangely agoraphobic. I’d gotten really used to my tiny 23 square metre broom closet in Bonner Platz, and my new place, which is twice as big, felt eerily spacious. But over the next few days, as I unpacked everything and stocked up on groceries (apartments without cooking supplies in the fridge feel sterile to me), the place started to feel like home.

The place has some quirks (no microwave, no curtains?! Wtf – I am using newspaper), but it’s nice to have a separate bedroom again. It’s nice to have a kitchen I can move around in. It’s nice to have a dining table with space for a fruit bowl and a vase of fresh flowers. And it’s AWESOME to look out the window every day over the rooftops of Munich, and see the Olympia Tower in the distance.

My new neighbourhood is so great. I walk out the front door and I’m in the thick of human activity. My favourite coffee shop in Munich is two blocks away, there are four supermarkets on my block, and the smell of wood-fired pizza wafts into my apartment windows in the evening. There is an English tea house nearby that I am excited to try (I am a tea nut). And when I went exploring today, I found two super-nice organic stores, an Indian supermarket, an Asian supermarket, and a second hand English book store. SCORE.

The next six months are going to be gut, gut, super gut.

Where the wild things are

Bavaria is known today for being the most traditional, devoutly Catholic corner of Germany. (We even get a public holiday for Epiphany and Corpus Christi. Score!) But before a single steeple towered over Germany, the villagers of the Bavarian Alps worshipped at the altar of nature – exalting the spirits of the mountains, the forests, and the elements.

These days, very few of the old pre-Christian traditions remain. Many of the important days on the Pagan calendar were adapted by the Catholic church into officially-sanctioned holidays (for example, Christmas replaced the Roman festival of Saturnalia). What couldn’t be Christianised was, in some cases, banned. But the isolation of the alpine villages allowed some of the ancient traditions to continue intact.

In those long-gone times, it was believed that the coming of winter brought not only cold weather and the deadening of the soil, but treacherous spirits of all kinds. Keeping these spirits at bay was the goddess Frau Perchta, accompanied by her entourage of helpers, some beautiful, some grotesque, known as the Perchten. Perchta was also said to know if children had been good or bad during the past year, and reward or punish them accordingly (sound familiar?).

Out of these beliefs came the tradition of the Perchtenlauf (Perchten run). On several sacred nights each winter, the men of the village would dress up in the fantastical guise of Perchten, and run through town expelling the evil spirits from their midst with lots of noise and mischief. Of course, each pocket of the Alps has its variations on the stories and traditions, but you get the basic idea. Gangs of dudes running through the streets, basking in the anonymity of frightening ten-kilogram masks. Much mayhem ensues.

With the resurgence of interest in Indo-Germanic culture, the Perchtenlauf has been dragged out of obscurity, and is now celebrated with renewed gusto across southern Germany and Austria. It’s even reached as far north as the outskirts of Munich. When a colleague of mine told me the Perchtenlauf was his most favourite Bavarian tradition, I had to go and check it out for myself.

In the 10,000-strong town of Kirchseeon, just outside Munich, a small but devoted group of neo-Pagan enthusiasts has been reviving the tradition of Perchtenlauf each winter for the last fifty years. Kirchseeon is only a half-hour drive from town on the autobahn, but it feels like a different world – rural and quaint. Its modest town centre is by the railway station, and narrow one-lane dirt roads link the main street to the tiny satellite communities of Riedering, Ilching and Buch, each literally only three or four blocks in diameter.

My friends Radhika and CM came with me on this adventure. We parked the car by the main street and walked through snow-steeped fields to the outskirts of Riedering, where a small crowd was gathering. There were a lot of kids there, and as the time for the Perchtenlauf approached, they were practically bursting with excitement.

After a few minutes, we started to hear rousing drumbeats in the distance. As everyone craned their necks to look out over the fields, a motley crew approached…

Hairy, wild-eyed monsters, horned devils, and savage-looking wolves made up the parade, accompanied by a marching band of drummers and cowbell players with oversized cartoon heads. It was really quite a sight!

The Perchten galumphed noisily into the village with the stream of spectators in tow. One long-snouted beast hung back with the crowd, accepting donations of coins and notes in his rather vicious-looking maw. 

The Perchten stopped at various points in the village to perform a strange ritual. They would form a pentacle with their staffs, and dance around this in a circle while singing exhortations to the spirits. I couldn’t follow the songs very well, but I did hear the word “raus” a lot, which means “get out” – so my hypothesis is that they were telling those pesky evil spirits of winter where to go.

The dances were accompanied by the musicians I mentioned earlier. Now when I said cowbell players, they weren’t each just ringing the crap out of a single cowbell like you would hear at the last mile of a fun run. No, these guys were playing what I can only describe as a xylophone made of bells. It sounded tuneful, and yet ancient and primitive at the same time. It reminded me of gamelan music.

It wasn’t all just a quaint rustic alpine song-and-dance though. The Perchten were having a field day fulfilling their secondary function of causing mayhem wherever they went. They tiptoed (if you can imagine a 6 foot 5 monster with tusks tiptoeing) behind old ladies and yelled loudly, scaring them out of their wits.

One creature stole a little boy’s hat and balanced it on one of his horns for the duration of an entire dance. For the first few seconds, the boy looked proud that his hat was the centre of attention in the dance. Then he started to get worried that he wasn’t going to get it back. His trembling lips were on the verge of emitting a wail, when the monster returned to deposit the hat on the boy’s head, gave his nose a playful tug, and then cantered back to join his fellow Perchten.

At one point, the procession passed by a small hill covered in fresh snow. One of the Perchten saw his chance, and ran up the hill overlooking the path. From this vantage point, he began to make snowballs and rain them down on the passing crowd. The children squealed with delight and began to make their own snowballs, giving as good as they got from the monsters three times their size.

And one Perchten simply went over to his wife/girlfriend and hugged her tightly, fangs and horns and all. The woman looked pleased, but still rather bewildered – kind of the same expression she would have had if her husband were roaring drunk, as opposed to dressed as a giant monster.

We got done with the first village of Riedering. The procession headed out into the fields to the next village. By this point, the Perchten and the civilians were completely mixed together on the little dirt road. A very hairy werewolf fell into step with me and put his arm jovially around my shoulder with a muffled “Grüss Gott”. (When I read that sentence over in isolation, it sounds so bizarre.) I turned to smile up at him, giving him the perfect opening to reach down and pull my winter hat over my face. Doh!

Darkness was quickly falling. The Perchten lit fiery torches and carried them during their dances, lending the scene a touch of drama.

As the action headed to the third village, we headed back to our car so we wouldn’t be wandering about the fields of rural Bavaria in pitch darkness. (In hindsight, that might have been fun. But it was so bloody cold.) We got there without being abducted by any evil spirits, so I guess the Perchten did their job!

Guten Rutsch!

I am standing on the rubble of buildings destroyed in Allied air raids. The sky glimmers fretfully with blinding flashes of light. My ears ring with loud explosions, punctuated by human cries and the yelps of traumatised geese. All I can smell is smoke.

Nope, I didn’t find a time machine to transport me back to wartime Germany. The scene I’m describing is the last night of 2009 in Munich.

New Year’s Eve, or Silvester as it’s called in Germany, is in many ways a pretty standard affair here. Everyone buggers off from work early; the streets are full of stumbling drunk people; and all the cellular networks jam up as the clock strikes twelve.

Now, I grew up in Sydney – the first really big city in the world to enter each new year. NYE is basically the one time a year that Sydney makes it onto global news bulletins, so we like to do it up big over there. Every year 5 tonnes and several million dollars worth of fireworks are blown up over Sydney Harbour – literally our fifteen minutes of fame. It’s unfailingly spectacular – the premier pyrotechnic display on the planet. You have to go camp out along the harbour at 1 o’clock in the afternoon if you want to beat the other 2 million spectators to the prime viewing spots.

So I’m not too easily impressed by fireworks. Once I moved to Seattle, I became pretty meh about the whole new year thing. Not much to write home about compared to my home town.

So why was my Silvester in Munich blog-worthy? Because in Germany, you get to light your OWN fireworks.

A lot of people have an impression of me as rather a sensible young lady, but I do also have my pyromaniacal side. When I went to a department store on the 30th of December and found the ground floor full of explosives for perfectly legitimate sale, the way forward was obvious.



With several score Euro worth of fireworks in hand, my parents and I made our way to Olympiapark, the site of the 1972 summer games. As well as housing the main stadium and several other event venues, the park is home to a giant grassy mound built over the rubble of buildings destroyed during World War Two. This hill, named Olympiaberg, is one of the highest points in Munich, which is otherwise pretty much as flat as a pancake. On a clear day the views from Olympiaberg are wonderful.



Olympiapark’s normally a pretty quiet place. I go running there a lot, because as I mentioned, it’s one of the only places in the city where I can get some hills into my training. It’s mostly joggers and dog walkers and kids on the swings. But on the 31st of December, Olympiapark is a magnet for all of Munich’s pyromaniacs.

Now, Germans have a reputation for being rather a stolid, orderly, rule-following people. And on the whole it seems fairly true. Until now I’d only noticed two major outlets for German non-conformism: they drive like maniacs on the highway, and they like to walk around and play volleyball in the nude. I have now discovered a third situation in which Germans like to go a little bit crazy: the situation in which they are in possession of legal explosives.

As early as 3pm, people were already letting off rockets in the streets. And I mean on major thoroughfares, off apartment balconies, in high density areas. I want to know how many buildings have caught fire from a rocket accidentally going through someone’s window. By 10pm, we were hearing several loud bangs every minute. And by the time we emerged from the U-Bahn station at Olympiapark, the scene I described in my first paragraph was well underway.



As we walked through the park, I almost jumped out of my skin several times as loud explosions erupted only a few feet away. Every square metre of non-flammable surface (ie. footpath) was colonised by groups of grinning revellers lighting fuses on products with names like “Dance of the Vampire”, “The Hell Fountain”, “Firefly” and “Moonshot”. The buffer zone between civilians and pyros was non-existent. Only about 30% of the people I saw lighting fireworks seemed entirely sober. We staked out a piece of territory by the lake and started our own fireworks show.

As expected, it was a LOT of fun. There was one scary moment where my rocket shot off on a sideways trajectory instead of straight upwards, but luckily it went across the lake and landed harmlessly on some wet grass on the other side. I was enjoying myself so much that by 11:45 we had already consumed our entire stock of fireworks.

But that was okay, because by this time you could see that other people’s pyrotechnics were building to a peak. As the clock ticked closer and closer to midnight, the seasoned pyrotechnicians were pulling out their big guns (literally). By 12am, the sky was absolutely chockers with fireworks and the sound was deafening. It didn’t have the professional coordination of the Sydney display, but the combined effect of thousands of Münchners’ fireworks was an equally stupendous sight. With our own bag of tricks empty, we could just sit back happily and watch the show.

Apart from being a whole bag of fun, the city of Munich's stance of outsourcing the NYE fireworks to the public is a pretty astute one, I have to say. Not only does it avoid shelling out millions of government Euro to put on a coordinated display, but it must also be a nice bump to the retail economy to start the year. Not to mention that it probably isn't worth Munich's while to try and compete with the globally televised pyrotechnic extravaganza up in Berlin.

I’ll never forget this New Year’s Eve. Open source fireworks FTW!

Other miscellaneous Silvester observations:

• The German phrase for “happy new year” is interesting. It’s “guten Rutsch” (or more fully, “einen guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr”), which means “have a good slide into the new year!”
• As if you needed any further proof how strong the drinking culture is in Bavaria, Munich has to be the only city I’ve ever seen whose official site has a page of tips on avoiding and treating New Year’s Day hangovers. Btw the German word for hangover is also fun – it’s “kater”, or “tom cat”!