The Romantic Road - part I

  Wurzburg, Germany
Friday, October 26, 2007

There wasn't much I could think of as being romantic in Germany.  Not with their well-known efficiency and orderliness, their fast Porches and BMW's, or their harsh-sounding mother tongue particularly loud when swaying jugs in overflowing beer gardens. So when I discovered a whole section on the Romantic Road in my Germany Lonely Planet, it was hard to sit still.
 
Ed and I soon realized this was not to be taken lightly as this so-called Romantic Road traversed 350 km's down the middle of the history-enriched state of Bavaria.  So we took Friday off work, booked a car in Frankfurt and made sure it was equipped with a good GPS.


 
And so began our trip down the Romantic Road.  After we finally managed to turn the car on (German cars require you have your foot on the clutch for ignition) we headed towards the city of Würzburg.  The road was flushed with a bright opus of ginger, amber and cinnamon announcing the proud presence of Autumn, in case anyone dared to forget.  Anything could be romantic in a setting like this, but apparently, it was not the literal meaning of the word 'romantic' we had to pay attention to, but rather the 18th century intellectual and artistic movement known as Romanticism. There's a difference.
 
Romanticism had to do with emotion as a source of art, music, and literature; a harsh contrast against the scientific rationalization of the Enlightenment period.  Romantics weren't only looking at emotions such as love and happiness for inspiration, but also horror, fear, and anguish. In music it is translated in the emotive symphonies of Beethoven and Mozart, in literature the Gothic works of Edgar Allan Poe or Mary Shelley, and in art it was the epic images of Delacroix and Goya.
 
Romantics sought the tranquillity of nature and quiet fields, and fantasised of epic tales and far away lands with heroes and heroines from different times.  You might call them day dreamers, but it was in this day dreaming that the ideals that fuelled the French Revolution were born.  And so this is the sentiment that roams free in the Romantic Road in Bavaria, with idyllic landscapes and rustic scenes of a laid back life in the mountains, mused by reverie and dreamscapes.



We reached the opulent city of Würzburg where a cold day was rising and people were out and about hurrying with breakfast in one hand, paper in the other.  The marketplatz was already filled with little stalls selling small Christmas trees and wreaths, ceramic angels and wooden toy soldiers, woven baskets and rainbow candy canes. The smell of pretzels fresh out of the oven hung low in the air as if beckoning its perfect companion: a cup of hot chocolate.  The marine curves of Rococo ornaments decorated facades and doors, windows and roofs, in extraordinary and unusual pastel colors. 
 
We made it to the Würzburg Residez, our reason for visiting this splendid city.  It was the palace of the prince-bishops of Würzburg since the 18th century when Prince Bishop Johann Philipp Franz von Schönborn moved his court from a nearby fortress to this then small and unimportant residence.  He needed a palace that would show the world his power and fortune, not to mention his ego.  And so began the works to the Residence whose façade was constructed from yellow sandstone giving the building a golden glow, particularly on an autumn afternoon like this.



Inside we were greeted with the warning that it was absolutely prohibited to take photographs inside the palace.  Anyone who knows me or reads this log will know that there is nothing that pisses me off more.  Why would anyone travel for so long, invest time and money, get enthusiastic about the place, and pay the bloated entrance fee only then to be forced to limit yourself to rely on your memory.  Don't these people know how important photography is for a traveller?  And all for what? For some cliché postcards that cost €0.70 each!
 
The anarchist inside me decided this time we weren't going to abide by the idiotic and unfair rules, so I liaised with Ed and we hid a camera under our coats.  (Please forgive the images as they are shot at random with poor lighting and even poorer angles from under Ed's jacket)
 
But back to the palace.  The tour guide explained as we stood in the Imperial Hall, a vestibule which was the size of a small modern mansion, that the prince bishop Johan Philipp was inspired in Versailles and the court of Louis XIV.  Using the French château architectural model he commissioned Balthasar Neumann to oversee the work.  We faced the grand staircase which, according to the tour guide, had unusually low steps which made a person's climb upwards to meet their host very elegant and graceful.  He encouraged us to climb each step and see how distinguished our walk would be. He was right! All I needed now was an 18th century silk dress and white curly wig and I'd be done for.



We reached the Grand Staircase which was probably what the palace was most famous for.  I remembered it from Art History in college as an exquisite example of a Rococo interior.  The Italian painter Giovanni Battista Tiepolo had been summoned from warm sunny Venice to cold grey Bavaria for the purpose of decorating the huge vault, the largest ceiling fresco ever painted. Fittingly enough, Tiepolo chose the World as a theme and personified each continent with regal female figures, one in each cardinal point.  The highlight of the fresco is of course the allegory for Europe, with the court of Wurzburg surrounded by angels and goddesses and Tiepolo himself in the epicentre of the arts and culture. 
 
But more interesting was the view that Europe had of America at that time.  The guide explained that the personification of America was the obscurest, mainly because the continent had been discovered only a couple centuries before, and not much was known about the land or the people.  It was common belief that Native Americans were savages, beneath human beings, closer to animals.  So Tiepolo's allegory depicts an American queen with darkened skin and a crown of colored feathers riding a beastly crocodile, while her entourage of natives are cannibalizing and performing other savageries.
 


The rest of the rooms in the palace were richly decorated with the Baroque finesse that characterized this era, and most people flinched when we walked into one of the lavishly ornamented rooms.  I didn't though; I love Rococo and Baroque interiors with their attention to detail and perfection, and the floral and leafy motifs refined into elegant shapes and images in every corner and nook of the room.  No space is squandered and the key is to think in excess.

 It was unfortunate that the Imperial Hall was all covered up undergoing preservation, since this is the culmination of the magnificent sequence of rooms of the palace.  It is worth noting that most of the palace was destroyed during the Second World War when British bombers hit Germany.  Thankfully, or should I say miraculously, the priceless frescos of the palace were salvaged and after 20 million euros of rebuilding, it was all restored to its original plenitude.



After a quick walk around the disappointing palace gardens we grabbed a coffee and headed out of Würzburg towards our next destination. On our way out we spotted the old Fortress Marienberg from across the Main River, whose waters reflected the rise of the auburn hill on which the fortress stood. Symbol of Würzburg and home to the prince-bishop's court for centuries, we took comfort that the mighty building still stood strong and paternal as we drove out of the city, southbound on this Romantic Road.