A Week in Bavaria (Bayern)

Several things came together to suggest that a week in June might be the best time for us to go revisit some places where Elder Howlett served over 45 years ago. The first thing was that we weren’t going to have a car for a week -- ours was needed by someone else for a trip to Hungary. We thought we could take that time to make a train trip. There was a holiday on Monday the first of June, so we would only be away 4 normal work days. Then it became necessary to ferry some equipment in the direction we wanted to go, and it needed to be there before the holiday, so another pool car was found for us to use and we left early Saturday morning. After making the delivery about noon, we drove just a little further to Regensburg, Bavaria, where Elder H had worked more than 7 months in 1962.
Regensburg is one of the older cities of Germany. It is at the northern-most point of the Danube (Donau) River where it turns south-east to flow across several countries before it empties into a sea near Turkey. Obviously, the Romans had found Regensburg, and there are Roman ruins still to be seen. But Regensburg is also a “modern city” and some of that modernity can still be seen.
For instance it was the first place where a bridge was built over the Danube River (1146 AD), and that was early enough that some of the Christian Knights used it as they went to the Holy Land during the Crusades (about 1150 – 1300 AD) That stone bridge is still there, and we walked over it.

Regensburg had a Catholic Bishop way back then (which means they had a Cathedral or “Dom”), and one of those bishops was responsible for the conversion of people in lands further east to the Roman version of Catholicism. Those people were historically and culturally tied closer to Greece so they would otherwise have been part of the Greek Catholic church. Such events change history!
Regensburg became a scene of particular stress later after the Protestant Reformation started by Martin Luther. The town became Lutheran, but the Roman Catholic Bishopric, and several abbeys and other Roman Catholic institutions continued to be allied with Rome. The “counter reformation” was the Pope’s attempt to win back territory that had been lost to the Protestants, so Regensburg was a hot bed during those wars. (The Pope didn’t use missionaries, he used armies.) Such fighting among the people produced a hardened people that has continued through many generations, and in the nearly 8 months of tracting over 70 hours per week, Elder Howlett and his companions were only able to teach 4 lessons in that town.
After we got to Regensburg on Saturday, we found where the Regensburg Branch meets, and we arranged to attend Church the next day. We found that they still have only a branch about the same size as it was when Grant was there 47 years ago.

During the last few weeks that Grant was in Regensburg, he and his companion rode out into the neighboring villages to see if there might be a community where they could get a better response. During those rides, we discovered a building built like a Greek temple that overlooked the Danube river. We also found a small town called Neu Traubling, and decided we would start doing missionary work there. We went there several times on our bikes, and made preparations to work there, but a transfer sent me away before much was done. The town was filled with refugees from eastern countries in the Communist lands, and they were more humble than those in Regensburg.
During our day and a half that Pat and I were in Regensburg this time we went to both of these places.

The one is called Walhalla, built to resemble the Parthenon in Greece. It was built by King Ludwig (the First) in 1847 to honor Germans who contributed significantly to the progress of the world. Hundreds of people have been honored by having a bust of them placed in Walhalla.

The view out over the Danube River is beautiful. And the little village of Neu Traubling is now a big industrial center.

Monday we drove down along the Danube to Straubing – another town that Grant had worked in. He lived in the basement of a little factory back then. That is now a big shopping center.
One of the first thing s we saw as we drove into the city was the nest of a live stork on a roof top. Pat remembered reading a story to our children called “Wheel On a Chimney” in which a family put a wheel on their chimney hoping it would encourage storks to build a nest there. This was the first time that either of us had actually seen a real live stork in its nest on a roof top. It was a neat experience.

Straubing is actually older than Regensburg, but they didn’t become as important because they didn’t have a bridge over the river. Views of the old town show the architectural styles of many hundreds of years. It was winter when Grant served there, and the church meetings were held in the apartment of an American military family on a base a few miles out of town. Riding bikes to church in the winter was quite an experience, and they sometimes arrived with their coats covered with frost. The members called them the abominable snowmen. We drove by that military base as we left town to drive to München. This made our journey a little different from what it would have been had we taken the Autobahn. It was a peaceful drive across some beautiful German farmlands. But as we arrived in München, we were glad we had a GPS with us. That is a big city, and it is old with streets going every-which-way. The GPS led us to the Hotel where we had booked four nights. This was a new, ultra-modern Hotel – quite a contrast to the one where we spent two nights in Regensburg. That one had been a hotel for more than 100 years. It was tiny, the floors and stairs squeaked, and the only semi-up-to-date part was the Restaurant. The one in München was definitely built for the 21st century business traveler.
Typical of German old towns, München doesn’t have a lot of parking places, so we usually left our car in the underground garage at the hotel and took the streetcars to places we wanted to go.
Our first day there was spent in the Deutsches (German ) Museum. Grant had been there before during his recovery from a bad illness. He had laryngitis, and couldn’t talk, and his companion could say only very little in German. So we spent a day at the museum to fill our time with something useful.
This is a museum that shows progress in science and industry over many hundreds of years, and in some cases the original experimental apparatus is in this museum. F or instance the original Magdeburg hemispheres that were used to demonstrate the power of air pressure are there. (Search for “Magdeburg Hemispheres” on the Web.) They were placed together and all the air removed from the inside. Teams of up to eight horses were then hooked to each hemisphere, but they couldn’t pull them apart until the valve was opened to let air back inside. Pat and I spent the entire day in the museum, reviewing the progress of man from basic science to astronomy. They had several ships and two submarines to study, and a Zeiss Planitarium to demonstrate our place in the solar system.
The next day was our day to visit the “Fairy-tale King’s Castles.” King Ludwig II (the grandson of King Ludwig I) was possibly the most significant of the kings who lived and traveled in style, but did little to govern the country. He built several castles, each at a cost of many millions of Marks. He idolized King Louis of France, and some of his castles are copies of the French castles.
King Ludwig II had been reared in Hohenschwanngau castle shown here from above. It is just above Pat's elbow. It is one of the older castles that is up in the foot-hills of the Swiss Alps. The Alps rise suddenly out of the mostly-flat farm lands of Bavaria, and the borders between Germany, Switzerland, and Austria run through the first peaks south of the flat land. There are several castles in this border land, and this king was reared in one of them. As he was growing up he spent time in dozens of castles, some in formal circumstances, but a lot in secluded spots. He tended toward life in imagination rather than the real world. When he became king at age 18, he only tried the role of a king for about a year, then withdrew from public life somewhat to develop his fantasies. He built several castles, and rebuilt several others.
The most famous of the new ones is Neuschwannstein, which he built close to the castle where he was reared. This picture shows the newer castle from the older one. While he was remodeling his father’s castle he kept thinking of the old ruin that was up on a higher spot a few miles away. Finally, with the help of a designer of theaters and the inspiration of his friend – the musician Richard Wagner – he was ready to start on the fairy-tale castle that was the inspiration for Disney land. For the rest of his life this project was his major interest.
After visiting both of these castles, we returned to München, again driving through the farm lands of upper (South) Bavaria. Many of the farms had the farm house and the barn combined into a single building.

The end where the people lived was usually plastered and painted, with flowers and pretty windows, but the barn end was usually unpainted wood. We made a stop in the little town of Kaufbeuren - at least it was little when Grant served there as a missionary. There was only one member there when he was transferred in to work as the last companion of an elder who was soon to go home. We baptized two more, and had another couple progressing in that direction when Grant’s companion went home and he was transferred to Heidelberg for his first assignment as a senior companion. Now they are one of the few small towns in Germany where the Church has their own building.
The next day, Thursday, we thought we might be able to see the BMW motor-car assembly plant, so we went by streetcar to their location. Unfortunately, they couldn’t schedule us into the assembly line, but we got to go into their museum.
BMW (Bayrische Motoren Werke = Bavarian Motor Works) has replaced Mercedes Benz as the premier automobile in Germany. From there we went to a part of the Deutsches Museum that had been moved to an old airport on the edge of the city. There we saw the museum of aviation. We saw airplanes I had only read about, and enjoyed it very much. It was early evening when we got back to the motel, but since we had bought day-passes for the streetcars, we decided to go see the central part of München.
The old Cathedral (Dom) known as Die Frauen Kirche (the church of our lady) is the most famous landmark in the old town, but it was partly covered during a repair project.
However we got to see the Rathaus (city council building) with its very old Gothic appearance and the original of the clocks where there are full-sized mannequins that dance around as the clock strikes the hour. We didn’t get to see the dance as it was too late in the evening. We ran out of time, but got a glimpse of the Theresian Wiese where they hold the biggest beer party (Oktoberfest) in the world. I had seen that before, as my first companion picked me up at the train station, then took me just a little way down the street where we stopped to watch the parade of beer wagons. That wasn’t how I wanted to start my mission, and I’m still not interested in such things.

Friday morning we still had several things on our list of things to see and do, but what we wanted to do most was to visit Dachau – the first and most important of the Nazi concentration camps. When Hitler came to power he took advantage of various situations to issue orders whereby he was able to annul laws designed to protect the freedom of the people, and finally by declaring a state of emergency he was able to make himself an absolute dictator with no responsibility to answer to anyone else in any way. Once he reached this state, he proceeded to silence anyone who opposed him. He set up the first concentration camp at Dachau – a suburb of München.


Notice the inscription on this front gate, "Arbeit Macht Frei" which means, "Work Makes Freedom." They never planned to free anyone, just work them to death.

Hitler had his Secret Service (SS men) pickup anyone who opposed him, and without any trial they were locked up in this and hundreds of other camps. Most were political prisoners, some religions – especially the Jews – or from an “undesirable background” like the gypsies. The camps were not run by police. Hitler used these camps to train his SS men. The object was to train up an army of men who would obey all orders without question. The method was to have them run these camps with as much cruelty as possible. At first the goal was to have as many prisoners die as possible.

As you can see, this modern art monument depicts the gross suffering of the prisoners.
A successful SS man had to destroy any feelings of compassion or mercy he might have, and these camps gave them the chance to practice this way of life. One of the sports was to bait a prisoner until he stepped across the line, then the SS men would gun him down for trying to escape or for breaking the rules. Hundreds of prisoners were killed in this way, and even more were hung. They hung them in front of the incinerators in the crematorium. Toward the end they installed a gas chamber so they could poison thirty or forty at a time, but the American Army arrived too soon for them to put it into use. They did have such gas chambers in some of the other camps. When the US Army arrived, they found that there were several hundred dead prisoners that the SS men hadn’t been able to cremate because the coal for their ovens wasn’t available.
Although we had other places we had planned to see, this visit was just too overwhelming for us to complete quickly. We ended up going over the place in quite a bit of detail, reading most of the information on display. Part of the display was designed to show how a despot like Hitler was able to circumvent the laws and take over power to do such things.

One of the main points in the camp was a sign in several languages that said “Never Again.” The most famous statue there was captioned “to give honor to those who died, and to warn the living.”
Having filled the last full day of our trip with Dachau, there were several things on our list that we knew we couldn’t do, but on Saturday morning, after checking out of the Motel, we drove out to the area where Grant served as a missionary the last few months of his mission. This is in the area of the Nymphenburg Castle, and after driving around and recognizing the area where he and his companion had worked, we parked and walked around that castle.

This was the one in which the fairy-tale king was born, and it was huge. The park land around the castle and the support buildings covered dozens of square miles. We had seen enough of the inside of castles, so we just walked around and watched the swans and gease, and enjoyed the flowers and trees. A fun part was to see four bridal couples who were there for their wedding pictures.

What a wonderful week we had in Bavaria.