Bremen

[John Marchioro]

Bremen, July 18

Spent about 4-5 hours walking around the Altstadt in Bremen today. It
is really quite nice. Once again, Bremen was repeatedly, constantly
bombing during the Second World War, and it is clear that much of the
city was destroyed in the process. But it is not clear how much of the
Altstadt was. Damaged, no doubt, but apparently not completely turned
to ashes in the way that a place like Hamburg or Dresden was. And
another aspect of this is that (like Dresden, which was being fixed up
quite a bit when I visited in 2012), Bremen is a much smaller city
than say Hamburg (Hamburg is Germany's second largest city in fact,
bigger than Munich, though I am not sure if the population figures for
the greater metro area reflect that....), it is Germany's 10th largest
city according to Wikipedia, and restoration efforts clearly were
concentrated on a much smaller area, the core of today's Altstadt.

https://www.tripadvisor.com/Attraction_Review-g187325-d1546413-Reviews-Historische_Altstadt-Bremen.html

You can see it all in a few hours, and it is really quite picturesque.

I wanted to buy another Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt for my burgeoning
collection, and asked the taxi driver who took me to my hotel whether
there was one in Bremen. He said yes, in the Steintor district. When I
took the streetcar into the Altstadt from my hotel, it passed right
through that district, but I did not see any Hard Rock Cafe, so I had
doubts.... And I decided to find the Tourist Info Office in the
Altstadt and double check. Sure enough, no HRC in Bremen... But I was
fortunate in that the Tourist Info Office is located in the
Glockenspiel Haus, along a charming little street called
Boettcherstrasse (Coopers' Street):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Böttcherstraße

Unfortunately, the guy who had the idea for this street, Ludwig
Roselius, was a Nazi supporter (he first met with Hitler as early as
1922! whoah!).... And adjacent to the Glockenspiel building is a
Roselius Museum housing works of German art. I did not visit it.

Now the Glockenspiel Haus:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glockenspiel_House

I was fortunate to be there at 4 PM when the chimes rang and then the
10 panels were displayed one after one.... Really quite charming, and
there was quite a crowd there to watch it..... Though as I saw the
panels go by one by one, I had doubts.... Columbus? Hmmmm.... Clearly
the Bremen Town Council did not get the memo about him yet. Lindbergh.
Hmmm.... Clearly the Bremen Town Council does not know what his rep in
the US is..... And of course it made me wonder about a few others,
like Count von Zeppelin. Truth be told, it is very hard to separate
out explorers and the like from the rise of the new technologies and
rest that led to European colonization and also war among the advanced
powers for supremacy. Discoveries of new territories and colonization
thereof are part of single process, and if a new technology has
military applications, it is going to be used for that end 99.9% of
the time.

But my doubts were reinforced when I saw a little stele on the
Glockenspiel Haus that reads: "In 1938 the Condor, a creation of the
Focke-Wulf Firm of Bremen, flew a non-stop flight from Berlin to New
York, thereby creating a new bridge between the peoples [of the two
countries]." Hmmmmm..... 1938. Bad timing. As for Focke-Wulf:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf

Yep, they were making those airplanes that were soon dropping bombs
all over Europe, including GB. The Condor itself was extensively used
in wartime operations in the same war:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Focke-Wulf_Fw_200_Condor

Somehow it all just struck the wrong note. Again, you can understand
German pride in all these things. As you recall from my account about
the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart last year, there was literally
not a syllable about automobile development in the USA in that museum,
zero, not a word about Henry Ford and the like.... Presumably there is
a story behind this relating to key breakthroughs like the development
of the internal combustion engine, which the Germans consider to be a
German invention, and there is bitterness about Germany not being
fully credited for it and perhaps also MB not getting its patent
royalties for it as well.... I do not know and do not have the time to
read the history of it now. And once again, not to be rebarbative, but
technology has a dual edge and a breakthrough in aviation that allows
people like me to fly around the world can obviously be used for
military purposes. And was. And I understand the LOCAL pride and all
that, I am sure the burgers of Bremen take great pride in the history
of the Focke-Wulf firm, as the burgers of Stuttgart must take great
pride in Mercedes Benz and Porsche (both of which made tanks and the
rest for the Wehrmacht during WWII). But still.... 1938. Hmmmmm. Bad
timing to talk about building bridges between peoples. It strikes an
off note.

Anyway, that was that. A charming place to spend a day, you can see
some wonderful major buildings and the a large number of smaller
carefully restored brick buildings on adjacent streets, many of them
with bilingual plaques in German and English providing basic info
about construction and repairs and the like. The one thing I noticed
was that while there are some nice streets like Boetcherstrasse
leading off from the main square of the Altstadt where the major sites
are all located (about 10 buildings in all, one of them a UNESCO World
Heritage site), if you follow them for a few hundred feet they usually
morph into a typical shopping district, nice enough but entirely
modern..... the Altstadt is nice but rather small, and you will
exhaust it fairly quickly. So it is place to spend 4-5 hours wandering
around and to have a nice meal in the central square, and if you like
it you can take a boat trip on the Weser as well (though in the city
it has been turned into a canal, long long ago, and I did not take
that trip today.... am sure it is a lot less interesting than the one
I took in Hamburg yesterday).

OK, some work now, and then a bit of sleep, and the train to Cologne
tomorrow AM.