Historian Harry Mount takes a cruise on the Elbe through the former East Germany and finds much to admire in a region which survived years of warfare
Stourhead a delightful schloss by a lake dotted with islands, each with its own folly; among them a mini-Pantheon, a pocket Vesuvius, a handful of Roman temples and a thwacking great mock-Gothic castle. Dessau itself is a corrective to romantic Anglophilia. The Bauhaus School of modernism moved here from Weimar in the 1920s, under its first director, Walter Gropius. His 1926 Design Academy survives all white concrete, flat roofs and glazed curtain walls as do the houses of his Bauhaus professors, snapped up by the new wave of artists, including Wassily Kandinsky and Paul Klee. The city feels oddly calm. Since reunification, many young East Germans have migrated west: the population of Dessau has fallen from 100,000 before the Berlin Wall came down, to 80,000 today.
But depopulation has its benefits. On consecutive evenings, I had the medieval towns of Wittenberg and Torgau almost to myself, the only sound the crunch of my shoes on the pavement. Not only were there no cars, but no loud music coming from the open bars in Torgau's early Renaissance piazza heaven to a noise-hater like me.
Fellow lovers of peace and quiet will enjoy the places where the ships dock, away from the main tourist drag. My first evening in Magdeburg was accompanied by the enchanting sight of swallows and swifts darting past my cabin window, at our mooring next to a quiet riverside park. The crew fell over themselves to be helpful. And what cleanliness: the only rubbish I saw, in a week on the river, was a single plastic bottle floating down the river at Wittenberg.
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Wittenberg, of course, is where Martin Luther nailed to the town's church door his 95 theses against the excesses of Catholicism in 1517, and brought in the Reformation. Luther's church survives, although the door was burnt down in 1760, in the Seven Years War. Remarkably, his old house is still there, too, next to the handsome University of Wittenberg famous as Hamlet's alma mater.
Also deserving of mention is Meissen home to the famous porcelain works. The Meissenware factory has produced china since the 1700s and still retains its signature crossed-swords logo one of the oldest trademarks in the world. |
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A visit to the factory is a fascinating insight into how porcelain has been produced in the region for over 300 years. The story goes that King Augustus the Strong ordered his subjects to find a way to manufacture gold. After years of experiments they finally discovered the next best thing white gold or porcelain. I've banged on a bit about the post-war history of East Germany, at the expense of the joys of German Gothic, classicism and Baroque architecture. Torgau has the best German Renaissance schloss in the country: Hartenfels Castle, an utterly original, mid-16th century confection of pilastered gables, ornate strapwork and needle-thin towers, clustered around the vaulted Gothic church where Martin Luther held his first post-Reformation service.
As you sail south, the landscape gives way to picture-book Germany. A trip through the soaring sandstone formations of Saxon Switzerland is not to be missed.
In Dresden you will find hulking great Sound of Music castles and Gothic clock towers topped with onion domes. Baroque Dresden, wiped out by bombing in 1945, has been almost completely rebuilt. It has been beautifully done: many of the original stones, blackened and warped with age, have been dotted among the creamy new sandstone blocks partly because the heart so wants this scarred city, and country, to be healed. And it has been.
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