The Rough Guide to Germany PDF
Preview The Rough Guide to Germany
CONTENTS HOW TO USE THIS ROUGH GUIDE EBOOK INTRODUCTION TO GERMANY Where to go When to go Author picks Things not to miss Itineraries BASICS Getting there Getting around Accommodation Food and drink The media Festivals Sports and outdoor activities Travel essentials THE GUIDE 1. Berlin and Brandenburg 2. Saxony 3. Saxony-Anhalt and the Harz 4. Thuringia 5. Northern Bavaria: Franconia 6. Munich and central Bavaria 7. The Alps and eastern Bavaria 8. Baden-Württemberg 9. The Black Forest 10. Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland 11. Hesse 12. North Rhine-Westphalia 13. Lower Saxony and Bremen 14. Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein 15. Mecklenburg-West Pomerania CONTEXTS History Books Film Popular music German Glossary MAPS AND SMALL PRINT How to use this Rough Guide ebook This Rough Guide is one of a new generation of informative and easy-to-use travel-guide ebooks that guarantees you make the most of your trip. An essential tool for pre-trip planning, it also makes a great travel companion when you’re on the road. From the table of contents, you can click straight to the main sections of the ebook. Start with the Introduction, which gives you a flavour of Germany, with details of what to see, what not to miss, itineraries and more – everything you need to get started. This is followed by Basics, with pre-departure tips and practical information, such as flight details and festival listings. The guide chapters offer comprehensive and in-depth coverage of the whole of Germany, including area highlights and full-colour maps featuring all the sights and listings. Finally, Contexts fills you in on history, books, film and popular music and includes a handy Language section. Detailed area maps feature in the guide chapters and are also listed in the dedicated map section, accessible from the table of contents. Depending on your hardware, you can double-tap on the maps to see larger-scale versions, or select different scales. The screen-lock function on your device is recommended when viewing enlarged maps. Make sure you have the latest software updates, too. Throughout the guide, we’ve flagged up our favourite places – a perfectly sited hotel, an atmospheric café, a special restaurant – with the “author pick” icon . You can select your own favourites and create a personalized itinerary by bookmarking the sights, venues and activities that are of interest, giving you the quickest possible access to everything you’ll need for your time away. MUNICH CITY SKYLINE INTRODUCTION TO GERMANY Germany remains something of a sleeping giant in travel terms, for though it attracts roughly the same number of foreign visitors each year as the United Kingdom – around 35 million – it rarely makes headline news in the travel media, and when it does those headlines are most often about Berlin. The German capital certainly deserves the attention; it’s as exciting a city as any in Europe. Yet the paeans of praise can sometimes crowd out the rest of Germany, reduced to a picturesque backdrop for Christmas markets or the Oktoberfest. In 2017, the German National Tourist Board rode to the rescue with a Top 100 of the best bits of Germany, and what’s most striking about the list is its sheer diversity. To be sure, Berlin, beer and Christmas all feature, but so too do the sub-tropical islands of the Bodensee, the other-worldly crags of Saxon Switzerland and the Müritzsee in the Mecklenburg Lakes – this last a peaceful landscape of lakes and forests almost unknown to non-Germans. Alongside the highbrow attractions of Germany’s cities – architectural jewels such as Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie and Würzburg’s Residenz – the list also includes some of the most raucous, fun-packed theme parks in Europe. There is, in short, much here for the visitor to enjoy. And much of it remains – to non- Germans at least – undiscovered. KARWENDEL MOUNTAINS, WERDENFELSER LAND If Germany is misunderstood by outsiders, recent history is to blame. It is not even three decades since the Berlin Wall was chipped away to end a turbulent and agonizing century for the country, ill-served at crucial points in its brief history as a united nation-state by rulers who twice led it into disaster: in 1918, as Kaiser Wilhelm II’s vainglorious dream of empire ended in defeat, starvation and revolution; and at the end of World War II, as Hitler’s vile race-war rebounded in terrible fashion on the German people who had chosen him as their leader. There followed a period of 45 years in which not one Germany but two faced each other across a tense international divide – the so-called Iron Curtain – throughout the years of the Cold War. Political fragmentation is nothing new in Germany. From the tenth century until the early nineteenth, the Holy Roman Empire provided only a loose semblance of sovereignty over a vast collection of states, and it’s this jumbled history, as much as the country’s varied geography, that explains Germany’s sheer diversity. For centuries many of Germany’s cities governed themselves without feudal overlords, while elsewhere the feudal states ranged from substantial kingdoms like Prussia, Saxony or Bavaria to tiny landgraviates and prince-bishoprics. Yet each made its contribution to Germany’s heritage, in the architectural and cultural splendour of many a former Residenzstadt. The Lutheran Reformation and its aftermath left their mark too: northern Germany is predominantly Protestant, the south more Catholic. Germany’s contribution to the world of classical music is undeniable, and provides a powerful pretext for a visit for many, whether to experience the glories of the Berlin Philharmonic or of Wagner’s Ring at Bayreuth, or to follow in the footsteps of great composers: Bach in Leipzig, Beethoven in Bonn. Germany’s reputation as the cradle of modernism is also well deserved, and a pilgrimage to the Bauhaus in Dessau or the Weissenhofsiedlung in Stuttgart is sure to please design fans. German modernism was preceded by the older traditions of the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Rococo, each of which left a rich legacy of artistic and architectural treasures. Germany’s fine art is less well known, yet from the pioneering realism of Albrecht Dürer to the ethereal Romanticism of Caspar David Friedrich, it’s well worth discovering. Most German cities of any size have excellent galleries, with Berlin and Cologne hubs of the European contemporary art scene. Not that the pleasures of Germany are all intellectual. The excellence of its famous beer derives from the sixteenth-century Reinheitsgebot, the world’s oldest food purity law. Germany’s food culture is traditionally characterized by wholesome but hearty dishes, yet the impact of immigration, travel and culinary ambition has been powerful, and modern German cuisine is lighter and more international in flavour. Though the dangers of overindulgence are ever present, so too is the antidote. The tradition of the Kur or spa visit has endured to a far greater extent in Germany than elsewhere, and there are innumerable spa towns up and down the country. And of course, there is an outdoors that is truly great: a location at the heart of Europe means the country is full of scenery that seems cherry-picked from the best bits of its neighbours. Between the white powder beaches of the Baltic and Bavaria’s Alps you’ll discover everything from endless forests and lush meadows to gorgeous swooping river valleys like the Rhine, the Mosel and the Elbe. Small wonder the Germans make full use of their scenery, whether for hiking and cycling, excellent ski runs in winter or a whole raft of watersports. Indeed the Germans themselves are one of the unsung pleasures of a visit. The officious neighbour who complains if you don’t hang your socks out to dry in coloured order may not be entirely fictional, but you’re more likely to be struck by the warmth and open-mindedness of Germany’s people – particularly its young people. Germany today is a world away from the uptight humourless nation of popular imagination – just one more example of where the reality is far nation of popular imagination – just one more example of where the reality is far more interesting than the clichés. FACT FILE • Germany occupies 357,112 square kilometres of territory in Central Europe. It has land borders with nine countries and a coastline of 2389km on the North and Baltic seas. • Politically, Germany is a parliamentary democracy, with an upper house – the Bundesrat – and a lower chamber, the Bundestag, both in Berlin. The administrative structure is federal, with the sixteen Länder (states) having a high degree of autonomy. • Germany is the largest economy in the European Union and the continent’s largest exporter; it is the third-largest in the world. As the economic heart of the eurozone it is also home to the headquarters of the European Central Bank. • With a population of almost 83 million, Germany is the most populous nation in the European Union, and it is also among its most densely populated and highly urbanized. The four largest cities are Berlin (3.7 million inhabitants), Hamburg (1.86 million), Munich (1.54 million) and Cologne (1.1 million). • Germans DO have a sense of humour and DO love to sunbathe naked. But DON’T feel you can’t mention the war – nowadays Germans are avid consumers of their own history, and the Nazi era is picked over exhaustively in TV documentaries, in books, and at the cinema.
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