Via Romea Germanica Day 13: Rietze - Braunschweig

Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realise, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.

- Bill Bryson, A walk in the woods (1998)

I was up as soon as the birds started singing - and the bells started ringing - in the former schoolhouse and community centre in Rietze. At 7:30 Heinrich came by to check that everything was all right and say goodbye. He walked with me as far as his house, where I glimpsed the stork's head peeking out of its rooftop nest. I continued out of the village and along a small paved road to Wipshausen, where the people in Rietze had suggested I stop for breakfast. But I'd made porridge in the community centre kitchen, and a cup of very strong coffee, and I was determined to walk ten kilometres to Wendeburg without taking a break. I had a long way to walk, to Braunschweig!

Much of the way was along narrow paved roads through the fields; not much to look at in the way of scenery, so I amused and educated myself by attempting to decipher the signs along the road, using Google Translate to look up words I didn't know and (hopefully) add them to my slowly growing vocabulary. I always make an attempt to learn some of the language of the places where I walk, and began studying German on Duolingo when I first came up with the idea of doing this walk in January. Yesterday I had a true moment of enlightenment when I realised the meaning of Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme! I had of course seen English translations of the name of this popular Bach chorale, but it's one thing to read a translation and another to figure it out for yourself,  word by word. Putting together words from signs by the road, in this case... Hier wache ich accompanied by a picture of a menacing guard dog on a gate, Deutschlands stärksten Stimmen für Europa on an election poster... anrufen is a verb Duolingo taught me... Flash! Wachet auf, ruft uns die Stimme! 😃

Wipshausen 

Church in Wipshausen with ancient tombstone

Life is good

Church in Wendeburg 

In Wendeburg there was a supermarket with an in-store café and pastry shop, but I couldn't be bothered to cross the parking lot and go into a busy supermarket 😄 so I carried on, hoping to find another, perhaps independent bakery. And I found one that was right on my path in Wendezelle, on the way out of Wendeburg. I sat down to take a break with a cup of herbal tea and a slice of rhubarb custard pie. 

The way was long and uneventful up to Volkenrode, after which I found myself on the wrong side of a fence. I came to a gated research facility, with a barrier to prevent cars from entering but nothing to prevent pedestrians from walking in. There was no-one at the gatehouse, I could see a couple of cyclists inside, and the gps track on my phone clearly continued into the grounds, so I went in, somewhat hesitantly. I followed the gps track along the edge of a paved road among the fields. But then I came to a gate clearly marked Do not enter, and though there was a way around it from where I was (already inside the fence), I thought I'd better not. Germans are renowned for being pretty strict about following rules; there was a bullet-point list of six numbered rules merely for using the toilet at the café I had stopped at 😆. I had visions of being yelled at by mad German scientists if I ignored the sign and continued. So I went the other way, across the fields towards what looked, on the map on my phone, like a way out. But the whole area was surrounded by a tall chain link fence! I turned back again, along a different route through the grounds, and came across... a class of kindergarten children! Which was a bit of a relief; the facility was obviously not conducting experiments with hazardous chemicals, or radioactivity, if they let kindergartens wander about the grounds. Whether it was a class on a field trip, or for the children of employees, I do not know, but I asked one of the two teachers to direct me to the nearest way out!

I walked out past the gatehouse. No-one challenged me, either there or while I was inside the fenced-off area, and the official gps track of the route definitely passes through the grounds, so I am still none the wiser as to whether it was all right to be in there or not.

Back outside the research facility, I found myself on a cycling path beside the main road into Braunschweig, a sizeable city of a quarter of a million people. It took some time to get through the suburbs, with their rows of identical houses, and into the city centre, where my first stop was the cathedral. 

Braunschweig

Braunschweig is known in English as Brunswick, which is actually closer to the original name, still used by locals in their Low German dialect: Bronsweik. This is a combination of the name Bruno - as the city was ruled by the Saxon noble family of the Brunonids up to the 12th century - and the Low German word wik (related to the Latin vicus), meaning a place for merchants to rest and store their goods. The town was in fact an ideal resting place, located by a ford across the Oker River.

In 1142, Henry the Lion of the House of Welf became duke of Saxony and made Braunschweig the capital of his state, developing the city to underline his authority; it was under Henry's rule that the Cathedral of St. Blasius was built,  and the statue of a lion, his heraldic animal, was erected in front of the castle. The lion subsequently became the symbol of the city.

Construction of the cathedral began in 1173; the altar was consecrated in 1188. The seven-armed bronze candelabrum dates from the same year, and originally kept watch at the base of the tomb of Henry the Lion and his wife Matilde, a key work of Saxon sculpture dating from 1235 to 1240. Leaves budding from the base and branches transform a death vigil candelabrum into a tree of life, symbolising a new beginning after death.

To the left of the main altar is the Imervard Cross, named after its sculptor, who signed the work on Christ's belt. It is a medieval Volto Santo crucifix, like the one in Lucca, depicting a fully robed Christ, awake and with open eyes, representing Christ resurgent and victorious over death.

In the chapel to the right of the altar are carvings of Christ in Affliction and the emblems of the Passion, carved in the round to be carried in procession, dating from around 1460.

After obtaining my stamp from the cathedral I repaired to the tourist information office, where I obtained a map and identified a few key points of interest that I could visit without walking too far out of my way as I crossed the city to reach my lodgings on the other side. 

The castle

City hall

On October 15, 1944, an Allied air raid  destroyed most of the old city centre and the city's churches. The Altstadt or old town of Braunschweig had until then been the largest homogeneous ensemble of half-timbered houses in Germany; about 10% of these houses survived the bombing, as did the cathedral. Some of the surviving historical half-timbered houses were moved - taken apart and reconstructed elsewhere - to create "islands" of old buildings and cobbled streets among the new constructions. One such island is Magniviertel, a pleasant neighbourhood around the church of St. Magni, which is half new and half old; the left side was destroyed in the bombing and has been rebuilt in modern style, while the right side is original.

After the war, Braunschweig suffered economically from its proximity to the Iron Curtain. But in the 1960s and 70s industrialisation boomed, and today the city has a population of a quarter of a million, and is a renowned capital of scientific research. And in fact I am staying with two scientists! Astrid is a mathematician, and her husband Jens is a physicist. Their two daughters are away studying sciences at university, while their son, the youngest, Alexander, has one more year of high school and then plans to study physics, like his father and sister.

With my hosts

My home for tonight is a big flat in this building

My Servas hosts Astrid and Jens grew up in Leipzig, in what used to be East Germany, and so I asked them a lot of questions about what is was like and what happened when the wall came down. In a couple of days' time I will be walking on the site of the former wall. I'm looking forward to it!

Rietze - Braunschweig 30 km