Europe @ 2.4 km/h (24 page)

And a fascinating character he proved. His bar-restaurant walls were blanketed with trophies — about 200 in all, everything from silver steins and ornamental cups to a huge deer with formidable antlers. But my assumption that the man-made trophies were for hunting turned out not to be the case. Thomas was a champion skier from the mid-Seventies onwards and his daughter has followed in his tracks. The trophy collection belongs to them both.

A plaque near the chairlift at nearby Feldberghof hints at the grandeur of this Alpine range. The Erstreckung spans 360 km from Germany’s highest peak, Zugspitze, at one end to Europe’s second highest peak, Mont Blanc, at the other. At the chairlift terminus on the lower slopes of Mount Feldberg, we are 1450 metres above sea level. Forty metres above us is the top of a tower that affords stunning views of the Erstreckung range.

Assisted up five steps by other visitors’ willing hands, I make it to the viewing deck from where it is impossible to tell which part of the thin blue line of mountains is in France, Switzerland or Germany. Up here nations are subordinate to Nature, what you might call a healthy perspective.

26 August, 3.52 pm. Definitely my last speed record, I promise myself. The casters have developed a wobble at anything over 20 km/h. But the spiralling asphalt strip that curves down from Feldberghof to the main road is freewheeling paradise. I hit 25.4 km/h and, if not for that wheel wobble, feel certain 30 km/h would be attainable. Better not to think about it; best not to try.

695 km

From northern Sweden to southern Germany these days you stumble across Australian restaurants and bars in the unlikeliest places. This afternoon I spot one in a Freiburg outdoor shopping court. If we are going to take over the world, this is surely the way to do it. Subtly infiltrate a non-Australian space and always, but always, go for the throat.

698-699 km

My first train journey of the day delivered me from Schwarzwald to Karlsruhe, where I had to do a quick-change routine between platforms to catch an eastbound connection to Munich. On the first train I shared a private compartment with two other passengers — a mother, Jutta, and her son Silas. Jutta’s English was not very good but she managed to convey the purpose of her journey, and a sad one it was. Two months ago her father, a cabinetmaker, died in Goppingen, a town near Ulm, and today she was going there to see a notary.

On the Munich service this afternoon, everything seemed to be running with celebrated German efficiency, which is more than you could say for this morning’s Karlsruhe transfer, until the eight minutes came when it actually had to be done. Service officer Cornelia had hurried to the platform on receiving a phone call from the conductor five minutes before the train pulled in. She greeted me by handing up the paperwork that had failed to inform her of my arrival, let alone of my need for a baggage trolley, but responded admirably to the counter-argument that
Ich bin hier
(on Platform 3) and ‘Look, my train is over there’ (on Platform 8).

Rising to the challenge, she performed the eight-minute transfer in seven-and-a-half minutes and, even now, as I roll into Munich, a full-scale internal investigation is proceeding at Karlsruhe to discover the error in Cornelia’s impression that between 11.58 this morning and 12.06 this afternoon I was on her patch, despite the documentary evidence that I wasn’t.

On the Munich leg of the day’s travels came the announcement, ‘We will be arriving in Augsburg at 2.46 pm. For local connections the train to [one place name] will be leaving at 2.43, to [another] at 2.47 and to [a third destination] at 2.49’. Somehow precision had leapt the tracks and slammed into absurdity.

As we drew into Göppingen, Jutta and Silas sought me out to say goodbye. In sympathy for them, but stuck for appropriate words of farewell and condolence, I wished them ‘a meaningful day’. When they had descended from the carriage, the passenger next to me, Ben, inquired why I had used those words. When I explained my difficulty, he said there was a German phrase that would have overcome the awkwardness of the moment, ‘
Ich hoffe,
dein Tag vergeht nicht zu langsam
’. As he translated it, I found it quite moving. ‘May your day not go too slowly.’

Opposite Munich
Hauptbahnhof
, in an effort to get my bearings, I ask a dapper little man in a business suit and hat where Senefelderstrasse, the street of my chosen hostel, is. He babbles something unintelligible before turning on his heel and strutting off. When I ask a bystander, who has heard it all and is standing with his mouth agape, what the rude man said, he quotes him, ‘If you don’t know where you’re going, you should stay home’. Welcome to Munich.

I find my way despite him. In the lift of the wonderfully named Wombat Hostel is a joke for the marsupially challenged. ‘FACT: Wombat eats, roots and leaves.’ Well, isn’t it just my luck on being shown my shared dormitory — at four in the afternoon — to find a German couple in a bed at the far end of the room smack bang between feeding time and checkout?

Werever I go in Europe, people’s knee-jerk reaction on discovering I come from Australia is to exclaim, ‘Oh, so far away!’ To which I now reply, ‘Not really. You spend 22 hours on a plane, disembark and you’re right there’. Some are still not convinced: maybe they don’t like to admit they’re irked by the cost — these people who would think nothing of splashing out on a holiday in New York or South America — so instead they bemoan the loss of a day out of their busy lives. From the way they talk, you’d think they’re making the journey in box kites, not jetliners. The point to impress upon the next reluctant European you hear decrying the tyranny of Australia’s distance from Earth Central is that we have excellent sleeping facilities for overtired globetrotters. If they doubt this, just clinch the argument by saying, Why do you think koalas choose to live there?

703-707 km

Today I meet Mike Holland, my old friend and journalistic colleague from Oman and Fleet Street days who has rearranged a few commitments so that we can meet up in Bavaria and see something of Munich and Altotting, where his partner Regina’s mother lives, before heading south to the Austrian border.

In the hostel corridor scouring my backpack for a lost glove, I look up to see a familiar figure stooped over, peering at a room number. ‘Mike!’ I call out, and that’s how we are reunited after eleven years.

Genial as ever, moustachioed Mike has remained that rare creature, a friend at a distance but often in my thoughts. His father served in the British Army of the Rhine, so he has been familiar with Germany since childhood. A former comment-pages editor for
The Observer
in London, Mike — who bears a striking resemblance to Einstein in hairy late middle age — has lately been forced by ill health to take things a little easier.

But he has not opted out of professional life altogether. Indeed he may be the only sub-editor in the history of
The Tablet
, a liberal Catholic journal in Britain, to have written an article titled ‘Why I am an Atheist’. This comes as something of a surprise when you recall that he was schooled by Jesuits.

Now Mike is as knowledgeable about technology as I am ignorant of it, but that doesn’t mean I’m uninterested. Together this morning we stroll the few hundred metres from downtown Munich to the Deutsches Museum. Apart from the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, and the British Museum in London, the Deutsches Museum has no rival as a compendium of Man’s state of knowledge about ‘the known world’ of science and its practical technological applications.

The museum was founded a century ago by Oskar von Miller, whose passion for the new technology of his day was matched only by his contribution to it. He had carried out the first two major trials of long-distance power transmission in 1882 and supervised construction of the first hydroelectric scheme in the Alps. Herr Miller’s house of knowledge contains a proud collection of firsts. Here you will see, complete with its tepee-like scaffolding, the telescope with which German-born astronomer Wilhelm Herschel discovered the planet Uranus, and the apparatus used to discover cosmic background radiation in 1965.

Behold: the bench on which Otto Hahn’s team of lab scientists discovered the principle of splitting the atom; the original vacuum tubes with which Conrad Rontgen discovered X-rays; and an array of Robert Wilhelm Bunsen’s burners, donated by his estate.

The aeronautics hall gives us the giddying sense of being suspended in mid-air ourselves, like the exhibits. Overhead are replicas of the standard-wing and double-wing gliders created by Otto Lilienthal, who in 1891 just outside Berlin became the first human to fly;
²⁰
together with the first helicopter ever developed beyond the experimental stage, the Focke-Wulf F 61 of 1936.

The ‘air space’ is shared with a Junkers F 13, which in 1919 became the world’s first successful commercial plane, and the Heinkel He 178, which just before the outbreak of war in 1939 became the first aircraft propelled by jet engines. But the incontestable star of the show is a Lockheed Starfighter, the combat craft capable of reaching twice the speed of sound which was supplied to the luckless Luftwaffe in the 1950s and 1960s. As Mike points out, ‘an awful lot crashed’ — 269, to be exact, in which 110 pilots perished, or, as the German inscription has it, ‘
dabei fanden
110 Piloten den Tod
’ (‘found their deaths’).

Months later, I speak to a German man with contacts in the aviation world who recalls a joke from that time.

‘What’s the best way to get your own Starfighter?’

‘Buy a block of land and just wait.’

On to the astronautics display, and while Mike inspects other exhibits I peer closely at a piece of moon rock sitting inertly (as they tend to do) in a reinforced-glass cube. This rock, we are told, was given ‘to the people of West Germany by the American people … in the hope … of a world at peace’. A gift from Richard Nixon in 1973.

There are few faults to find with the Deutsches Museum. In the museum guidebook, just occasionally, the obvious bleeds all over the page. There are no prizes for guessing what Homer Simpson would say on reading ‘The sun is the central object of our solar system’ or ‘The basic tool used in computer science is the computer itself’.