All I knew about Potsdam in Germany was that some historic post-Second World War treaty had been signed there - Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt carving up postwar Europe.
I knew rather more about Prague - reputedly one of Europe’s most beautiful cities - although I’d never visited. But it had been on my wish list forever. This was the golden capital of the new Czech Republic - where Mozart had given concerts, where Amadeus was filmed - with its 100 towers, huge castle and the famous Charles Bridge.
I knew next to nothing about the fascinating cities along the Elbe’s banks between Potsdam and Prague - Magdeburg, Dresden (although I did know about the cataclysmic Allied bombing in 1945), Wittenberg and Meissen.
My week-long trip with Peter Deilmann River Cruises was going to fill in all these travel gaps and much more. While in the former East Germany with the elegant and exclusive MV Katharina Von Bora riverboat as my base, I visited its oldest Gothic church, stood in front of the door where Martin Luther had nailed his 95 theses and changed forever the face of religious thought, marvelled at one of its greatest examples of Baroque architecture, handled some exquisite “White-Gold” handmade porcelain, admired Saxony’s “Little Switzerland”, before finally coming to roost amid sumptuous unique Art Deco interiors in Prague’s Old City.
‘But you’re not black!’
I think we’re all aware of the advantages of cruising - no packing and unpacking, meals and entertainment on tap, fascinating shore excursions. Drawbacks for me would be hundreds of other passengers and a jolly Holiday Camp atmosphere. MV Katharina offered all the pluses and none of the minuses - only 75 passengers, an elegant, sophisticated ambience, and class with a capital “C”.
Germany wears its autumn foliage like a many-coloured cloak - russet, ochre, burnt umber, bronze, gold. Potsdam in late October had lured its residents into its parks and forests: people walking, cycling, jogging in the watery sunshine. After the dynamic chaos of Africa and Jo’burg’s traffic, everything seemed so orderly, controlled, neat and tidy. I met my fellow passengers, mainly from America and Germany. I was the only one from South Africa. “Africa!” sighed an elderly lady from Boston with a puzzled look in her eye, “But you’re not black!” It was Rugby World Cup Final the next day but there was no television and the captain informed me that “In Germany vee are not interested in zis game.”
I fell in with a French chef who had won this trip on the Katharina and we sat sending and receiving frantic SMSes from Paris and Jo’burg updating us on the score.
The next day we reached Magdeburg, once the capital of Saxony, a university town with the world-famous Max Planck Institute. I asked my guide what sort of research went on here. “Research into dynamic complexes.” Uh?
‘A place on the edge of civilisation’
There was a lovely opera house where that night some of my fellow passengers enjoyed a performance of The Magic Flute, 20 parks (Magdeburg is Germany’s third greenest city), electric trams and the magnificent Magdeburg cathedral, the oldest Gothic church in Germany, and home to a E2 million-organ with 1 000 pipes and 6 000 stops. St John’s survived the Allied bombing because it was used as a beacon by RAF pilots to pinpoint other targets. A two-and-a-half thousand-year-old baptismal font made of red porphyry looted from the Middle East by German Emperor Otto I on one of his many campaigns stands in the nave. Statues of sweet-faced virgins dot the church, smiling what is known as the “Magdeburg Smile”. Nobody knows why or at what they are smiling.
Next day it was the World Heritage Site of Wittenberg.
There’s something vaguely depressing about this part of Germany. Was it because I know its sad history, the watchtowers that still stand at the end of the bridges, that the Elbe was the border that divided former East and West Germany, or the obsession with orderliness, the heavy-handed humour of the locals?
Even the charismatic Martin Luther on his first visit in 1504 remarked that Wittenberg was “a place on the edge of civilisation.” Nonetheless, single-handedly, and with great courage, he took on the might of the Holy Roman Church and brought Protestanism to Europe.
Frederick the Wise, who was in power at the time, collected religious relics the way other people collect stamps. He had 19 000 of them when Luther arrived, including a splinter of the true cross, crumbs from the Last Supper, and a vial of the Virgin Mary’s milk. Today, Luther’s house is a small museum where you can see his original living room with its uncomfortable painted wooden benches and sturdy dining room table.
Here, his remarkable wife, Katharina Von Bora, a former nun, held sway, presiding over gatherings of intellectuals from all over Europe and bearing Martin six children in the meantime. A woman liberated long before her time, she could write and read not German and Latin, was familiar with mathematics, and had chosen Luther for a husband without him knowing.
Katharina managed Luther, the household and the finances, brewed her own beer, grew her own vegetables and flowers, and raised hogs, cattle, horses and poultry. She even had a fishpond with trout and carp. After Luther died, she was forced to flee Wittenberg when political winds changed and died in Torgau where you can still see her well-preserved tombstone with its life-sized portrait.
In the church of St Marien, where Luther preached more than 3 000 times, a children’s choir was practising for Reformation Day on October 31. They carried candles and bowed their heads before the altar. I wondered to myself what Martin would have thought of their jeans, takkies and chewing gum.
Our next stop along the Elbe was Meissen, home to some of the world’s most beautiful and expensive handmade porcelain. I found the most interesting pieces in the porcelain museum were not the cupids, fauns and fragile china ladies and gentlemen, but the sculptures made during the communist regime - revolution art. Muscular figures with clenched fists and best foot forward. But even an oppressive regime couldn’t subdue all artistic creativity. Alongside the stalwart china revolutionaries are exquisite depictions of fairy figures - Titania and Puck metaphorically cocking a snook at authority.
Dresden, the site of the appalling Allied firebomb storms of 1945 (immortalised in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse 5) a week before Hitler killed himself in his Berlin bunker, has risen from its ashes in a miracle of reconstruction. Its opera house, one of the most famous in Europe, looks today as it did when it was originally built in 1841 by one of Dresden’s most famous sons, the architect Gottfried Semper.
The new synagogue, the first new synagogue to be built in the former East Germany since the Second World War, symbolically shaped as a twisted cube, stands where the old one, also designed and built by Semper was destroyed on Krystallnacht in 1938, “the night of the shattered glass” so called because of the millions of pieces of glass which remained after the destruction that Nazis wrought all over Germany. But one remnant of the original remains. A local firefighter salvaged the Star of David from the flames and hid it in his home until after the war. Today it dominates the entrance of the new building.
Cosima, our guide, told us about how when, as a Catholic child who refused to give up her faith, she was persecuted by then communist authorities and her peers, she wished to be a cobblestone. “In the GDR there was no hard currency, so the government sold everything for cash. Even the cobblestones were ripped up and sold to West Germany. I wanted to be a cobblestone so that I also could be sent off to the West.”
In Prague I stayed at the Imperial Hotel, only recently restored and reopened after a rollercoaster past. Originally built in 1914, it was the mecca for Art Nouveau enthusiasts from all over the world who came to admire its art work and sumptuous interiors. Used as headquarters for the communist unions during the Cold War, it is now restored to its former glory.
I sat on an elegantly carved chair with a brocade seat in the Caf� Imperial, dining on confit of duck, under a high mosaic ceiling of flowers and abstract designs picked out in thousands of tiny ceramic tiles in mustard, yellow, white and blue. In the lobby, stained glass windows and a marble fountain of a bare-breasted maiden survived both communist occupation and a subsequent period as a youth hostel. Carved marble and ceramic columns of Egyptian legends, creatures and motifs held up the roof and adorned the doors and lobby. The whole building could have been a kitsch nightmare - instead it was in perfect taste - a glowing tribute to the Art Nouveau movement.
Prague is a city of castles, towers and music. It is as if a giant hand has picked up Paris and squeezed it into a bonsai version - bridges, domes, turrets, palaces, cobbled streets, elegant facades on tall old houses and thousands of tourists. Music is everywhere - jazz bands in squares, violinists on street corners, even an organ grinder with a toy monkey on the famous Charles Bridge. It seemed that every spare inch of space advertised one music concert or another.
On my last night I sat in the 10th-century St George’s Basilica in Prague Castle high on a hill and listened to the Prague Royal Orchestra play Mozart, Grieg, Sibelius and Dvorak. There were only 12 members of the orchestra and a conductor, and the basilica seated only 60 or so people. We were the privileged few.
If it’s huge lobbies, wide decks, swarms of people, sunny beaches, non-stop entertainment and buffet food you’re after, then don’t choose a Peter Deilmann River Cruise. But if you yearn for European style, elegance, cordon bleu food, historic places that resonate with famous names, craftsmanship and ideas, then go cruising on the Elbe.
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