GERMANY: MAULBRONN MONASTERY AND NYMPHENBURG PALACE

May 24, 2025

Maulbronn is a small town of 6,700 people in southern Germany about 12 miles north of Pforzheim. Legend has it that in the 12th century, wandering monks followed a mule looking for water into the valley. (The name Maulbronn means "mule fountain.") Finding a beautiful lake, the monks settled here and established a monastery. Now a UNESCO World Heritage Site, the monastery draws about a quarter million tourists every year.

For being so old, it is in amazing condition and is, in fact, one of the best-preserved monastic sites in Europe. It's also surprisingly large.

Half-timbered building near the entrance

Granary building, early 13th century

GERMANY: ZWIEFALTEN

 May 22, 2025  

On our way from Grafeneck to Zwiefalten, we stopped to take a photo of a bar/inn where the Grafeneck staff came to relax, have a drink, or perhaps rent a room if overflow housing was needed. Today, this charming restaurant exhibits no evidence of its past, and I suppose it is a good example of the fact that life must go on.

Zwiefalten is a tranquil village of about 2,300 people in the Swabian region of southern Germany about 70 miles southeast of my mother's hometown of Pforzheim. The skyline is dominated by the twin towers of the Abbey of Our Lady of Zwiefalten, a former Benedictine monastery founded in 1089.

In 1812 part of the property became a lunatic asylum and then later a psychiatric hospital.

Zwiefalten State Hospital and Sanitorium was the last place my grandfather was held before he was transported to Grafeneck. Of the 10,654 people gassed at Grafeneck, more than 1,000 came from Zwiefalten. Once Grafeneck was shut down in December 1940, killings by injection continued at Zwiefalten.

This distance from Zwiefalten to Grafeneck is about 14 miles and takes just under 25 minutes to drive. Perhaps it took the gray transport busses a little longer in 1940, and certainly the patients who were passengers in the bus did not know where they were going.

We began our vist to Zwiefalten at the Württemberg Museum of Psychiatry. Apparently the psychiatric clinic at Zwiefalten is the oldest in the state of Baden-Württemberg.

GERMANY: GIENGEN

 May 20, 2025

Halfway into this trip, Bob and I and my sister Chris and her husband Stan met up in Giengen, Germany, with the rest of my siblings (three more), two of their spouses, a cousin, and a nephew for a total of eleven family members. What a blast! 

Giengen is where my mother was born. In fact, I can work my way up the family tree and find the following births in Giengen: my mother's mother (1895), her father (1848), his father (1817), his father (1785) AND mother (1793). both sets of their parents (1748, 1760, 1759, 1761), and five more generations before that dating back to as early as 1585! Pretty incredible. 

Giengen is located in the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg less than 20 miles from the much larger and more famous city of Ulm. Today, Giengen has a population of around 20,000, but it seems to always have been somewhat of a sleepy city, and as we walked around, it felt like it had a population of about 500.

Giengen's claim to fame is that it is the home of the toy stuffed animal factory Steiff, founded in 1880 by Margarete Steiff (1847-1909). Confined to a wheelchair because her legs had been paralyzed by polio as a child, she took up sewing and began making stuffed toys for friends, then opened her own store in 1877. In 1902, her company began making stuffed bears with movable joints. The bears took off in the United States. Some sources claim they were nicknamed after the then President Teddy Roosevelt, becoming the first "teddy bear," but other sources credit a political cartoon and a Brooklyn candy store owner with creating the nickname and the first bear. The two events appear to have occurred simultaneously.

While most cities have a statue of a king or famous political or religious figure in the town center, Giengen has a teddy bear (or two). 

What looked something like a Chamber of Commerce building had this image in the window. It translates to "Capital of Teddy Bears, Giengen on the Brenz [River]."

GERMANY: NUREMBERG'S MARKET SQUARE (OLD TOWN)

 May 18-19, 2025

We spent the morning in Dresden, then drove to Nuremberg in the mid-afternoon, a drive that took about 3 ½ hours. We arrived just in time for dinner. While on the road, I researched restaurants to try to find a good, authentic German dinner. We ended up at the Bratwursthäusle (House of Bratwurst). Founded in 1312, it is the oldest restaurant in the city and is famous for producing what the European Union has declared to be the first bratwurst (grilled sausages) in Germany. Their sausages are made onsite every morning.

I got an assortment of brats (boiled, grilled, and fried) and a chunk of some other kind of meat with sides of sauerkraut and potato salad. It was wonderful, and I had it again the next day when our guide took us to the same restaurant. (We didn't tell him we'd been here the night before.) The desserts were also very good. We had chocolate mousse with a berry sauce and apple strudel swimming in custard sauce.

Were we happy? Yes, yes, we were. In my journal I note that it was our best meal so far.

After dinner and then at the end of the day the following day, we explored the Hauptmarkt, or main market square. The Nuremberg Town Hall was basically destroyed during World War II but was painstakingly rebuilt afterwards. 

GERMANY: DRESDEN

 Sunday, May 18, 2025

We were up at 7:00 AM, ate breakfast in our hotel at 8:00, and left at 8:45 to catch a 9:00 church service.

Except . . . I failed as navigator and took us to the wrong church. Somehow we ended up at Christ Church, a Lutheran church whose claim to fame is that it is Dresden's only remaining church with two steeples and was the first Art Nouveau church in Germany. It was built in 1903-1905 and was badly damaged by bombs during the bombing in February 1945 that destroyed much of the city. (More on the bombing in a minute.) It was repaired enough to make it usuable in 1950-1951 and thoroughly restored in 1973-1980.

We walked all around the church searching for an unlocked door, but we didn't find one. We did discover this beautiful sculpture of Christ with a lovely green patina. It made it worth the stop.

We finally found the church we had been looking for, the Frauenkirche, or Church of Our Lady. 

The church was destroyed during the infamous February 1945 firebombing of Dresden, a joint RAF and USAF operation that included four attacks over three days, destroying more than 1,600 acres of the city's center and killing approximately 25,000 people. This bombing preceded the bombing of my mother's hometown of Pforzheim by ten days, and she would often weep on the anniversary of this event as well as on the anniversary of the bombing of Pforzheim.

Dresden after the bombing. From Wikipedia.

A bronze plaque in the square shares this memory from Church Inspector Weinert (translated here from the German): "On Thursday, February 15th, around 11 a.m., as I was entering the dead city, searching for the cathedral dome in the milky fog, I was shocked to see nothing. An hour earlier, my wife, searching for me, had witnessed this tragedy: after an initial, quiet crackling, the dome slowly collapsed, and then, with a tremendous bang, the outer walls of the church burst, and a pitch-black cloud of dust filled the entire area."

View from City Hall after the bombing. 

GERMANY: WITTENBERG

 May 17, 2025

About 50 miles northwest of the sleepy little town of Torgau and also positioned on the Elbe River is Wittenberg, a somewhat larger city with 45,000 inhabitants. A university was established here in 1502, which attracted two important luminaries to its faculty line-up: Martin Luther and his friend and fellow reformer Philip Melanchthon.

Luther's and Melanchthon's portraits were painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder,
the most famous German portraitist of his day, who painted at least ELEVEN portraits
of Luther and over THIRTY of Melanchthon..

Wittenberg is a typical charming German town, maybe even more charming than most because unlike many other German cities of any size, it was spared destruction during World War II. Its religious history protected it from the Allies' bombs. However, it was occupied by the Soviets after the war and became part of East Germany in 1949.

Germany has their own version of "George Washington Slept Here." Two windows in this pretty building are marked with this information: Karl August (1757-1828), who was the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, visited the city in 1820, and Napoleon I, aka Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), King of France, slept here in 1806 and 1813. 

GERMANY: TORGAU

 May 17, 2025

Torgau is a smallish town in eastern Germany on the Elbe River that today has a population of about 20,000 people. Probably its biggest claim to fame is that it is the place where the US and Soviet armies first met at the end of World War II on April 25, 1945. Eventually, Torgau became part of the region controlled by the Soviet Union and known in the United States as East Germany.

But that was not our interest in the city. We had planned a few days in this area of Germany--Saxony--to become better acquainted with the religious reformer Martin Luther, who established Torgau as a key center for the Protestant Reformation. Luther traveled here more than 60 times from his home in nearby Wittenburg to consult with princes and theologians, and Torgau was where he consecrated the first church intentionally built as a Protestant church.

Our first stop was at the Hartenfels Castle, which was built in the 15th century, making it the largest completely preserved early Renaissance castle in all of Germany. 

One of the most interesting things about the castle is that is has a moat surrounding it that is full of greenery and logs rather than water.

That is because the moat is home to two brown bears. This tradition dates back to the castle's origins. After a pause beginning in the 19th century, the bears were reinstanted in the 1950s with a gift from the Leipzig Zoo. Benno and Bea, who are brother and sister, are the latest residents, having lived here since 2013. We only saw one of them, but I can't tell you which one.

INDIA, VARANASI: CHRISTMAS EVE MASS AT ST. MARY'S CATHEDRAL

 December 24, 2025

I wasn't too thrilled about spending Christmas in a non-Christian country, but in the end I think it was a good experience. We enjoyed our Sunday service in an LDS Ward, and we had the opportunity to go to a Christmas Eve Mass in Varanasi in St. Mary's Cathedral, a Gothic Revival-style church that is the episcopal seat for Varanasi. Since Catholics make up only 0.1% of the population of the Agra Ecclesiastical Province that includes Varanasi, it is impressive that they have this building and could pull off this level of celebration.

St. Mary's was established in 1854 during the British colonial era and attained cathedral status in 1970. The current church was finished and dedicated in 1993.

The cathedral was less than a mile from our hotel, so we decided to walk there rather than worry about catching a cab, rickshaw, or Uber. Once we got in the general vicinity, the church was hard to miss because of the lit-up Christmas decorations.

The highlight of the outdoor decorations was a nativity scene that ran almost the entire length of the yard from the entry gate to the church building. The stable and Holy Family were in the center, with the shepherds arriving on the left end . . . 

. . . and the wisemen arriving with their camels on the right end.

IRELAND, DAY 6: SLIGO'S YEATS TRAIL

July 9, 2024

After I spent a few minutes with the statue of Yeats in Sligo, we got on the "Yeats Trail," which takes visitors to several sites around Sligo that are somehow connected to the famous author.

Our first stop was Sligo Abbey, now in ruins but once a flourishing Dominican convent founded in 1253 and operating until 1760.

The Abbey is the setting for two short stories by Yeats: "The Curse of the Fire and of the Shadows" and "The Crucifixion of the Outcast."

Unfortunately, we arrived at 9:10 AM and it didn't open for tourists until 10:00--too long to wait.

IRELAND, DAY 4: DANIEL O'CONNELL MEMORIAL CHURCH

 July 7, 2024

On our way to the scenic Ring of Kerry Drive, we passed through Cahersiveen, population 1,300. When we saw the Daniel O'Connell Memorial Church looming over the village, we decided to take a look. We parked across the street and just happened to notice a ceramic Statue of Liberty through the window of a second-hand store. Crazy.

It looks like the church is 2/3 of the way to their fund-raising goal for renovating the building.

Built between 1888 and 1902, this is the only church in Ireland named for a layperson. Daniel O'Connell was an important Irish nationalist leader in the early 1800s who called for the repeal of the Act of Union of 1800 and for the restoration of the Kingdom of Ireland. He served as a member of Parliament and as the Lord Mayor of Dublin. He also played a role in the abolition of slavery in Ireland in 1833. He was born just outside of Cahersiveen, and the village is proud to claim him as their own, as they should be.

The marble block cornerstone of this granite church was a gift from Pope Leo XIII and was sourced from Rome's catacombs.

IRELAND, DAY 2: CORK

 July 5, 2024

Our next destination was Cork, located in (what else) County Cork, the largest and southernmost county of Ireland.

With a population of about 225,000, Cork is the second largest city in Ireland. That's a small population for the second largest city of a country! But then, the largest, Dublin, has fewer than 550,000 people.

My first impression of the city came from this fantastic mural, which I have since learned is entitled What Is Home? The artist, a guy named Asbestos, explains, "I painted this figure wearing a cardboard box on its head to start a conversation with the public about what home means to them. As a country we are currently in an existential crisis over housing and our need to put a roof over our heads. There's a fear and uncertainty about finding a safe space, and the system seems to be stacked in favour of the landlords." The mural, painted in 2021, is part of a street art project started during the 2020 lockdown.

It was mid-afternoon and we were hungry. We hadn't eaten much since breakfast. Bob had scoped out a restaurant weeks before the trip located in Cork's English Market--Farm Gate Café. 

We both ordered lamb stew and were a little disappointed. It was only average.