Dienstag, 20 Juli
Schloss Nymphenburg!
(There’s a current debate in Germany about the use of the letter “ß”—“ess-set”/“scharfes-s”—instead of “ss”; it has little to do with pronunciation, apparently, and more to do with keeping an ancient letter versus making things in the technological age easier, from what I’ve understood.)
Anyway, this trip had been scheduled for Tuesday but the Zivis (the community service intern college student types who organize the outings) had to reschedule a bunch of events. We walked with Peter the Zivi to the Tram, only to discover that our tram had vanished, and we were faced with a half-hour wait. Frowning, Peter took us down the street two blocks to the next tram station, to face the same thing. We shrugged and took the U-Bahn instead, dumping out to find another tram delayed. Each delay had spurred a small group of students to give up and do something else, but Mary and I were firm in our decision to go see Nymphenburg. The German Versailles, in München itself—technically a tram ride away.
Peter, not to be thwarted, decided to start us walking there.
Painful idea.
We arrived after a long, depressingly hot walk through the aching humidity. München’s weather has been phenomenal. It’s been clear skies with 80 or 85 Fahrenheit every day, with the exception of two afternoon rain showers. Gorgeous. Of course it was sunny, but it was just beyond the lovely sort of warm, becoming oppressively so. By the time we strode up to see the palace, I was too dehydrated to be sweating.
Nymphenburg’s neighborhood is so closely similar to Versailles, it’s scary. Not only that, but walking up the tree- and shop-lined avenue (which is pretty quiet) it was seriously giving me feelings of déjà vu. We emerged back into the sun, and exactly like Versailles, a round semi-circle of street faced us, with what used to be the palace stables arranged neatly along the road. Except where Versailles had an impressive wrought-iron and gold-plated gate in front of a hundred yards of paving stones, Nymphenburg has water. A brilliant idea, to my mind. A larger man-made pond drips into a smaller, ringed by short hedges and lovely shrubbery, capped near the entrance with a rocky, simple fountain. All along the grass and in the water were birds of all sorts, many of which were swans, pecking disinterestedly at the grass or lazing about in the water.
The palace itself is similar and yet completely different from Versailles. It’s shaped similarly, stretching from a main building to the north and south sides a long distance. It’s not impressively tall, nor is it impressively gilded, rather favoring a simpler, almost modern style in its wide windows and sweeping lines. I could immediately reflect on Versailles—how fortuitous that I had been there recently—and notice the easy differences between the Bavarian monarchy and the French; Bavaria, or Bayern, was not a large nation/country/place, but it was not small either. But unlike France, it did not flourish quite the same during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and in a practical way I am beginning to associate with German tastes, their buildings and monarchs seem to reflect this. (I am no art or architecture history person, these are my own historical musings and interpretations.) France under the Sun King, Louis XIV, flourished in a lavishly over-wrought style that earned it the reputation of style and luxury France still to some extent retains; it was the center of a life that the German and Austrian monarchs and emperors sought to make their own, and ended up simply copying on a more demure scale. The fact that the Wittenbach family attempted to recreate the feel of a French palace—over and over again—with their own palaces is a testament to that desire to replicate the highest fashions.
Nymphenburg itself struck me as a starker, more plain shadow of its French cousin, but I liked it nonetheless. It has an austerity and simplicity to it that I liked vastly better than Versailles, a preference for wood, mirrors, and paintings that Versailles left off for sculpture, gilt, and chandeliers. Not that there aren’t any of those things in Nymphenburg, of course, but the fact that they only really made one room seem incredibly gaudy, leaving the rest to favor a more homey style is something I think I would have liked more, had I lived there. (Though admittedly, none of the palaces I’ve been in seems very…homey. Or really enjoyable. Imagine governing a country from such a place as Versailles! No wonder the Louis kings lost the people.)
When we arrived at the front of the palace, our tourguide was waiting. She was an elderly woman who was very panicky that we were a half-hour late. She kept repeating, in slow German, that she would have to cut our tour pitifully short, and she was so very sorry about it. It was cute. She led us up to the main entrance hall of the palace—that one room that’s fairly gaudy, as I mentioned—and down a few corridors lined with paintings, carvings, and furniture that was probably bought from—or inspired by—France, based on its design. It was interesting, and somewhat musty, and the guards were very snappish about leaning on the walls. I definitely liked the Garten, though, because it was so—big. That’s really all I can say. Big, open, and wild in a way that the garden of Versailles isn’t and won’t ever be. Versailles grounds are deliberately in the country, apart from Paris, and it’s a trek to get there. It was meant to be a palace away from city life for the nobles. But Nymphenburg is in München in a way that Versailles isn’t anywhere, making the vast park behind the palace almost an Englisher Garten in its own right in size. It’s amazing. And empty! Empty in a way I wish Versailles had been when I’d been there. Versailles’ garden had been fenced off to the people with the 20 Euro ticket, so I had to suffer to take window pictures of it from the castle. What an annoyance! I suppose they’re afraid we’ll trample the flowers?
Mary and I hung out in the sun for a little while, then decided we were severely pooped and needed to find the U-Bahn, immediately. We walked back to town and caught a working Tram back to Karlsplatz. Mary was hungry so I brought her to Augustiner am Dom, a restaurant I’d had Wiener Schnitzel in the other day. We found they had a back “hof”—courtyard—and immediately took advantage of it. We had some Augustiner and some delicious soup, and thoroughly enjoyed our day.
