Germany Makes Sense from the Ground Up

Here’s a trick for your next trip. On a German market square, look at the church before you look at the menu board. Its walls tell you roughly where you are.

Red brick usually points north, to towns like Lübeck. Red sandstone shows up in the southwest and along the Main. In Freiburg, one of the old quarries that supplied the minster sits within sight of the minster itself. The hole the church came out of is still there, in plain view.

Those colors came straight out of the ground (no metaphor intended). People built with whatever lay under their feet, so stone country went up in stone and clay country fired bricks.

Usually. Because the tallest brick tower in the world stands in Landshut, down in Bavaria, at about 130 m (427 ft). In Munich, even the Frauenkirche (Church of Our Lady) is brick. A strip of clay runs through the gravel plain east of the Isar, and the city’s brickworks dug there. So much for the tidy north-south rule, huh?

That’s the thread through the pages below. First the land itself, then what we built on it. After that come the churches, and finally the highlights from the road and from above.

Germany’s Land and Water from the Coast to the Alps

Germany climbs from north to south in four broad steps. The North German Plain runs far inland from the coast, flat or gently rolling. Then come the Mittelgebirge, the wooded low mountain ranges across the middle. The Alpine foothills follow, and a thin strip of the Alps finishes the climb at the Zugspitze, 2,962 m (9,718 ft) high.

Four steps, and we get exactly one row of Alps. It is a thin one.

Ice shaped both ends. Glaciers reached deep into the north and spilled out of the Alps, and they left lakes behind when they melted. That makes the Mecklenburg Lakes and the lakes south of Munich cousins. :-)

The coast splits in two as well, with the North Sea to the west and the Baltic to the east. The two could hardly behave more differently.

People settled all of it and drew borders across it later. Our regions still follow the land more closely than those lines do.

German History and Heritage Built from the Ground Up

Our history runs back more than two thousand years, and the ground turns up in it early. Earlier than that, really, but the Romans were the ones who wrote it down. They let the Rhine and the Danube guard their frontier. Where the two rivers left a gap, they built the Limes—a land border of 550 km (342 mi) with watchtowers and forts.

That worry line is a signposted holiday route today. You can drive the gap the Romans lay awake over.

Later builders read the ground just as carefully (no trucks, no choice). Along the Baltic, where good stone was scarce and clay was plentiful, whole Hanseatic towns went up in Brick Gothic (Backsteingotik). Stralsund and Wismar still look the part. Along the Neckar, the valley’s red sandstone went into the Heidelberger Schloss (Heidelberg Castle). Same logic, different dirt.

Castles followed the terrain, too. On the Middle Rhine, the river cut a narrow gorge through slate mountains. About forty castles, palaces, and fortresses line those 65 km (40 mi).

In the flat Münsterland, water did the job a hill does elsewhere. More than a hundred moated castles and palaces still stand there. Who needs a hill?

German Sacred Sites in Brick and Stone

Remember the church walls? (I did promise we would come back to them.) This is where they get interesting. Churches often end up telling a longer story than their builders planned.

In Dresden, the Frauenkirche was built of sandstone. The air raids of February 1945 destroyed it. The ruin stood there for decades, and rebuilding began in 1994.

Look at the walls today and you see two colors. The dark blocks are original stones, recovered from the rubble and set back where they came from. The pale ones are new. They are darkening at their own pace, and one day the wall will be a single color again.

Then there are the names. A Dom usually means a cathedral, yet the one in Frankfurt has never been a bishop’s seat. The word Münster is just as slippery, as the big church in Ulm shows. Clear as mud, right?

Germany’s Highlights from the Road and from Above

The highlights make more sense once you know what they stand on. See? It all comes back to the ground.

Most of the themed routes follow an idea. A few follow the land itself, and those are the ones I’d drive first. The German Alpine Road keeps to the edge of the mountains all the way from Lake Constance to the Königssee. Too bad there aren’t more like it.

For the fastest geography lesson in the country, go up. In Berlin, the Fernsehturm (TV Tower) is the tallest structure in Germany. It stands 368 m (1,207 ft) high. From its viewing floor, the North German Plain looks every bit as flat as the name promises. ;-)

Short on time before a trip? Read two of the pages above first. The one on regions explains the ground you’ll be crossing, and the one on places to visit picks the towns that deserve a night.

How we Germans live on all this ground is the subject of German culture. If a trip is taking shape, start with Germany vacation. The plain facts and figures are on Germany info.

Me? I still look at the church wall first when I get off a train somewhere new. Brick or stone, pale or dark, and I have a rough idea what the ground under my feet is made of.

It is a small habit. It has yet to let me down.