Excursions Add-On: The Best for Last?

"Let's start at the very beginning,/ A very good place to start..." Okay, people, time to bone up. Are you ready? Name the scene. #1? (Hint: "Come out of that water at once!")

#2? (Hint: "I, too, have sinned, Reverend Mother.")

As you can see, I am not going in order here. But you've got this. Keep going. #3? (Hint: "Apparently, we are both suffering from a terrible lack of curiosity.")

Ha, did I get you with that? Okay, here's an easier one: #4? (Hint: "You are sixteen, going on seventeen...")

Surely, you got that. How about this: #5? (Hint: "...Ti Dooooo-ooo-oooo!")

Okay, fine, here's a curveball: #6? (Hint: "Would now be a good time to sing about our favorite things?")

What, you got even that?! Alright, how about this one: #7? (Hint: "Yikes, lady, watch out, you're being followed by a dangerous, albeit jovial, fur ball!")

Yes, that's a deleted scene. Rodgers and Hammerstein decided the annexation of Austria by Nazi Germany was dark enough. Well, if you still haven't put two and two together, "The hills are alive with the sound of music."

Yep, we went to Salzburg, and we took Fraulein Maria's Bicycle Tour.

Suzy's bike was named Martha, would you believe it (--see the name on the front fender),

which is, indeed, starting at the very beginning. It was like the Martha trip, both because of her love of The Sound of Music (--Suzy and I have watched that movie every Christmas since we met) and because of her abiding interest in the Holocaust, which Scout especially has taken up.

I'll speak about the Holocaust parts later, but, for now, let's stay focused on Salzburg... So, yeah, we dipped our fingers in fountains, local urchin played in trees,

we heard sometimes salacious details behind the book and the making of the movie (--did you know the book was actually called The Rebellious Nun, and that the real Maria, the reformed nun, was more the stickler than her husband?), and I did my absolute best to embarrass Scout

(--an increasngly easier feat these days). The tour guide gave me his portable speaker and played the soundtrack of The Sound of Music and I sang it with everything I've got. Suzy did, too. The kids were mortified.

And while we took the tour, we also recognized how beautiful Salzburg is.

The next day, we decided to take our own turn and hiked the Gaisberg,

one of the many mountains surrounding and overlooking the city.

It was breathtaking. I couldn't stop taking pictures.

What a great place to set a movie--for an actual Rodgers and Hammerstein-worthy story to take place. We loved Salzburg, even the parts that had nothing to do with Maria.

You see that cup of chai right there? Best I have ever had, just as Katy said it would be--at a place called Afro Coffee. The kids did not like their hot chocolates nearly as much, but they dug the place.

In the end, all on its own, Salzburg was an amazing trip,

but as I said above, it was only one of three thematically bound parts. The previous post was long enough, so I saved this "excursion" for last. No, not because it was last, nor because it was the best, though it had the bonus of us all being together, but because its three parts constituted a whole. Yeah, you know how I keep raising--or rather, facing the question of what all these random trips will add up to in the end. Perhaps it is the English teacher in me to have such concerns, but this road-trip was an exception to the rule--though, to tell you the truth, an almost purely accidental one. You see, both before and after Salzburg, we stopped in Munich, and both of those stops lent a powerful continuity. On the way down, we stopped at Dachau.

It was a profound experience, especially since that camp was the first of its kind, established and operated in the long lead-up to and throughout the war--the "model" for many many more camps, and the training ground for some of the most degenerate and brutal human beings in history.

It pulled together much else we had seen or heard about or read since arriving in Germany (--and long before that, too--remember Martha and Scout here). I am glad it is preserved, glad we saw it, but its importance is also its revolting truth.

Right, never again! But, it seems obvious enough to me, "NEVER AGAIN" is either a call to continual action or it is next to nothing. It is a call, that is, to remaining conscious of and recognizing this unremitting human capacity as it reveals itself; and, most importantly, a call to being ready and willing to oppose it, not to just turning away from it. The Germans, themselves--or at least Berliners lead me in this: their earnest will to remember the past and to atone for it is, for me, one of things I relish most about them, and is the main reason I felt we needed to go to Dachau... Look at these stones.

You can find them all over Germany. Each one represents the last time a person, usually a child, usually outside an elementary school, was seen before being abducted by the Nazis. These stones we found in Salzburg, actually, though the Austrians, it seems, do wish to distance themselves as far as possible from the Nazis. (Do you remember the scene in The Sound of Music, where the Nazis are marching through the market square? A brief shot, really. Well, originally, the local government was opposed to the inclusion of that scene, but when the movie producers proposed to use actual footage instead, the government caved and allowed for a much scaled down version to be filmed.)

In any case, this well documented and horrible example--this "model" camp, and, more, everything it stands against--every human's basis in love became the theme of our trip. Our reaction to it shined a light on everything we did. And then came the last part, our second stop in Munich, on the way back up to Berlin: this is a picture of the three at the Munich Olympic compound.

This was Suzy's idea, and, again, I am grateful for it. Of course, the Munich Games (1972) was terribly marred by the kidnapping and killing of 11 members of the Jewish wrestling team, one West German cop, and five Palestinian "terrorists." Many of the Jewish victims were children of Holocaust survivors, and a couple of the coaches were even survivors themselves. And the kidnappers had logistical help from Neo-Nazi police officers, which gave the "massacre" an added edge of irony: The Munich Games were meant, in part, to showcase the progress made since the sinister days of Hitler's rule. Now, there is a powerful memorial set up to remember the victims and of the controversy surrounding its handling. Suffice it to say, it is all a sobering reminder of the call to action that is "Never Again". Still I can see the sculpture outside the central prison block in Dachau.

Back on the road, we talked and talked about the trip and its theme, while the yellow rapeseed fields of Germany passed by.

(Oh, may we love more actively, more consciously, my three.)