Thursday April 30

I went to the public market in the morning. It was full of beautiful fruit, vegetables, and flowers. There was quite a bit of the white asparagus that the Germans like. I walked to the medieval and highly decorated Ste. Anna church, with its attached “Luther Steps” museum which was well worth seeing. Luther stayed here when it was a monastery. The pope sent a legate down to terrorize him. The legate yelled at him but he yelled right back. The church went Protestant a few years later, ha ha.

They were having a small prayer service while I was there, and their chanting sounded just exactly like the Catholic chanting of my youth, except it was in German. There are dozens of dead people buried in the walls and floor, and I was wondering if, after the Reformation, the corpses who chose to remain Catholic were dug up and moved up to the Catholic cathedral a mile north.

I walked up to the Dom, the ancient cathedral which is still Catholic. It is also full of dozens of dead people in the walls and floor, with stone and marble tributes, some elaborate. Next to it is a little plaza with Roman-era ruins.

I also visited the beautiful synagogue, built in about 1913. The Nazis set it on fire on Kristallnacht in '38, but because there were adjacent goyish establishments, including a gas station, the fire brigade extinguished the fire instead of watching it burn, as was they usually did when Jewish-owned buildings were burning. After that it was used as a place to gather Jews enroute to their death, and as administrative offices. It has now been restored and there is a very nice museum cataloging Jewish life in Augsburg through the centuries.

Then I walked to the train station and bought my ticket to the town of Nördlingen, which I plan to visit tomorrow.

There are plenty of platzes with fountains and benches, and people enjoying the spring sunshine. When tottering around looking at stuff, you have to dodge bikes and streetcars.

Vignettes:

When you pass a person on an empty street, the other person doesn’t say hi.


People don’t say Guten Tag here. They say “Grüß Gott,” usually heard as “Sget!”


Hardly anybody wears a hat or sunglasses, even when it’s sunny.

In the Karlstadt department store, I saw a dapper older gentleman with his little dog on a leash, perusing the displays of the weird men’s euro-underwear.

Here are some Hungarian potato chips. You can't GET them in America!