Sunday, September 25

GÖRLITZ

Görlitz is the eastern-most town in Germany. I wanted to see it for two reasons. First, my high school German teacher Herr Heuser was from Breslau, in Silesia (now in Poland), and he told stories. As the Red Army advanced through Germany, Breslau was declared a "Festung" (fortress) - the Führer said the people should stay and fight and he wouldn't let them evacuate, so when the Red Army came through they destroyed the city. 18,000 people froze to death and 40,000 civilians lay dead in the ruins of homes and factories. So I was interested in Silesia, and Görlitz has a Silesian Museum.

The second reason is that Görlitz is the only German town of its size (about 55K people) that didn't get bombed during the war at all. And after that, the East German government didn't invest much in its infrastructure. So almost everything you see is unchanged, and the way it used to be.

The downtown is very pretty, with big old kept-up medieval buildings and churches, but outside of that there are streets and streets of empty clapped-out buildings, some even with plywood on the windows. Many of them are decorated with pretty 19-century architectural ornaments, nymphs and pilasters, etc. Lost glory.

Maybe where the kid puked in "The Reader"

So, they make movies here, because it's like back-in-time -- a ready-made movie set. I read that they call it "Görlywood" (ha ha). When I was walking from the train station I think I saw the passageway where Kate Winslett helped the kid puke in "The Reader." According to the IMDB, they've made 44 movies here in recent years, including "Inglorious Basterds." The interior of The Grand Budapest Hotel is an old shopping pavilion here.

Anyway, Tuesday morning I took the train from Erfurt eastward out of Thuringia and into Saxony, through Leipzig (been there) and Dresden (Missus Slade and I have been there). I stayed there two nights.

Near Görlitz, station signs started to be in both German and Polish (the train I was on went on to Warsaw).

I dragged the suitcase a mile over bumpy cobbles to the only non-airbnb place that I had booked on this trip (there weren't any airbnbs here much) -- the Picobello Pension, which is in a beautiful location, right on the bank of the River Neisse, which since The Big One is the border with Poland. There is a footbridge that connects the two countries. There is no sign or marker that tells you when you left one country and went into the other - people are just walking and biking back and forth. In fact, I was just in Poland a few minutes ago, and bought a Polish beer in one of the "Zigaretten" shops that cluster around the Polish side of the bridge like hemorrhoids. I didn't have any zlotys on me, but the Polish lady GLADLY accepted euros. Everybody there does.

By the way, I think they should build a wall, and make Poland pay for it.

This pension is about $35 a night, which is pretty cheap but other than the location, it's no bargain. It's pretty spartan, and I'm on the 3rd floor, which over here means the 4th floor. With my heavy suitcase and no elevator! (I know. It's good for me.)

The worst thing is, there's no free wifi. You have to pay 4 euros for a scratch-off card that gives you 180 minutes of bad wifi. I plan to write a bad review of this place on Booking.com

Silesia is a fat tongue of land that sticks down southeastward from Berlin with its capital at Breslau, now Wrocław. Like most of eastern and northern Germany it was originally Slavic, until the Teutons moved in and took over way, way back in the day. A lot of eastern German town names sound Slavic - they end in -ow and - itz. Actually, the -in part of the name Berlin is the same Slavic ending as on Stalin and Lenin. (I hope nobody ever told that to the Führer - it would have pissed him off for sure).

The Allies chopped off the eastern part of the Reich and gave it back to the Slavs, with the new border running south up the Oder and Neisse rivers.

The Görlitz area is on the west side of the river Neisse, so it was the only part of German Silesia that stayed in Germany. All the rest of it went to Poland. So there is a really good Silesian museum here where I spent a lot of time. Descendants of Silesian Germans come here to see how it was for their grandparents, and sigh over their wonderful lost homeland.

The Soviets expelled the German Silesians, who had lived there for centuries, pushing many of them through Görlitz. And they moved Polish, Ukrainian, and White Russian populations westward into Silesia, to take the ousted Germans' jobs, shops, and farms. They called it "population transfers." The museum has lots of pictures and artifacts and text about it, in German and Polish.

There are tourists here, but as far as I can see they're all Germans. You can hear Polish spoken in the streets, and also Greek. After the Greek civil war of 1949-50, 14,000 Greek Communists (the losers) were brought up to here and settled on both sides of the river by the Polish and German Communist governments.

Also, I saw a family of orthodox American Jews (I heard them talking) - with kippas and tsitsis and everything - walking in the main Platz. I wanted to ask them if they had some Jewish connection with Görlitz - maybe related to murdered pre-war Görlitz Jews - but I didn't want to embarrass them or me. I chickened out.

Monday morning I rented a bike and rode all over town, enjoying the many pretty old run-down buildings. Then I spent the afternoon riding around on the Polish side, which is not very different except it doesn't have a historic core, since the core was on what's now the German side.
The picture is my bike on the "Peace Bridge" across the Neiße to Poland.






This is a doggy toilet facility in Zgorzelec, Poland, which is the name of the Polish half of Görlitz. I like the way it actually show's the dog's anus. In case you still didn't exactly get what it was for.