With thanks to Heide and Juergen, VERY old friends from student days in Leipzig 52 years ago, for use of their flat here for the last three nights (they’re in Sweden marking their own 53rd wedding anniversary), we’ve had a brief rest from cycling, half way through our three months on the road, to overload on Bach and pay respects at Jutta’s Hartung family grave in Dresden.
Returning to JS Bach’s home town and possibly my favourite German city – three months here as a student even in GDR days in 1971 was a wonderful, formative experience, with lots of rowing and not a lot of studying – we found ourselves quite by chance in the middle of one almighty (annual, it turns out) Bach Festival.
So in the space of just 26 hours, we were thrilled by four concerts, including possibly the best performance we’ve ever heard of the Matthew Passion, sung by Solomon’s Knot entirely by heart in the church of St Nicholas, itself heart of the 1989 revolution which swept away East Germany’s communist system.
For Monday breakfast, we were inspired at Bach’s home church of St Thomas by The Little Singers from Armenia, an internationally acclaimed children’s choir which is possibly the best vocal ensemble (a time for superlatives here) that we’ve ever heard, which is saying something.
Lunch was a recital with one of Leipzig’s great organs at the rather newer (as in, end 19th century) Michaelis Church, and last night, dashing from Leipzig’s enormous railway station (describing itself as the most beautiful in Europe, a fair description) from a slightly delayed arrival from Dresden, we had a Bach-focused medley of renaissance music by both the master and a couple of his predecessors as Thomas Church Kantor.
The weather has been absurdly warm and pleasant – reflecting the extreme drought that much of Germany is currently experiencing, with fields and grass turning brown before our eyes as we tandem. (I might have mentioned climate change – it’s really, really serious.)
A train dash to Dresden (using German railway’s brilliant and intensely popular monthly Deutschlandticket with a whole month of local travel for just 49 Euros) offered much space for reflection, of a city destroyed in February 1945 with Allied bombing that would today be considered a war crime, and of Jutta’s complex family story.
Jutta’s father Fritz was the outcome of an illicit liaison in occupied France in 1915, adopted later by his own Dresden-based biological father after the death of his young French mother only a few months after his birth.
As World War Two approached its final months, Fritz as a Wehrmacht soldier was captured by the Americans in Italy. His first daughter Angelika back in Dresden died of diptheria in December 1944 less than two years old, and Fritz’s first wife died in the February 1945 firestorm.
Fritz himself died in 1992, and his ashes are with the magnificent family grave in Dresden. Its upkeep has been handed back to the cemetery administration who are looking now for a patron to take on the costs, with the option of using it for themselves when the time comes.
So much more that could be said, but enough for now.
We’re off again on Daisy shortly, heading for Zwickau and the old East-West German border just south of Plauen where Jutta and I came a cropper in tramlines in 1978, truncating our first tandem tour on Daisy 1 somewhat suddenly.
Sadly, in Zwickau, the makers of Daisy 2’s Pendix electric motor are busy with preparing for a big bicycle trade fair and can’t welcome us on a visit to the factory. But life is nothing if not peppered with disappointments as well as moments of profound happiness and meaning.
Of which Leipzig and Dresden have been full.
I may blog rather less frequently from now on, as we’ve got some serious long-distance cycling to do if we’re to get home to the UK within the tragic 90-days-in-every-180 limit to European travel that came with the madness that is Brexit.
At least Johnson and the Tories are now getting their come-uppance for having imposed this on us.
Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord… And let’s hope that the post-imperial anti-European virus is at last being expunged from our collective English psyche and political system.
Catching up with some delay on our stay in Weimar, where Germany’s greatest writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe lived and worked.
