Fri, 29 Aug 2003

author Tim	location Oettern, Weimar, Thüringen, Deutschland
posted 10:35 CEST 30/08/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Deutschland/Deutschland 2 ( all photos )

Leipzig, Buchenwald ( 13 photos )
Liz and I got ourselves organised reasonably early, and decided that driving into town would be less hassle than getting the tram, probably cost about the same and anyway, it was raining cats and dogs!
After parking in roughly the same place as the previous day, we had a coffee in one of the stylish arcades the city has on offer.
From there we headed to the Rathaus and the markets out the front to meet up with Baz, but in the end he was running a little late and had to go straight to the train station instead.
The rain had subsided for a while, so we turned our attention across the square to the dominant Thomaskirche, which houses the tomb of one Johann Sebastian Bach in front of the altar, one of Leipzig's most famous exports. There were also some instruments from his time on display, catching our musical minds' attention.
From there we wandered to the edge of the town to the Stasi Museum. The Stasi were the East German Secret Police in the time before the fall of the wall, and hence part of the Soviet Empire. The museum documented the total distrust of everyone everywhere, as they had collected everything from intercepted mail to scent and saliva samples in jars of pretty much everyone in Leipzig. The place has been kept pretty much as it was when it was invaded by citizens in 1989, stopping the destruction of the evidence that had been in process. It was fascinating to wander around, looking at lots of rooms full of tools of the trade, but would have been better if either our German was better or there was a more comprehensive English translation of much of the material.
We had just enough time before our parking ticket ran out to visit the temporary exhibition site of the Musical Instruments Museum of the University of Leipzig. The universal language of music helped us out here, especially when the helpful attendant threw a barrage of Deutsch at us, as we could see by her demonstrating the very interesting square organ complete with bird whistle, spinny flower things and of course lots of pipes. They had some really old clavichords, harpsichords and weird thirty-stringed lutes and even violas which we just about took in with the little time we had.

From there, it was out of town, heading west further on our "Old East Germany Ring Trip". Next stop was the Buchenwald concentration camp. From the outset we had a reasonable idea what we were in for - you don't visit places like this for an easy-going enjoyable afternoon. Once again we were a little let down, this time by the fact that we couldn't get an audio-guide despite the place not closing for many hours to come. We had to just wander and read a bit, not quite a way to do the horrific memories justice but still interesting to see the place where something like 56,000 people lost their lives.
There was a museum on the outskirts which was actually about the building of the memorial (getting the Allies and Soviets to agree on anything almost always involved enough to-ing and fro-ing to fill an entire museum), which contained an audio recording that an American reporter broadcast a day after the camp had first been discovered at the end of the war. That pretty much said it all for us, and coupled with the fact that the rain had come back we decided not to venture much further around the place.
Instead, we headed back to the motorway and a little way back east toward Weimar, where we checked ourselves into a nice little caravan park in forest land a long way from anywhere.

(customised)