The architecture, the festivals, the humor – Deutschland ist sehr wunderbar! Day 6 – Germersheim, Germany

Sometimes I think cities are just like people. Some of them are world celebrities, known and spoken of by everybody. They shine and sparkle in their glory. They have no secrets left. Crowds of fans (aka tourists) are their inevitable fate and privacy is long forgotten.

And then there are simple fellows who live their simple lives. Their names are unknown; their ways and paths are left alone. The only visitors are family and friends and tourism is an extraordinary phenomenon treated with sacral reverence.

I for one love those fellow cities. There is room for imagination and fantasy. Tripadvisor is helpless and the internet blushes with embarrassment returning a tiny Wikipedia article as its one and only search result. You are on your own, but isn’t it great? When the world is thoroughly traveled and infected with tourism plague, isn’t it amazing to find places where no tourist has ever set foot and you can pretend to be an explorer on a mission to make new discoveries?

Well, while I do exaggerate a tiny bit (a lot actually), I got asked a few times by locals in Germersheim why I was taking pictures. When I said I was a tourist, their postures would suddenly turn flamboyant and their faces would light up with proud smiles.

“Germersheim is a beautiful city!” they would say.

“Oh, it absolutely is,” I would make their day.

And I wasn’t lying. 

Germersheim is located on the left bank of the Rhine, with the population of about 20,000. Its history goes back to Julius Caesar’s times when a military camp was laid on a small area where later Germersheim was founded. The city got destroyed and rebuilt several times in the upcoming centuries and became a fortress in 1831. Many parts of the fortress exist until today and account for a particular military look and feel of the city.

Former barracks, arrest buildings and parts of the fortress got new lives and housed within their walls museums, schools, galleries and parks. Those half destroyed seedy grassy walls with loopholes, scattered through the city, create scenery good enough for the Game of Thrones filming, while modern buildings have a rather lively, cozy and inviting look. Besides, thanks to the School of Translation, Linguistics and Cultural Studies of the University of Mainz, a quarter of the city’s population is students. And so you get a unique mixture of medieval military flair with rural coziness of a small and neat German town.

See that light? That’s where the gym is located! 

And here is the sculpture garden and trail located in Fronte Beckers (part of the fortress). I had a chance to walk there at sunset, in complete silence, being the only person in the park... and I got some shiver going on, believe me! 

Here’s the Music School…

And the University building...

And the Fortress Park…

And the Biergarten…

And more pictures of this versatile town, which I got to visit thanks to my sister perusing her Master’s and currently taking residence there. J

I guess the moral of this story is when a place is treated with genuine interest, respect and curiosity, it opens its arms and turns out to have a lot more to offer than might have seemed in the beginning. Sort of like people. :)

More information about Germersheim can be found here and here. 

Read about Day 5 of my Germany-France road trip here.