Today, we’re taking a virtual vacation in Germany! We’ll be wandering through Berlin and Munich, with a side stop at the salt springs of Bad Nauheim.
“It would be difficult to conceive a more imposing spectacle of the kind, than is brought in a moment before the gaze of the stranger, who for the first time enters the Prussian capital, from the side of Charlottenburg. Situated in a dead level, and overshadowed by plantations and groves, Berlin is completely hidden from you till you have passed the barrier; when you are introduced all at once to a scene, of the gorgeous magnificence of which, no one, till he shall have thus made acquaintance with it, may hope to form a conception. Your carriage having passed beneath the span of the gateway, which not being arched, produces a two-fold striking effect, halts at the barrier guard-house, and so enables you to look forth upon the entire extent of the Unter den Linden….”
[Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, visited in 1837 (1839), p. 61]
“My first impression of Munich was of a place simply irradiated with the love of beauty. … [The] squares, with their old tower-gates and churches and massed houses, were grouped as if composed by the eye of a painter. And although one half of the Marien-Platz is the work of our day, yet few squares in Europe have given me a deeper sense of the combined opulence and simplicity, the dignity and pure beauty, that used to invest the forums of medieval towns like Siena and Nuremberg.”
[Romantic Germany (1910), p. 301]
Images:
Berlin: 1. Ansicht Berlin’s, no date. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; 2. Berlin. Unter den Linden, circa 1890-1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
Guidebook: 3. Baedeker’s handbook for Northern Germany (1886), page xiii (first page of Introduction). University of California Libraries via Internet Archive.
Bad Nauheim: 4. Postcard of Sprudelhof, circa 1923. Joseph McGarrity Collection, Villanova University Digital Library.
Munich: 5. The Bavaria, with Temple of Fame, circa 1890-1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division; 6. Munich. Hofbrauhaus, circa 1890-1900. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.
