The Bells in Their Silence
Travels through Germany
Chapter One
CULTURAL CAPITAL
Hamburg, Hannover, Göttingen, and Kassel. There were other trains: the
tracks to the dull marshy west toward Bremen and Osnabrück (change for
Amsterdam), or the maddeningly slow and infrequent service to Berlin,
whose cars were always crowded with students. There was the boat-train
north to Denmark and the local to Lübeck. But this was the one we took
most often from our temporary home, the white and bullet-nosed InterCity
Express that dropped south at a speed America could only dream of-Hamburg
to Frankfurt in three hours and a half, Munich in just over six. Though
today I wasn't going quite so far. "Grüssen Sie Thüringen von mir," the
happy pink-faced conductor had said when he punched my ticket. Say hello
to Thuringia for me. He was young and plump, with a ginger mustache; I had
trouble with his accent and wondered when he'd left.
In the cafe car, I spread the Herald-Tribune under coffee and rolls and
looked up from "Doonesbury" as, south of Hannover, the north German
lowlands began to ripple into hills. I finished my break ... read full excerpt from The Bells in Their Silence: Travels through Germany ebook
