The way to plan a holiday is to let someone else do it. I’m lucky enough to know two people who actually enjoy booking travel and accommodation. They are good friends, so I often go on holidays with one or the other. This year one of them kindly arranged a holiday for himself and me in Germany.The most obvious and popular route from England to Germany by train is to Cologne(Köln in German) with a change at Brussels; we left London just after 8 a.m., London to Brussels took just under two hours, Brussels to Cologne just under three, and the return fare for two people was £312. On holidays with this friend, much of the conversation consists of him proposing things to do and me accepting them (out of laziness, and contentment with the mere fact of being on holiday). The task at other people’s lunch time is always to find a place that serves cake and coffee for me and a snack and beer for him.
We reached Cologne soon after 2 p.m., put down our luggage at our hotel and went for a walk by the Rhine, soon finding a café with the combination of refreshments we needed. On a previous visit to the city I had stayed at a hotel overlooking the river and had been unaware that the terrace and lawns between hotel and river concealed an underground main road. Our walk was partly on these lawns and promenades and partly, where the road was in the open, on paved walks at a lower level.Walks by rivers are relaxing if they are not beside a main road. On another visit, I had stayed in the street called Eigelstein, not wide, full of small shops and obviously old. It is close to what in Roman times had been a separate channel of the Rhine, smaller and further west than the present river, which formed part of the Limes, border of the Roman empire(the Romans had a presence east of the Rhine but were not in full controlthere). In the Römisch-Germanisches Museum you can learn the history of the city, partly from an excellent interactive display. Cologne was the capital of the Roman province of Lower Germanyand was made a city (or “colony”, Latin Colonia, from which the name derives) in 50 C.E. at the request of Agrippina, wife (and niece) of the Emperor Claudius. From 1536 it was the seat of one of the electors to the Holy Roman Empire. If you’re interested in art and history, Cologne has numerous museums and galleries for you to explore. The cathedral, the main railway station, the best of the art galleries and (from October 2026) the Römisch-Germanisches Museum are concentrated in a small pedestrianized area.
On this visit we dined at the BrauhausEmKölsche Boor in EIgelstein, a proper bar with no carpets, knick-knacks or, as far as I remember, music.Bratwurst with mixed vegetables and chips cost 15.90€ (rather than haute cuisine, which I suppose must exist in Germany, I’ve always gone for simple plentiful food there, where sausages, beer, coffee and cake are usually good; they cater well for vegetarians too). As well as a strong dialect, Cologne has an unusual, top-fermented beer (“Kölsch”) which is sold in measures of only 200 ml. The waiter will keep taking away your empty glass and replacing it with a full one, unless you put your beer mat over the empty when you’ve had enough.
Next day we took a train for about an hour’s journey up the river to Bad Breisig. This was the first of many journeys on the railway between Mainz and Cologne, a well-known riverside route with gorgeous views. Bad Breisig in the time of the Roman empire was the southernmost point of the ‘Lower Germanic Limes’; south of it the empire’s border, the Upper-Germanic-Rhaetian Limes, was on the right bank of the Rhine. Today it is a pleasant resort with a riverside walk, cafes and restaurants.
At the hotel no-one answered the door at first; when the landlord eventually turned up he proved to be an intelligent, sad, laconic, plodding sort of middle-aged man, and there was a feeling of loneliness and emptiness about the whole place. We went by train to Brohl, a little further up the river, visited the engine sheds on the narrow-gauge railway there and saw a Mallet (articulated compound) locomotive having steam raised. The fitter looking after the engine was very friendly, the air in the place almost unbreathable and too opaque for photography. After a journey back to Bad Breisig on a train that was late like almost all German trains, we dined out of doors at a riverside restaurant, very pleasant and very characteristic of resorts on the Rhine, sharing a table, and conversing intermittently, with a likeable German couple. An endless procession of barges passed on the river in both directions.
Next morning at the advertised time for breakfast the breakfast room was locked. After ten or fifteen minutes our landlord arrived and when we asked about the time for breakfast said, as if it was only natural, that at the advertised time he had gone out shopping for bread. He was hardly cut out for today’s hospitality trade, not that it mattered very much to us. We went a second time to Brohl and ascended the valley, Brohltal, into the Eifel hills on the narrow-gauge railway, with unusually steep (5%) gradients, low speeds and lovely views of the hills, woods and fields. There was so little time for coffee and cake at the top station, Engeln, that I had to leave some of it or miss the train back. Back at Bad Breisig, in choosing a riverside restaurant for dinner,we tried to avoid a pair of buskers playing too loudly, and went for an Italian place, but the buskers were evidently moving from restaurant to restaurant and soon caught up with us. The food was good, as Italian food always is.
Our next stop was at the southern extreme of our tour, Heidelberg, off the Rhine, a little way up its tributary the Neckar. Heidelberg was from 1085 to 1690 the capital of the Electoral Palatinate and from time to time the seat of the Elector Palatine. Although much of it was destroyed by the French under Louis XIV, the parts they spared and those built later were not bombed in the Second World War, so the city still has attractive buildings, including those of Germany’s oldest university and oldest library. These, the various museums and the fact that Heidelberg was a hub of Romanticism and the birthplace of artists such as the Fohr brothers, make for a city full of learning and culture.
The hotel was in an ideal position on the bank of the river. Here we visited the Kurpfälzisches(Court Palatine) Museum and art gallery and saw work by Tilman Riemenschneider(1460-1531) whose remarkable carved wooden altarpieces I had seen long before in Rothenburg and Würzburg. I learned that effigies of Mary holding grapes represented her maternity: Mary was the vine and the grapes were Jesus.
Next day we moved back down the Rhine to a place I had been looking forward to, Koblenz. On holidays of about a week I travel very light, carrying everything in a fairly small rucksack, but this time I had really overdone it: the shirts I had laid out for the holiday were still at home on my bed, forgotten during mypacking. The only garments I absolutely refuse to wear for more than a day are socks, but wearing one shirt for a week is too much even for me, so I bought one here.
The statue at Deutsches Eck, Koblenz, on the promontory between Rhine and Moselle at the confluence ofthe two rivers, is an unbeautiful representation, on a megalomaniac, almost insane, scale, of Kaiser Wilhelm I on horseback, calling to mind, as someone had said to me after an earlier visit, Shelley’s “Ozymandias” – and that person didn’t knowthat an artillery shellin the Second World War had reduced this statue also to a “colossal wreck”. The French poet Apollinaire called the statue “macabre et gigantesque, un affreux monument”, and the German writer Ignatz Wrobel called it “ein Faustschlagaus Stein” (a punch in stone). What I read about the painstaking restoration of this horror after its merciful destruction in the War reminded me of Mark Twain’s story about the search party sent out when the Ark was all ready to sail — months of searching, mountains and forests, frightful weather, terrible hardship — a party that finally returned triumphant with what the Ark had lacked, a male and a female house fly. Some fragments of the destroyed monument, including the Kaiser’s face, are in the Mittelrhein Museum. Good things are also there, especially paintings, of which I particularly remember the mysterious, disturbing ones by the artist calling herself Rissa (still living), which include erotically-presented women with a dwarf or a sinister robot-like man standing beside them.
Koblenz’s most famous son, more important to students of 19th-centuryEuropean politics than the Kaiser, is Klemens von Metternich, Austrian Foreign Minister. Monuments to him in the city are rare but his birthplace, the Haus Metternich, has been maintained as a historical site
The best place to eat and drink that we found in Koblenz was Gretchens in An der Liebfrauenkirche where one could sit in a shaded terrace garden opening on to a pedestrian alley. Main dishes (steak, schnitzel, spit roast, tarte flambée, some fish dishes) cost between 7€ and 17€.We liked the place enough to go there twice, and the charming lady who served us the first time treated us as old friends on the second visit.
We remembered meals of Bratwurst (accompanied by beer) that we had enjoyed, and started looking for Bratwurst. In Koblenz we were beginning to be fanatical in our quest for this delicacy but the city seemed to be a Bratwurst-free zone, although near the station was a restaurant whose menu listed it. I think what we had there wasn’t really Bratwurst but grilled Bockwurst, the smoother-textured, Frankfurter-like pre-cooked sausage that is usually heated up in water.
On our last day we got the train to Cologne, still enjoying the journey beside the river.On this our eighth journey on this line I said to my friend “If it were possible to tire of this route, we would have done so by now”. At Cologne Hauptbahnhof we learned that our train to Brussels for the Eurostar no longer existed; we were not the only passengers to whom this was news. We checked all the E-mails that we had been sent about the journey from Cologne to London (marketed in its entirety by Eurostar), as did another passenger in the same plight, and we all agreed that we had not been told of the alteration. The next train was several hours later and we had time to visit the Museum Ludwig close to the station, where the collection of German expressionist and Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) paintings is particularly good. Among the expressionist works are some famous ones by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, August Macke and Otto Dix.
Our arrival in London was a little over five hours late according to our tickets; we did later get some money back. Our experience shouldn’t deter you too much from travelling to and from, or within, Germany by train: German trains are not usually more than one hour late.