The Castle on the Sea

If you study in Konstanz, you will probably make an expedition to Meersburg sometime during your September or March orientation. If you happen to be studying somewhere else in Baden-Wuerttemberg, I highly recommend that you make it a stop on your eventual warm-weather tour of the Bodensee. It's a small town, with not quite enough going on to warrant making it the end goal of a long train ride, but if you want to understand why the Bodensee has been a source of poetic inspiration for German authors from Goethe to Hesse and beyond, an afternoon among vine-covered hills and treacherously steep streets of Meersburg is vital. Even if you don't give a damn about German literature, God forbid, the views alone are worth it.

The town of Meersburg is named after Die Meersburg, the 'Castle on the Lake', a name that sounds like something from a fairy tale. The Burg is said to have been built in the 7th Century by King Dagobert the First, whose name most decidedly does not sound like something out of a fairy tale. It was lived in until the late 19th century, when it was made into a medieval museum. As far as such museums go, it's interesting but nothing spectacular. It's tough to make yourself passionate about placards and descriptions of coats of arms from the 1300's. What is truly mind-blowing is the sense of history that I mentioned in my post about Konstanz, the idea that you are standing in a building of stone that has survived unchanged through generations upon generations of men, and will continue to serve as a relic for hundreds of years more, at least.

Another focal point of the castle tour are the chambers that Annette von Droste-Huelshoff lived in for the last years of her life. Annette, or 'Die Droste' as many locals affectionately call her, as though she were an old aunt who still lives down the road, was The preeminent German poetess of the 19th century. If you have taken an upper-level German course at UMass, chances are you have read her short story 'Die Judenbuche' ("The Jew's Beech"), renowned as one of the first detective stories. As far as I can tell, Meersburg has the same love for her that Amherst has for Emily Dickinson, and the same hoarding of artifacts that relate to her. In one tower of the castle, you can see her bedroom and study, the stuffily conventional blue, floral wallpaper more appropriate to the musty sitting room of an elderly family friend than a 1400 year old castle. Samples of her handwritten poetry and prose are available for display, so an interested visitor can read her works of forlorn love that I have trouble seeing as having much more literary impact than the anguished scribblings of a snubbed thirteen year old. But I shouldn't be mean; her depictions of female attempts at self-identity in the constricted social order of her day are truly very good, and I think she is remembered more for them than for her love poetry. And no matter what you think of her, it is always interesting to see and try to understand the way the great minds of the past lived.