Two facets of historic German culture

After breakfast we set out with Connie and Udo to visit Lippeland, first driving to the town of Detmold and then to the Herrmansdenkmal (Herrman Monument) 55 metres high, standing on a prominent ridge in the forest overlooking the Rhine-Westfalen plain, a vivid green and gold patchwork as far as the eye could see in every direction.

The monument was constructed in 1875, celebrating the growth of German national identity under Kaiser Wilhelm I. It made me think of the American statue of Liberty. Hermann was a german warlord of the first century, educated and trained for local military governance by the Roman empire. He fought a successful independence campaign and gained status as a nationalist icon in the nineteenth century.

There's a ridgeway walk through the forest running for a hundred kilometres or so, and the memorial site is popular local tourist destination, not least for treetop walks and visits to a collection of tall standstone rock stacks, each of which can be climbed for the view, in safety by flights of steps. We settled for climbing up 30 metres to the viewing platform beneath the monument's statue, admission €7. During the recent restoration work on the monument, a shine steel plated ticket controlled automatic turnstile was installed. Two paces beyond the original manned ticket booth, empty and redundant remains a sign of the times.
  

We drove on from the monument to Detmold's Museum of Rural History and Culture, Lippeland's equivalent to St Fagans Museum of Welsh life, and it's the largest of its kind in Germany with a hundred buildings. The domain is on an open hill side whose fields are still farmed. Buildings from all over the region have been re-erected here, including two windmills, two chapels, one with with a schoolroom attached, a petrol station of 1930 design. The houses are mainly grouped as in a village. Larger properties have well tended gardens interestingly laid out to illustrate local domestic and decorative custom.
 

Most of the buildings are timber framed, some with lime washed wattle and daub walls, others with brickwork exteriors, occasionally there were thatched roofs, but most were red  tiled, standing out in a landscape of gold and green. Huge farmhouses shelter both people and animals in spacious and well laid out enclosures. One of them accommodates the horses which pull a tourist wagon around the estate, others house handcraft workshops, one a restaurant offering local specialities where we had lunch.

Two exhibits I found most moving. One was the eighteenth century house of a Jewish tradesman whose last occupants had been taken to a concentration camp, never to return. Few rooms were furnished, empty rooms told the family story in a sparse way. Whether this is a work in progress or kept deliberately minimal is hard to say, but it speaks of a deeply disturbing history,never far from being repeated somewhere in today's world with a different set of victims.

The other exhibit was a Parish poor-house for women, with  small rooms and sparse white washed interior. Although three centuries old, the names of only 38 of a great number of anonymous inhabitants were on record, printed on banners hung from the ceiling in one room. Another room contained two symbolic bare wooden chairs in the bare parlour, where the pastor and friends visited down the years. The kitchen  had a table and chairs for eight occupants.
 
One room alone was furnished with bed, table and chair. On the bed were laid out the few clothes belonging to a typical inhabitant, and on a glazed panel barring the entrance was inscribed a copy of the ledger account of the costs of the person's occupancy. Coldly clean and decent was the best that poor, vulnerable or sick people could expect at the end of their lives. For women at the end of a life as home makers, it meant ultimate shame.
  

After such an active day, we were too tied to contemplate preparing a meal and we headed out for a pils and a pizza at a country Gästhof restaurant, and stayed until the sun went down. A day rich in impressions of rural beauty and domesticity, filled with pride and respect for the many good things of the past, which the world can still appreciate.

Photos of our day's outing can be seen here