MM#10: Mabel’s Grand Tour

Mabel goes to Europe

There comes a time in every young person’s life where she must face the facts: Europe exists, and it demands to be seen. I have spent the last week traipsing around Europe processing this information and I return to Substack a new woman. I write to you today, dear readers, in the tradition of my eighteenth- and nineteenth-century predecessors, who celebrated their entrance into adulthood by traveling the European Continent. The Grand Tour was considered a rite of passage and the cornerstone of a proper, well-rounded education for British and American young people. By visiting the sites and seeing the sights of Classical antiquity and the Renaissance, Grand Touristas could truly grasp their cultural inheritances, sow their wild oats, and emerge as Enlightenment individuals dripping in liberty, knowledge, and experience. If you are a fellow inhabit of Shondaland and are caught up with Netflix’s Bridgerton, then you’ve surely seen the fruits of a Grand Tour in one Colin Bridgerton, who leaves for his Grand Tour a chubby, self-important virgin and returns a MAN—chiseled, tan, level-headed—ready to dominate the marriage mart. 

The classic Grand Tour itinerary often began in London, included visits to Paris and Geneva, and culminated with a romp around the Italian greats—Rome, Venice, and Florence being prime targets. Travelers with more time might have ventured to Greece, Turkey, and the Holy Land. But I come bearing stories not about Europe’s major metropolises or its charming classical cities. No, as Madonna once sung, “Paris and London, baby, you can keep.” My Grand Tour deviated from the beaten path. I’m not like the other girls! I’m here to regale you with tales of the German states of Thuringia and Saxony. Thuring-what? Huh? Where’s that? What’s that? Why would anyone ever go there? Excellent questions. Let me explain by way of a brief summary of my trip below—the first of what I hope will be many Mandylion travelogues. It’s summer after all, and Madeline and I intend to live it up.

Day 1: Salve Weimar

I arrived in Weimar on a Tuesday so sunny that the cobblestone streets seemed to call my name, to beckon me to explore the medieval city. Within an hour, I had traversed the city center several times over. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Weimar was the throbbing heart of the German Enlightenment, home to Goethe and Schiller, whose visages are practically inescapable here. In the twentieth century, Weimar was home to Germany’s best (if such a thing exists…)—and its absolute worst. In 1919, the Weimar Constitution was signed, announcing the emergence of the short-lived Weimar Republic, a democratic parliamentary government destroyed by the rise of Nazism. That same year, architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus school, that much-mythologized bastion of artistic experimentation where Mies van der Rohe, Anni Albers, and Wassily Kandinsky rubbed shoulders. The Bauhaus lasted in Weimar for just a few years before relocating to Dessau to escape political pressures. In 1937, the Nazis established the Buchenwald concentration camp a few miles outside of Weimar. Jews, Communists, Poles, Romani people, homosexuals, and many, many more were imprisoned there. By the end of World War II, 56,545 people had died at Buchenwald. All of this history is palpable in Weimar, rippling beneath the surface and occasionally bursting into view in terrifying ways.

The first thing I did in Weimar was sample the local fare. Thüringer Klöße is a delightful dish consisting of potato dumplings that sort of taste like gelatinous mashed potatoes. I ate the big potato balls in a swamp of mushroom sauce. My grandma and I shared a REALLY good apfelstrudel for dessert.

We then visited the Goethe Wohnhaus, the primary residence of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The big yellow building was constructed in 1709 and occupied by the polymath-legend-writer-philosopher-scientist-etc. from 1782 until his death in 1833. Upon arrival, I was greeted twice. First, by an informational video explaining how the prisoners of Buchenwald constructed wooden crates to store Goethe’s treasures during the war. Second, by the Latin greeting SALVE, inserted with wood inlay at the threshold of the main living areas. At Goethe’s house, everything has its place. Sculptures are neatly tucked into perfectly proportioned niches. Every doorway in an enfilade on the second floor is topped by a black and yellow fresco of a Biblical scene or a mischievous angel. Specialized cabinets containing Goethe’s many collections—minerals, sheep’s wool, and other tiny natural scientific specimens—occupy every room. Their endless rows of small drawers compartmentalize the complex breadth of the natural world. Unfortunately, Goethe’s library is currently being cataloged, so was not on view.

Day 2: Rosarium

Wednesday was the main event. After an amazing European hotel buffet breakfast (meats, cheeses, breads, muesli), we piled in the rental Škoda and drove an hour to Sangerhausen. Our destination was the Europa-Rosarium, a municipal rose garden that my family was inspired to visit because of a Mandylion inquiry. Last year, while Madeline and I were putting the finishing touches on Mandylion Drop #1, I asked my grandmother, Judith M. Taylor, a horticultural historian and author of The Olive in California: History of an Immigrant Tree and Tangible Memories: Californians and Their Gardens 1800-1950, about the roses in Other Things Being Equal. Emma Wolf’s 1892 debut novel is full of flower analogies and rose shout-outs. Heroine Ruth Levice expresses her newfound interest in charity by rescuing a girl named Rose from shame and poverty, and nursing a young florist bound to his sickbed. When Ruth’s cousin declares his love for her, Wolf writes that “her face turned white as a Niphetos rose.” Later, her courtship with her soulmate Herbert is decorated with Maréchal Niel roses.

I asked my grandma if she was familiar with either rose. Though she humbly claims not to be a rosarian (that’s the official word for a professional rose-lover), she was able to dig up a little information for me via her horticultural sources. She also made the fabulous suggestion that we make a pilgrimage to the Rosarium to tickle our fancy for nineteenth-century roses. Founded at the turn of the century in east Germany, the Rosarium is a collection of 8,000 roses (both rose species (naturally occurring plants) and rose cultivars (human-made crossbreeds)) spread over thirteen acres. The Rosarium unfolds over a gently sloping tract of land, through which narrow paths cut, circle, and snake. Huge pyramid-like dirt mounds are visible on the horizon—built to enclose toxic mines nearby. Despite the proximity to oozing poison, the Rosarium, especially at this time of year, is a visual and olfactory delight. Roses blooming at your feet. Roses blooming on trellises overhead. Roses blooming on 6’ tall tripods at eye-level. Roses, roses, roses in every imaginable shade: pink, purple, orange, scarlet, white, yellow, peach, and more. A rainbow of roses, roses, roses all smelling delicious. 

This is not your average garden. Many of the roses grown at the Rosarium are one of a kind and can’t be found anywhere else. The Rosarium is less a garden than it is a museum of roses. Though roses have grown in temperate climes around the world forever (my grandma told me about a fossilized rose dating back some five million years), the history of roses in Europe began to change in the eighteenth century. At the end of the century, some intrepid horticultural thinker realized that many roses imported from China bloomed twice a year, unlike European roses which bloomed annually. Horticulturalists began to crossbreed Asian and European roses and released upon the world a huge diversity of rose cultivars. The new roses merged different desirable traits—petal shape, color, scent, seasonality, etc.—and incited a whole new market and culture of ornamental flowers. Roses, like clothes and music, go in and out of style, and follow trends. Roses have not always looked the same. That’s why the roses I see at the bodega around the corner from my apartment differ from the ones that Ruth Levice adorned herself with in mid-nineteenth-century San Francisco.

Not every rose has staying power. A beautiful rose might not be hardy enough to withstand multiple seasons or a bitter winter. Other roses fail to meet human expectations, either aesthetic or practical. The Rosarium has in its collection the first German cultivar. Bred by a guy named Weissenstein in 1773, the blood-colored rose is remarkable, but also a remarkable failure. Its buds never open. Though the Rosarium doesn’t cultivate every rose ever, it has many roses like Weissenstein’s, which are historically significant but are not marketable today.

While sitting at the airport with my grandma and father, I asked them both for a pull quote about the Rosarium:

“It was an overwhelming experience because of the gigantic variety of both the species roses and the cultivars. I pray that it will be able to continue into the future.” — Judith

“It was a distinguished collection of some of the hardiest and most productive hybrid and species yet encountered in this hemisphere.” – David

Day 3: Cacti, Luther, and the DDR

Another day, another ride in the Škoda. This time we headed to Erfurt, a town most famous for being the place where Martin Luther studied and was ordained, just before he instigated the Reformation. But like I said, my Grand Tour was off the beaten path, so we went to Erfurt not to participate in Luther-tourism (it’s a thing), but to visit a cactus farm. Operated by the Haage family for the last 150 years, the Kakteen-Haage has survived multiple wars and Communism. Its nineteenth-century greenhouses are still standing, which was an absolute thrill for me, a bonafide lover of glass architecture. Its mid-twentieth-century greenhouses were relocated from one side of Erfurt to another by order of the Deutsche Demokratische Republik (PSA: DDR ≠ Dance Dance Revolution). On the way back to Weimar we went to a gas station with a huge mural dedicated to Uma Thurman. That afternoon we visited Buchenwald, which was so profoundly disturbing that I was bedridden for the rest of the day.

Day 4: Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek and an organ recital in Dresden

After sleeping off my exquisite misery, I resumed my tour of Weimar Classicism with a visit to the Herzogin Anna Amalia Bibliothek, which I had been unsuccessfully attempting to enter for three days. With the help of my German-speaking brother Virgil, I pretty-woman’d the staff of the library, and secured tickets for Friday morning. The white, blue, and gold oval-shaped library was as charming as I’d hoped, with two stories of floor-to-ceiling bookshelves holding books bound in leather and skin (animal or human, I don’t care to know). The best part was being forced to wear enormous wool clog slippers to protect the original floors of the library, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Assembled by princess, patron of the arts, and composer Anna Amalia of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel in the eighteenth century, the library contains over 1,000,000 volumes, including a notable Shakespeare collection, a 1534 Luther Bible, and thousands of important works of German literature. It’s an added bonus that the library’s architecture conjures Bridgerton-style fantasies of being a German noblewoman bound in a whale bone corset, overflowing with intellectual and sensual power… Anyway, after my family dragged me out of the Bibliothek, we traveled to Dresden, leaving Thuringia for Saxony. Oh, Dresden, you’re crazy. Bombed to nothing in 1945 and part of the DDR until 1990, Dresden is a city that may forever be rebuilding itself. Scorched architectural fragments salvaged from the ashes of the Allied fire-bombing are woven into the reconstructed Baroque buildings that dominate the city center. On our first night, we visited one such building—the Frauenkirche Lutheran Church—to hear an organ recital. The organist played works by Bach and Mendelssohn. Then Cosmo and I ate french fries in our hotel room.

Day 5: More flowers

My grandma wrote a book about the transformation of the ornamental flower industry in East Germany after World War II. Hence our visit to the Kakteen-Haage, as well as Elsner pac Jungpflanzen. The Elsner family has operated a massive flower and herb wholesale business in Dresden since 1889, except for several decades after the war when the business was socialized and taken out of their control. My grandma’s friend and heir to/manager of the Elsner business, Antonia, gave us a thorough tour of the facilities, from the fridges where tiny plant cuttings grow in agar-agar to the immense greenhouses where millions of begonias and geraniums sit pretty, waiting to be distributed across Germany. It was staggering and gorgeous. After our tour of the flower farm, we ate schnitzel and flammkuchen, and then walked around historic Dresden in the pouring rain and saw some more burned monuments.

Day 6: Monkeys and Old Masters at the Palace

We ended our action-packed trip with a visit to the Zwinger Palace, built by Augustus II the Strong in the early eighteenth century and formally opened on the occasion of his son Prince Frederick Augustus’s wedding in 1719. It seems that the post-war reconstruction of the palace is still underway, as much of it was closed off for renovations. But we were able to visit portions of the palace-museum, including the Porzellansamlung, which houses Augustus the Strong’s spectacular porcelain collection. The first galleries house an expansive collection of Chinese and Japanese wares imported to Germany in the years before Europeans cracked the secrets of porcelain production. The gorgeous blue and white vases and paper-thin teacups lead into a gallery that’s more like a zoo. This was the first of the Meissenware galleries and every surface was decorated with porcelain animals made in the nearby town of Meissen in the years after porcelain became possible in Germany. Monkeys, dogs, birds, rhinos, goats, rams, foxes, and more enthralled me. I had no choice but to buy a 10-lb catalog about the Miessen menagerie. Once we tore ourselves away from the ceramics, we headed to the paintings galleries and had a party with Cranach, Canaletto, and Raphael. Then we ate schnitzel.

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Thus concludes my travel diary, gentle readers. I hope that I have provided an adequate summary of my Grand Tour, and that you find my words nearly as edifying and enriching as I found the trip. I am blessed to be able to travel with my beloved family. The world is my oyster. The world is my muse.

Thank you for reading and for existing.

Ever yours,

Mabel