Germany -- The Wartburg

The Wartburg may be the most famous castle in Germany, at least for Germans. It was where the German nationalist movement held its first meeting in the early part of the 19th century, the place where Luther hid out while he was translating the Bible into German, and the castle whose tournament of the minstrels has been a staple of German legendry for centuries. (It's the castle which figures in Wagner's opera Tannhauser.)

About halfway through our visit, Lucille started scowling at me and muttering "I can't believe you torched this place in the novel." Wisely, I refrained from my instinctive reply, which would have been: "Yup, and I'll torch as many more of these monuments to parasitism as I can too, you betchum."

Actually, my sans-culotte tendencies aside, the Wartburg really is a pretty nifty castle. Even ursus started warming up to the place. Most castles/palaces are either piles of ugly stone about what you'd expect a thick-headed robber baron to erect, or grandiose palaces which seem to consist mainly of eight thousand identical rooms. Giant apartment buildings, basically, devoted to ONE family. Sheesh. Talk about circular reasoning. "We need all these rooms to hold all the servants we need to keep all the rooms clean."

But, there's no denying it, the Wartburg is just plain interesting -- a place where people actually DID stuff for centuries, almost none of it involving bashing a competitor robber baron in the head. By the end of the tour, I was even starting to feel a little guilty myself. Oh, well. The napalm wouldn't have really hurt the stone work that much, so it could be rebuilt easily enough.

I took this picture with great satisfaction and more than a little sense of relief. When I wrote 1632, I was never able to find a really good description of the Wartburg or a detailed enough image. So I was guessing when I stated that there was only one main entrance to the place, which is what enabled the American besiegers to trap the Spaniards and machine gun them when they tried to sortie.

Well, heh heh heh. I WAS RIGHT. There _is_ only one entrance to the joint, and here it is. Pity the poor Spanish soldiers who tried to charge across this drawbridge in the face of an M-60.

The elf capering in the foreground is my wife Lucille, who claimed she was just pantomiming my glee at (once again! once again!) foiling the nitpickers.