Elias and I climbed the Muenster tower this morning: 207 enclosed steps up to the ticket desk, and then, via staircases on opposite sides of the tower, 56 nerve-wracking, fenced-in, open-air steps up to the viewing platform, and 33 comfortably enclosed steps up to the bell tower. I stifled my fear of heights with the knowledge that tourists don't drop from the tower every day, although surely a few workers must have plunged to their deaths over the several decades it took to complete the tower.
We followed up with a visit to the small Wenzingerhaus Museum near the Muenster, which offers an unusual collection of local artifacts, including a detailed diorama depicting a mid-stage Muenster; early city seals and stained glass windows; a tapestry of the Zaehringer family tree; medieval iron instruments of torture along 
with illustrated instructions on how use them; a melted typewriter from the 1944 Allied bombing of Freiburg; a Steinway piano; and an unnerving advertisement for Der Allemanne, Freiburg's very own Nazi newspaper that provided daily news to 300,000 National Socialists in Oberbaden (the first Swastika I've seen since we've been here, displayed in a hard-to-photograph spot behind a door).At the Wenzingerhaus, we were reminded that although Germans like the idea of museums, museum guards don't like the idea of museum visitors. Elias and I were the only two people for the guard on the second floor to glare at, and we received her undivided attention. Thanks to an earlier visit to Freiburg's Museum fuer Neue Kunst, where the second floor guard followed us from room to room to make sure we weren't enjoying the artwork too much, we knew not to take it personally.
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Museum Guards - or Can Foreigners be Trusted?
When visiting the Kansas Capitol in Topeka, with its expressive murals by John Steuart Curry, a few months after 9/11, I chatted a little in my accented English with the lonely attendant. When I then went to the bathroom, he followed me and busied himself with the faucets while eying me repeatedly.
...While a foreign visitor may not have this experience anymore today, he may arrive at a better understanding of American culture: Outside the Capitol there is the Pioneer Woman statue. A little boy is tugging on her apron, while she holds a baby on one knee and a rifle on the other.
It didn't even occur to me we might have been watched because we were foreigners. Elias and I will try avoiding conversation at the next museum to see if the response is the same.
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