Fürstenfeldbruck

We arrived in Steinebach on Monday afternoon (6/23) and commenced our ritual of hanging out and eating. We did build some local excursions into the mix, including a trip to Herrsching for big-town errands and gelato.

Three generations of post-gelato smiles

Back in Steinebach, the ginormous cat appointed S "Assistant Royal Tummy Scritcher"

We also took a trip to nearby Fürstenfeldbruck to go to our favorite kitchen gadgets store to gawk--but apparently the kitchen gadget store closed a few years ago. I guess we should have gone more often than once every five years. We did find a new kitchen gadget store that had bannetons (which we had forgotten we were looking for) and a special slicer for making Prinzregententorte (would that be cheating? We didn't get one, although we did try a piece of PRT at a bakery and decided it couldn't possibly be worth all the effort).

Fürstenfeldbruck city center appeared to be entirely under construction, with cranes and bulldozers and torn-up streets and sidewalks everywhere. With the old kitchen gadget store gone, the streets seemed unfamiliar. While crossing one street, we saw this memorial statue:

The plaque reads, "Hier führte in den letzten Kriegstagen im April 1945 der Leidensweg der KZ-Häftlinge aus den Todeslagern Kaufering/Landsberg vorbei ins Ungewisse" (Here, in the last days of the war in April 1945, the suffering path of the concentration camp prisoners from the death camps Kaufering/Landsberg passed into the unknown). The memorial, by Hubertus von Pilgrim, was erected in 1994 and is one of 22 copies commemorating towns along the KZ-Dachau death march; the first was erected in Gauting in 1989 (copies are also at the Dachau KZ museum and the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem). These close-to-home reminders are sobering, but a good thing. Even after coming to Germany regularly for the past 24 years, I still sometimes find it strange to see or meet folks of a certain age; the common thread is that no one knew yet everyone knew, no one participated yet everyone participated. And we say "Never again," but these sorts of things nonetheless continue around the world.

We saw the memorial in a relatively quick crossing of the street; the rest of our afternoon was spent at the FFB Kloster, which we had never visited before.

Organ info and up-close photos are here

Music notation on the ceiling! "Veni sponsa Christi."

Random happy dog