In Ulm und um Ulm, but not um Ulm herum

Our friends D, L, and E' are living in Frankfurt this year, where D has a post-doc fellowship. In early July, we met up for an afternoon in Ulm, a ~1,200-year-old town along the border between Bayern and Baden-Württemberg, with the Danube running through it.

E' is in Kindergarten, and when we climbed the Münster tower--the tallest church tower in the world--he was delighted, two thirds of the way up, to find one of those hand-crank machines that imprints a design on a copper coin (in this case, a 50 cent piece). This machine required a 2-Euro coin for the privilege, but L and I together could only come up with two 1-Euro coins. E resourcefully traded those for a 2-Euro coin from another tourist, and cranked away. To his chagrin, the pattern ended up being all words instead of a picture, but I was pretty stoked that he had gotten a German tongue-twister: In Ulm, um Ulm, und um Ulm herum (In Ulm, around Ulm, and all about Ulm).

S and I were only in Ulm for about six hours, but we managed to capture the spirit of the tongue twister. Since we arrived a few hours before our friends, we started our tourism with the um part--a 12km RT walk from the train station to Kloster Wiblingen to check out its Rococo library. The former Benedictine abbey was founded in 1093, and secularized in 1806 after Austrian losses during the Napoleonic Wars. 

Looking back toward Ulm on our walk to Wiblingen

Apse under construction

An organist was practicing the 2021 Winterhalter organ when we stopped by.

Many of the Wiblingen buildings are used today by the University of Ulm. In order to visit the old Kloster library, one must purchase a ticket that takes you first through a small museum. The museum included this image of an alabaster non-hairy Jesus...

...as well as a Lego model of the Kloster hosting a hard rock concert in the graveled plaza in front of the church. There's a Legoland amusement park in Günzburg, about halfway between Augsburg and Ulm.

We wended our way through to the library. The statues, representing assorted virtues and disciplines of learning, look like they're made from marble, but they're wood!

Carving prowess at Wiblingen yielded more realistic birds than at Schloss Nymphenburg:

The back of one of the pillars had a portion removed, showing the wooden construction and painted marble effect:

From Wiblingen, we skedaddled back to Ulm to meet up with D, L, and E'.

The Danube

We met up by the Münster entrance. 

First we explored the interior.

During WW2, about 80% of Ulm's Altstadt was destroyed, but the Münster, like that in Freiburg, was largely spared, due to an Allied policy of trying to avoid bombing churches and important works of art. Clearly many of the stained glass windows were blown out.

The grave markers on the church floor reminded me of the controversy surrounding Stolpersteine. The Stolperstein project is an international project to memorialize the Jewish, Sinti/Roma, political, homosexual, Jehovah's Witness, and euthanasia victims of Nazism in the time leading up to and during WW2. Some cities have abstained from participating, believing that the brass memorial markers, embedded in sidewalks in front of the victim's last known residence, invite people to trample on the names and memory of victims. Yet no one thinks much about tromping on the names of (usually non-murdered) folks buried in church floors.

The Münster chancel includes rows of seats for officiants and choir members with carvings of human busts at the ends of the benches, as well as humorous and occasionally scatalogical heads and critters under the seats. I'm posting a bunch of photos of them here, because they were so varied and entertaining. The photographic tour starts on the right side of the chancel (busts of women), moves past the alter, and continues on the left side of the chancel (busts of men).

Creepy bony dogs (?) on the pulpit

Then it was time to climb the Münster tower. Despite all of the fencing, the views still made this acrophobe a little edgy.

In the room with the hand-crank coin-crushing machine, there were also windows to look down through to the bells below.

The very last set of stairs was closed to the public. Very narrow, up up up.

Acrophobe and non-acrophobe

The tower had separate sets of stairs for going up and going down. Naturally, the downward staircase spits visitors out in the gift shop.

Look! Playmobil Martin Luthers!

Look! Luthers To Go, packaged in lidded coffee cups! Christians can commodify pretty much anything, I guess.

(Seems apt to insert a photo here of a print by Andy Warhol that I saw two days previously at the Brandhorst Museum in Munich....)

Andy Warhol, Christus $9.98 (Negative), 1985-86

Afterward, we took a short walk through the Altstadt.

D had read that one of Ulm's claims to fame is a 1997 Guinness World Record for Crookedest Hotel, so we made sure to include that on our route. Note the angle between the Fachwerk and the windows...

Windows on the new synagogue (consecrated 2012). The old synagogue (1840) was burned down during Kristallnacht (9 November 1938). FBoFW, the new synagogue is equipped with video surveillance cameras...

We then parted ways--us back to the train station to avail ourselves once again of government subsidized mass-transit, and D, L, and E' back to Frankfurt.