Bonn Soir. And no, the puns will not stop.

Hard to believe, but this is my last evening in Bonn. Tomorrow I depart on the ICE for Berlin.  This past Christmakah, a kind friend gave me the German version of the board game Ticket to Ride. The game involves building train routes throughout Germany and its border countries, and with my Germany-Austria rail pass, I feel almost like I'm living the game these days.

Overall, I would say my week in Bonn has been a success. I found a huge amount of interesting material in the archive -- truthfully, enough to write several dissertations on Beethoven alone, so I have a lot of careful thinking to do when I get back to Chicago. I bonded with the archivists, who seemed to like me and complimented my German, which makes me feel more confident about my stammering (apparently it's better than many other Americans' stammering). When I was preparing for the trip, I thought I would be the Neville Longbottom of archival research; but thus far, my research has been surprisingly successful. Every day this past week I arrived right when the archive opened, sat in the reading room for seven hours, and zoomed through tiny German Frakturschrift like Hermione Granger studying for her OWLs; and I felt exceptionally accomplished today when one of the archivists affectionately nicknamed me "Die Kleine Raupe Nimmersatt," the German version of Eric Carle's The Very Hungry Caterpillar.

Meanwhile, in Bonn, the friendly University student whose living room I am renting went out of town and let me use her bike. I spent much of the weekend and a couple days during the week riding around, exploring Bonn, and enjoying every second. The instant I got on the bike, I felt magically free, like Harry Potter's first ride on a broom, whereas walking around was tiring me out. Walking is just too slow, and your feet always hurt, and you end up seeing 1/10th of what you could see on a bike. Plus, riding the bike makes it look like I know where I'm going, like I'm a real Bonner -- especially since the bike is a cruiser with a fat, squishy seat, meant to be ridden without a helmet at an extremely slow speed, as almost everyone here does.

I've always scoffed at cruisers before, but I now love them. It's like seeing Bonn in an armchair!

First things first: the neighborhood I'm staying in, the Musikviertel (so-called because all the streets are named after composers).

The street I'm staying on: Mozartstraße.

You can tell it's the Musikviertel...

And from here, a captioned tour of photos I took on my various rides.

The scenic and upscale Südstadt.

Suddenly, I was at the Botanic Garden, which seemed to always be closed every time I passed by it. This building is apparently a minerological institute of some kind, part of the UBonn. I think?

I kept following the street the Botanic Garden was on. Gradually, the neighborhood got less and less scenic, and I tried to go back in the direction where I came, got hopelessly lost, and suddenly found myself next to a field with cows and a brewing thunderstorm. This is when I realized two things: 1) I should probably figure out where I am, and 2) Bonn is really small. It's definitely a real city with a downtown and various neighborhoods and it feels large on-foot, but it only takes 15 minutes of noodling around on a bike to arrive at this:

I gradually figured out where I was and headed back to city center. One note about riding bikes in Bonn, and maybe in Germany more generally: the bike lane is always clearly delineated, which is great, but it also criss-crosses between the street and the sidewalk. So half the time you're riding in the street, which feels natural to me (but dangerous without a helmet), and the other half of the time you're sharing the sidwalk with pedestrians. I find it confusing and also got fussed at by a disgruntled woman who didn't know I was behind her on the sidewalk, and explained to me with a strained smile that if I don't ring my little bell next time, the police will arrest me. I played the dumb American and went on my way.

There are lots of churches. They mostly look like this.

The mathematics building at the University of Bonn. 

Bonn paint colors: Easter all year round.

Back in the Südstadt, somehow, mysteriously, for the second time. Riding around without a map is strange.

Cool building.

I'm sure all these photos are starting to look the same, but it was just so pretty I couldn't resist.

I also ended up back at the Botanic Garden for a second time as I tried to get my bearings. 

Even though it was closed, I took this stunning picture through the cast-iron fence, which almost makes it look like I went there!

Entering Poppelsdorf, the prettiest area in Bonn, in my opinion.

A neighborhood corner in Poppelsdorf.

The minerological institute again. These photos seem out of order, but this is the order in which I took them...

Poppelsdorf.

A long pedestrian and bike path along a boulevard.

One of three weddings I witnessed during my ride.

In the downtown center, I prove that I exist, in typical taking-photos-of-yourself-is-awkward fashion.

And finally, on the University of Bonn campus, there is a British telephone box filled with books. 

In the week that followed, I took relatively few pictures, but here are some:

Did you know? Robert and Clara Schumann are buried in Bonn. The cemetary was on my way to the archive.

Old cemetaries: 2 parts peaceful, 1 part spooky.

This is the market square, the market of which I forgot to photograph. Here you see city hall, which happened to have clowns in front of it.

And finally... ice cream. The main culinary attraction in Bonn. It seems like everyone in the entire city walks around eating ice cream at all times of the day.

My overall experience of Bonn has been very positive. It's a charming city that seems like a pleasant place to live. I pictured it being a small town for some reason, but it's definitely a bustling city with an urban feel and lots of students.

Onward, to Berlin...

Wilhelm Müller von Königswinter, the Most German Name of All Time

Back in Chicago a few months ago, I came across a work of late-19th century Beethoven fan-fic, a quasi-fictional-quasi-biographical novel based on writings by Beethoven's childhood friend Wegeler, and penned by a man with the Most German Name of All Time: Wilhelm Müller von Königswinter. 

I suppose another of Beethoven's "friends" and devoted postmortem Beethoven-venerators, Franz Ignaz Ritter von Seyfried, is a close runner up. But Königswinter takes the cake.

So when I was chatting with a Liverpudlian coffee vendor in the market square, and when he told me that I really should go to Königswinter over the weekend and climb one of the seven mountains to the mystic ruin of Drachenfels, I couldn't resist seeing the place where Wilhelm was von (or his namesake, at least).

In part because of my recent Harry Potter kick, I pictured Königswinter looking like Hogsmeade and Drachenfels looking like a ruined version of Hogwarts, like the post-apocalyptic Hogwarts-if-Voldemort-won that will probably become a spin-off series if it hasn't already. Unfortunately, neither the town nor the castle (or castles -- there were actually two) lived up to my expectations, but the excursion was fun in a sort of Muggle way.

In some ways, Bonn reminds me of Chicago: if you go far enough East, you run into this:

The Rhine.

Even though you can see across the other side, it reminds me of Chicago because of the endless bike paths that stretch all the way along the river. I hopped on a local ferry to get to Königswinter, which is south of Bonn along the Rhine.

Squinting on the top deck.

Some ladies getting fancy down below. On ferries in Germany, almost everyone buys beverages, like a Biergarten on the Rhine.

Scenic 

And finally we neared the town of Königswinter, with two castles: one  mid-way up the mountain, one on top.

The lower castle, Schloss Drachenburg, was built in the late 19th century as a summer resort for a Neuschwanstein-enamored Duke. It was basically like a Disney-castle and, like all tourist attractions, cost money to even prowl around the grounds -- so I didn't bother with that one. The other castle, Drachenfels, was a ruined fort of some kind, possibly from the Middle Ages or possibly later, about which I could find almost no information because it wasn't the main attraction. It functioned as a playground, as well as scenic outlook. The view from the castle, which sits atop one of the so-called seven mountains, was the main highlight of my excursion.

You can either climb the mountain up to the castles, or take this historic, overpriced and overcrowded train. With a pounding headache from too much sun on the ferry, I opted for the latter. 

The view from the train window became increasingly awesome.

A ruin.

A ruin covered in children.

The amazing view.

River, farms, and towns. You can almost imagine what medieval Germany was like. Fewer white specks, and otherwise the view would probably have been much the same.

I also meandered around the town of Königswinter itself. It's a cute, shall I say cheek-pinchy, ticky-tacky-tourist town, with lots of little narrow alleyways.

Unfortunately, as has been a recurring problem throughout this trip, there was nothing to do in Königswinter that didn't involve eating or shopping. Walking around is of course free, but I got bored after a while and took the ferry back to Bonn. Now I feel just a little bit closer to understanding the real Wilhelm Müller von Königswinter.

Bonn Voyage: Beethoviana, or How I Became a Real Live Historian in a Single Day

There is a simple flaw in my archival-research-blog plan.

I'm not permitted to take pictures in the archive, and while I can pay for scans for my own private research use, I am strictly forbidden to publish any images of documents from the archive. This means that I'll have to use the thousand words, rather than the pictures, in my accounts of my findings in the archive, which simply means the blog will look less exciting.

Over the course of the last two days, I have transformed from a fake wannabe historian to some faint semblance of a real historian. I feel like I've undergone a coming-of-age ritual, albeit an easier ritual than some. Here's what happened:

I first visited the Beethoven museum itself, a series of rooms in Beethoven's birth-house that are filled with portraits, letters, books, instruments Beethoven played, Beethoven's own belongings from his writing desk, and one of the thirteen extant locks of Beethoven's hair.

The storefront window of the Beethoven museum.  Knickknacks, a bust, and... koi?

The doors of Beethoven's birthplace.

Beethoven graffiti next door.

Apparently it's expressing an edgy message. The column next to this one has the same words, but only the banana.

The museum itself was interesting (and sadly, no photographs allowed, so only descriptions from here)... but I'll admit that these kinds of museums have a tendency to be somewhat dull. If you buy the audio tour, you end up listening to 4 minutes of biographical information about Neefe while standing in front of Neefe's portrait -- then multiply that by all the portraits and objects and rooms in the museum, and you get information overload without a sense of why that information is interesting or valuable. Perhaps my experience was also dampened by the churning sea of 100 British schoolchildren who were visiting the museum that same day.

The point at which I started nerding out was the room filled with Beethoven relics and curios, like the lock of hair. I reached my own personal nerd overload in the special exhibit of the Carrino collection, in which a present-day Italian collector has ammassed hundreds of items of Beethoven-kitsch, souvenirs, coins, stamps, postcards, and weird allegorical images (bascially visual Beethoven fan-fic). I pored over every object in the exhibit, and came up with a number of recurring visual tropes that I've noticed in kitschy Beethoven images:

1) Beethoven's face, usually his life mask from 1812, emerges from the darkness.
2) Specifically, this face emerging from the darkness above a female pianist or male violinist.
3) A naked couple embraces somewhere in the vicinity of Beethoven's life-mask-face, in one instance entangled in his wild mane. No joke.

The question is where these traditions of depicting Beethoven in popular images originated and how they became so standardized.

After my trip to the museum, I went to the archive next door, then spent two hours yammering about my project in German, while several archivists -- all of whom are extremely friendly and helpful -- gradually piled book after book and document after document on the table in front of me.

Since then, I spent the last day and a half reading for hours and hours. But I didn't feel like a real historian until I looked at the Beethoven-Haus's very first guestbook from 1890. (The first entry was of course by  Joseph Joachim, the famed violinist and the museum's founder.) Unlike guestbooks today, people didn't write long messages, but simply signed their names, wrote the date, and wrote city of origin. Many of them only signed their names, nothing else. Even so, the guestbook was fascinating to look at. Within the first year of the museum, the majority of the visitors were from Germany, and many of them from Bonn and nearby Cologne. After the museum's first year, however, the foreign visitors overtook the locals, with visitors flooding in from England, the U.S., and various central European countries (but strangely, few Eastern-European or Mediterranean visitors until much later). Eventually, a decade later, visitors start to trickle in from Australia, Brazil, Calcutta, Japan. Although messages are rare in the guestbooks, there were nonetheless a number of little messages, poems, and tiny excerpts of music, all of which I scanned.

I also read through the museum's old guides, in which every item in the museum is explained in detail. Beethoven's various belongings weren't on display in the original museum, which was mostly portraits, letters and music sketches (albeit with three different locks of hair). But ten years later, the museum acquired its present-day collection of Beethoven's personal desk items, and put these on display, alongside a landscape made out of Beethoven's hair. Seriously.

Meanwhile, I've been on another Harry Potter kick (i.e. re-reading all the books and re-watching all the movies) and thus I'm weirdly interpreting my entire experience through Harry-Potter-related metaphors. This should be an entry of its own.

I haven't taken many pictures of Bonn because it's been raining nonstop. But here are a few:

One of the downtown squares.

The Beethoven monument from 1845, complete with loiterers in red pants.

Looking very stern.

The monument from the back, overlooking the church.

Everything's a little different in Germany.

... well, not quite everything.