Category Archives: German history
Wood, Water, Stone
Die Kelten are the Celts. Southern Germany belonged to wealthy Celtic tribes during the centuries before the Roman invasion. The Germanic tribes drove the Celts out of this region during the Great Migration.
Tim-berrrr!
On a foggy evening this week, Joe and I visited Bernkastel-Kues on the Mosel River, and I took the above photo of the St. Michaelsbrunnen, or St. Michael’s Fountain, in the middle of the old town square. How old is …
The Friedrich Kellner Diaries: “From the Darkness into the Light of a Better Future”
Friedrich Kellner, shown above in his World War I uniform, was a young man when Germany became a democracy, and he had high hopes that his nation would become a place of free speech and personal liberty. Unfortunately, the young …
The Last One Standing
It wasn’t the prettiest medieval castle on the Rhine, or the biggest, or the richest, or the most famous. But the Marksburg is the only castle in the whole middle-Rhine region that didn’t get destroyed. All the others had to …
A Circular Reference in Stone
Around the corner from the Deutsches Eck in Koblenz is a church that has stood, more or less (in spite of being renovated, bombed, and shot at) for the last twelve hundred years. This is the beautiful Kastorkirche, the Basilica …
A Monument from a Bygone Age … the 1990s
This enormous bronze equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I towers over the crowds at the Deutsches Eck, the spit of land in downtown Koblenz where the Mosel flows into the Rhine. Standing almost fifty feet high (14 meters) from plumed …