“On the lower reaches of the Rhine, where the banks of the great river start to lose their smiling countenance, where hills and cliffs with their audacious ruined castles rise defiantly exuding a wilder and sterner dignity, there lies, like an eerie legend from a bygone era, the gloomy and Read More …
Around 1800 the German Romantic author Clemens von Brentano (1778-1842) wrote his ballad “Lore Lay”, which begins: Zu Bacharach am Rheine Wohnt’ eine Zauberin Sie war so schön und feine Und riß viel Herzen hin. Which means more or less: In Bacharach on the Rhine there lived a sorceress. She Read More …
The city of Bonn is on the Rhine River at kilometer 655, which is the approximate distance from Lake Constance (Bodensee), where the numbering begins. Between Lake Constance and Bonn, the Rhine has been joined by numerous tributaries such as the Aare, the Neckar, the Main and the Mosel (to Read More …
If I had put my mind to it, I’m sure I could have found some distinguished and worthy historical personage to tour Hamburg “in the footsteps” of. But the fact of the matter is that when I am in Hamburg I tend to loiter around (or loiter about, as our Read More …
Rue d’Auteuil was the main street of the village of Auteuil, until that village was divided up between Paris and Boulogne in 1860. At that time more than half of Auteuil was incorporated into the city of Paris. This part is now the 61st administrative quarter of Paris and is Read More …
You’d think the people of Düsseldorf would always have been proud that their city was the birthplace of a major nineteenth century author, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). But no, until quite recently a lot of people in Düsseldorf wished he had gone off and been born somewhere else. Why? Generations of Read More …
This is a city-owned theater with its own opera ensemble, orchestra and chorus. I have only seen one opera here so far, namely Der fliegende Holländer (The Flying Dutchman) by Richard Wagner (1813-1883), which I have also seen numerous times in Frankfurt am Main, Wiesbaden, Mainz and Dortmund. The Flying Read More …
L’homme est né libre, et partout il est dans les fers. “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” This quotation from the beginning of The Social Contract, by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712-1778), is one of those that used to be on display in the town of Montmorency, a Read More …
From the tenth to the seventeenth centuries, the town of Montmorency was ruled by an aristocratic family of the same name, one of the most ‘distinguished’ and powerful families of the French nobility. Generation after generation, members of the Montmorency family were Sires, Cardinals, Bishops, Admirals, Generals, Regents, Constables of Read More …