WARTBURG

Yes the nearest Bachstadt is Arnstadt, where JS Bach held his first appointment before moving onto Erfurt (the region´s capital) and then Leipzig, which is in Sachsen Anhalt (einen kleinen Paris as Goethe says in Faust I). He was born in Eisenach which is in the west of Thüringen. I haven´t been there. There´s a great statue of Bach in Arnstadt, the nearest small town to Ilmenau. I cycled there one Sunday, got lost on the lanes dappled with sunlight and the scent of pine. There were many Hell´s Angels on the roads, one big guy wearing a Wehrmacht style German helmet, which looks like a knob, and a pair of goggles with throat cover, which made him look like Darth Vader. They moved on fairly quickly after pointing at my alu bike and laughing at it. I got a hopper ticket and went down south after having lunch in Arnstadt (a lunch of Thüringen Spargel - asparagus - soup, bockwurst mit sauerkraut und brötchen and a great ice cream all washed down with a glass of Köstritzer, the local brew. I cycled for about 30 km into Suhl, a town totally nondescrit, housing mostly old people (I think it is Thüringen´s old people´s home.). Then I got back on the train, thankfully my alu bike was mostly still in one piece, although I almost came a cropper on several occasions, and went back to Plaue, an orifice of nothingness between Ilmenau and Arnstadt.

So I didn´t find out very much about JS Bach, except to say that Arnstadt looks like the nest of a great genius. I don´t know but Thüringen must have been amazing in Bach´s day, its certainly an amazing Länder today, although its a but too ruhig. Schiller was Professor of History in Jena, I´ve been through Jena on several occasions now. It has a big university with an active, radical student fringe. Erfurt looks like a painting, there´s the Krämer Brücke, the only example of a Medieval bridge in northern europe that has shops on it, like the Ponte Vecchio over the Arno in Firenze. (which I was also fortunate enough to visit).  There´s a statue there of Martin Luther, who preached in the town, and who also was kidnapped/imprisoned/in hiding in the Wartburg where he assumed the identity Junker Jörg (the local aristrocrats realised that Luther was going to change Europe, but they needed a way of placing him within their narrative, so they awarded him this imaginary appelation, Lord George. ML wore a strange beard in the Wartburg and was generally pretty mad most of the time, a really crazy, whacky character, the Michael Jackson of his day. I´ve seen ML listed as a famous manic-depressive. Hey who was his psychiatrist? Was it the Pope? There´s a great painting of him in the Wartburg by Cranach the Elder).