Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
7. Aachen and Cologne
I took a train to Aachen. I hadn't been there before, but it was only a short journey from Li￨ge, where I
had spent the night, and I had always wanted to see Aachen Cathedral. This is an odd and pleasantly
neglected corner of Europe. Aachen, Maastricht and Li￨ge are practically neighbours - only about twenty
miles separate them - but they are in three countries, speaking three distinct languages (namely Dutch,
French and German), yet the people of the region employ a private dialect that means they can understand
each other better than they can understand their fellow countrymen.
I got a room in a small hotel across from the station, dumped my rucksack and went straight out. I had a
lunch of burger and fries in a hamburger chain called Quick (short for 'Quick - a bucket'), then set off to see
the town.
My eagerness surprised me a little, but I hadn't been to Germany in seventeen years and I wanted to
see if it had changed. It had. It had grown even richer. It was rich enough in 1973, but now - golly. Even
prosperous Flanders paled beside this. Here, almost every store looked rich and busy and was full of stylish
and expensive goods like Mont Blanc pens and Audemars Piguet watches. Even the stores selling
mundane items were riveting - J. von der Driesel, for instance, a stockist of kitchenware and other
household goods at the top of a hill near the old market square. Its large windows displayed nothing more
exciting than ironing boards, laundry baskets and pots and pans, but every pan gleamed, every piece of
plastic shone. A little further on I passed not one but two shops selling coffins, which seemed a bit chillingly
Germanic to me, but even they looked sleek and inviting and I found myself staring in admiration at the
quality of the linings and the shine on the handles.
I couldn't get used to it. I still had the American habit of thinking of Europe as one place and Europeans
as essentially one people. For all that you read that Denmark's per capita gross domestic product is forty
per cent higher than Britain's, the Danes don't look forty per cent richer than the British, they don't wear forty
per cent shinier shoes or drive forty per cent bigger cars. But here people
did
look rich and different, and by
a factor of much more than forty per cent. Everyone was dressed in clothes that looked as if they had been
purchased that morning. Even the children's trainers weren't scuffed. Every car had a showroom shine on it.
Even the taxis were all Mercedes. It was like Beverly Hills. And this was just an obscure little city on the edge
of the country. The Germans were leaving the rest of us standing.
Not everything was perfect. Much of the architecture in the city centre was blatantly undistinguished,
especially the modern shopping precinct, and the bars and restaurants didn't have the snug and convivial
air of those in Holland and Belgium. But then I found my way to the calm of the cathedral close and warmed
to Aachen anew. I went first to the Schatzkammer, the treasury, which contained the finest assortment of
reliquaries I ever expect to see, including the famous life-size golden bust of Charlemagne, looking like a
god; a carved sixteenth-century triptych depicting Pope Gregory's mass, which I think I could look at almost
for ever; and assorted other baubles of extraordinary beauty and craftsmanship.
The whole collection is displayed in three small, plain, feebly lit rooms, but what a collection. Next door
was the octagonal cathedral, modelled on the church of San Vitale at Ravenna, and all that remains of a
palace complex mostly destroyed during the Second World War. The cathedral was small and dark but
exquisite, with its domed roof, its striped bands of contrasting marble and its stained glass, so rich that it
seemed almost liquid. It must have been cramped even in Charlemagne's day - it couldn't seat more than a
hundred or so - but every inch of it was superb. It was one of those buildings that you don't so much look at
as bathe in. I would go to Aachen tomorrow to see it again.
Afterwards I passed the closing hours of the afternoon with a gentle stroll around the town, still favouring
my sore ankle. I looked at the large cobbled Marktplatz and tottered out to the preternaturally quiet
residential streets around the Lousberg park. It was curious to think that this pleasant backwater was once
one of the great cities of Europe, the seat of the Holy Roman Empire, Charlemagne's capital. I didn't realize
until I turned again to Gilbert's history of the Second World War a day or so later that Aachen was the first
German city to fall to the Allies, after a seven-day street battle in 1944 that left almost the whole of it in ruins.
You would never guess it now.
