Features

Germany - Rudesheim

by Mike Levy

What is twee? If you ever wondered, go visit Rudesheim on the Rhine, a very pleasant 45 minute drive from Frankfurt. The town is famous for its winemaking, its riverside delights and its status as UNESCO World Heritage Site. The epicentre of tweeness is the town’s cobbled 144 metre alleyway, the Drosselgasse. Squeezing past the tourists on this narrow medieval money spinner, lined with endless souvenir shops, restaurants and wine bars, is just about worth it for the whiffs of fresh coffee, aromas of apfelkuchen and the sizzle of freshly made potato chips. You may also be tempted by the offer of Rudesheim Kaffe. This is a monstrously extravagant version of Irish coffee, creamed up and powerfully laced with a large dash of the local Asbach brandy. Tweeness in a glass.

All that said, twee has its attractions. Rudesheim seems to have no other purpose than to attract visitors and so the parking is easy, wine tasting and sausage opportunities abound and there is a very splendid (and cheap) cable car to whisk you up the Niederwald, the gorgeous wine slopes that dominate the little town. Riding up is five minutes of quiet and rather mesmeric beauty.

Taking the cable car (or climbing up the hill above the town) is a must. This is because the town offers one gigantic ‘must see’ attraction. I do not refer to Siegfried’s Mechanical Musical Instruments Museum, or the town’s ‘Museum of Medieval Torture’. No, on everyone’s ‘bucket list’ should be what for me is Rudesheim’s masterpiece: a must-see for every collector of the gross. I refer to the Niederwalddenkmal. This quasi religious monument took my breath away. I have rarely seen anything so magisterially monstrous. Commanding a wonderful view down the Rhine, the monument was built to commemorate the foundation of the German Empire after the end of Franco-Prussian War. It is a peon to Empire, a hallelujah to German unification built on the defeat of France. The astonishing friezes and the massive figure of a bellicose Germania chill the soul even here on these warm south-facing slopes. For the record the massive monument was unveiled in 1883 and somehow missed the attention of the RAF. Also for the record, the sculptor was Johannes Schilling, an unsung genius of the truly awe-ful and awful. The one thing you can say about the monument, it is definitely not twee.