Nicole schreibt...

Hannover / Hildesheim 2021

I normally don't do travel reports of what basically amounts to short day trips, but having taken so many pictures on this one, I thought why not. It has also been a special trip for me, as I had been wanting to see Hannover's famous castle gardens, the Herrenhäuser Gärten for many years. Never more so after reading Neal Stephenson's incredible Baroque Cycle which heavily features the gardens along with two very smart ladies - Sophie of Hanover and Caroline of Ansbach - along with one of Germany's foremost scientists, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. It's sad and telling for German school education that the ladies are forgotten and the man mostly associated with butter cookies these days. As the chance presented itself to catch a musical in nearby Hildesheim, which would require an overnight stay anyway, it was the perfect chance to finally visit the Gardens as well. The actual Herrenhausen Castle was destroyed during World War , but a smaller version has been rebuilt not long ago, mostly used for conferences and the like.

Above is one of the side buildngs and the Great Cascade, which is meant to be a water feature, but perhaps due to lack of visitors now that tourism is only just crawling back on its feet, all of those had been turned off. Below are two views of the Grand Garden with its gorgeously maintained flower beds, looking pretty much the same as they did in Sophie's days.

Above the Garden theatre and below the Great Fountain (not so great without water) and the main "bell fountain" which was at least switched on later when we had been inside the museum and I happened to look out the window.

There she is above left, Sophie (or Sophia), Electress of Hanover, who created, maintained and loved the gardens. And incidentally dropped dead in them during one of her daily walks at the tender age of 83, two months before she would have moved to her mother's home country of England to become its Queen. Instead that honour went to her son who became George I. and thus started the Georgian era. And speaking of fabulous women, another one was the French artist and sculptress Niki de Saint Phalle, now best known for her Nanas. A few of those stand at the embankment of the river Leine in the city of Hanover, but she also created these three incredible rooms called The Grotto in the Gardens, her last work before her death in 2020.

On we went into the museum depicting the history of Hanover's royal family that stopped being royal when the Prussians came to town in 1866 and annexed the place. There's still a pretender kicking around, the godawful Ernst August, former husband of Princess Caroline of Monaco and prime tabloid fodder for various misdeeds. So we only looked at the bits from Sophie's days, then moved on to another (freely accessible to the public) part of the large gardens, where the Grand Avenue leads to a small temple dedicated to Leibniz (at least the Hanoverians still honour the man, having named the University and assorted other bits and pieces after him).

From there it was onwards to nearby Hildesheim, where the Theater für Niedersachsen had been creative around the on-going Corona restrictions. Since open air performances are allowed, they created a theatre out of nothing in a field by the lake with the possibility of seating 500 people in socially distanced fashion. For their musical they chose Spamalot, the nutty Broadway musical adaption of the equally nutty Monty Python movie "The Holy Grail". While perhaps not my favourite musical, something fun and silly to just relax and enjoy seemed a great choice for returning to live theatre after 461 long long days, so I had decided to book and I'll say, I was really impressed by what they made possible there. But re-invention is clearly a specialty of Hildesheim, a small-ish town I knew nothing much about. It was bombed to crap in the war, but they decided to rebuilt several important buildings including their two medieval main churches which are now UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Above is the main square and even if it's "fake" it's still incredibly beautiful and we were lucky that our hotel was right there (the right building in the right pic). On our walk to the theatre we passed through one of the few authentic historical streets of Hildesheim and what I assume is the most picturesque ladies' prison in the country. We passed what used to be the medieval city's moat and finally reached the lake that's mostly used for recreational purposes like swimming and watersports these days.

Next morning we wanted to take a look at the two famous churches, the protestant St. Michaelis Church (left) and the catholic Mariendom (right), which replaced the very first chapel that Louis the Pious (Son of Charlemagne) had erected in 815 and thusly founded the settlement that would become Hildesheim. But Sunday morning is a bad time for sightseeing as both churches had religious services going on and didn't let tourists in, so we returned to the hotel and finally home.