A Trip through Culture Spots in Germany - 2
Wittenberg and Dessau

Wednesday 6th September

After breakfast & paying the rather larger bill than I expected, DM700. Never mind, it was a good, friendly hotel. In our hire car, we headed West up the Kudamm but found our motorway entrance closed, so had a traumatic few minutes round the houses until we found where we could get on it. This was the Avus & took us down to the ring road, where we turned right, then took the old road B2 south to Wittenberg, stopping in Treuenbreitzen to photo old buildings. There were several attractive unmodernised villages on the way, Marzahna seeming very medieval. We could only get one hour's parking in Wittenberg. The place is a dream & we inspected both churches, the one Luther preached in & the one on who's doors he nailed his 95 theses, slagging off corruption in the Catholic Church. Hit this link for an English version of the theses. Those doors have long gone in a 17th century fire but the 'new' ones had the theses raised on their metal surface. Unfortunately, Wittenberg has ribbon development to the West but we soon got to Dessau & found the Bauhaus, looking a bit shabby but the whole town is a dump. We had chicken (that word used) schnitzels in a Turkish café. They had been there for 22 years, so the DDR had Turks, too. I know they were always short of labour. I picked up the A9 motorway South of Dessau & went a long way South to the junction with the B7 for Jena. The motorway is being modernised, so there were bits of 3-lane-with-shoulder, bits of Hitler autobahn & bits of road-up. The North German Plain seems to go on for a long way South of Berlin! There was not time to give Jena (big traffic jams) a second look, as we continued on to Weimar.

Dessau - the Bauhaus from the South

Dessau - the Bauhaus from the North