Friday, March 30, 2012
Pomerania

The opportunity to go to Straalsund for the day comes up, so I take it. Stralsund is a medieval town on the Baltic, now a UNESCO World Heritage site. To do so, I have to board the train at Bad Doberan and take it to Rostock, then wait an hour for the train going towards Sassnitz, the northernmost point in Germany. Having to change at Rostock and wait gives me the chance to make a flying tour of the town, whose only place of interest when I was here last (and then not much) was the Bernstein Museum, devoted to amber, which is plentiful in the Eastern Baltic. (Bernstein is the German word for amber.)

Nothing much has changed. The streets have high-flown names --Konrad Adenauer Platz, Leibniz, Georg Bucher, Thomas Mann, and Schiller -Strasses --but the reality is pedestrian. I walk along Rosa Luxemburg Strasse, named after the fiery German Communist leader of the 1920s, passing Pension Stadtperle ("Pearl of the City"). It is anything but, this large fraying building that has seen better days: at 18 Euros a night its clientele cannot be too choosy.

Near the Stadtperle I spy several political stickers plastered onto a light post. The day before in Bad Doberan I saw a young skinhead wearing a black leather jacket with the message Gegen Nazis ("Against Nazis") on the back. One of the stickers takes the same line, depicting a fist smashing a swastika. Another is a variation on the theme, featuring a photograph of an attractive young woman at a demonstration wearing a hooded sweatshirt, fist in the air, presumably shouting the words below the photo "... endlich pragmatische Politik machen! ("an end to pragmatic politics!") -- Antifaschistische Aktion ("Antifascist Action").

Across the street from the train station I see a young man dressed in Goth style, black razored hair, long black coat over black t-shirt and pants, tucked into black leather lace-up boots. Identifying oneself as Goth or antifascist is a way to to stand out from the dreary reality of Rostock, to express with the few means available, a quarrel with the majority's conformity. I wonder whether I would not do likewise if I were young and lived here.

Fortunately, I have to leave Rostock to catch my 12:30 p.m. train to Stralsund, which soon arrives, trains in East Germany being just as efficient as in the West. After finding a seat, I settle down for a a ride through the green countryside. Copses of trees break up the landscape, providing interest, and the ride of almost an hour passes pleasantly. At Ribnitz-Darmstadt, I cross the old border between Mecklenburg in the west and Pomerania to its east. A short time later, I leave the train at Stralsund and enter a world so different from Rostock, I have might have arrived in Sweden. With its well-kept streets, attractive facades and cobblestoned streets, Stralsund is stunning.

The town is a way station on the way to the islands of Rugen and Hiddensee, summer resorts. Like them, Stralsund has a long history, and benefited by the establishment of monasteries and convents, which feature the same red brick Gothic architecture I saw in Bad Doberan. Stralsund's monastic buildings and its churches have been well restored however, and current archaeological excavations are unearthing artifacts from the period of monastic activity as well, in anticipation of the building of a museum. Investment has led to commercial development --Stralsund has many pleasant shops and restaurants-- but for the present, the town has the right balance of culture and commerce. I walk to the harbor, and can see Rugen Island with its chalk cliffs, national park and seashore across the water, as well as the new suspension bridge connecting it to the mainland. Hiddensee Island, where dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann made his home, is close by.

It is a broad vista. And when the sun shines, as it does today, it casts a gentle light, the kind of light Vermeer loved to paint into his pictures, a pearly northern light. As was the case when I traveled here by train earlier in the day, the sky is no longer part of the landscape, it is the center of attention. Whether on the train, passing green field after green field under a fortress of clouds, or looking up from Stralsund's streets, or out to Rugen across the harbor, the sky cannot be denied.