Freiburg im Breisgau Favorites

Fondest memory: Kaiser-Joseph Street is the central shopping street here.
We began our acquaintance of the city with this street.
The city has a special layout with two main streets connecting the town gates and intersecting at a right angle in the middle.
The streets form a pedestrian presinct in the heart of the city.

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Favorite thing: This looks at first glance like a perfectly normal yellow road sign, such as you might find on any regional highway in Germany. But wait! These signs don't normally point to places over a thousand kilometers away. And who ever heard of a place called Gurs, anyhow?

Gurs is a city in the southwest corner of France. It was the site of a concentration camp that was used by the Nazi collaborators of the Vichy government to intern Jews and other people considered undesirable by the Nazis.

Within a few hours on October 22, 1940, the Nazis rounded up 6504 Jewish men, women and children from the regions of Baden and the Pfalz, including some 300 Jewish citizens of Freiburg, and deported them to Gurs. Many died there of hunger or illness, and in 1942 the rest were sent east to Auschwitz or Maidanek, where they were murdered.

On the 60th anniversary of the deportation, in October 2000, Freiburg citizens erected a plaque explaining what had happened. The text on the plaque concludes: "Too many people looked away back then, too few resisted. This must not and will not happen again."

Update: There is now a similar yellow sign in front of the main railroad station in Mannheim, but with a different number: "Gurs 1170 km".

Second photo: Square of the Old Synagogue. This is where the main Freiburg Synagogue used to be, until it was destroyed by the Nazis in 1938.

Favorite thing: "If one person dies, it's a tragedy. If a million people die, it's a statistic." This cynical statement was attributed to the late Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin (1879-1953). It was quoted to me by a Russian orchestra conductor who spent his childhood in Moscow under Stalin's rule.

Like many other German cities, Freiburg is trying translate the statistic of six million Jews murdered by the Nazis back into the tragedy of individual people dragged from their homes and put to death. They do this by setting little squares of metal into the street or sidewalk in front of the houses where the people used to live. The two in the photo are embedded in the street in front of my hotel in the Rathausgasse in Freiburg. The one on the left reads:

Here lived
Sofie Rosentahl
neé Bloch
Born 1889
Deported 1940
Gurs
Murdered in
Auschwitz
and the one on the right:

Here lived
Julian Rosenthal
Born 1878
Deported 1940
Gurs
Murdered 1942 in
Auschwitz
These little squares of metal are known as "stumbling blocks" (Stolpersteine), but you can stumble over them only in a figurative sense, meaning you are made aware that these two murdered people used to live right here, so they aren't just statistics, but real people.

The "stumbling blocks" are an initiative of the artist Gunter Demnig, born 1947 in Berlin.

http://www.stolpersteine.com/

Favorite thing: Tourist Office
Rotteckring 14
79098 Freiburg.

- Tel.: +49 (0)761 3881-880
- Fax: +49 (0)761 37003

Internet:
- www.freiburg.de (different languages)
- www.alemania-turismo.com/pages_ms/freiburg_esp.htm (spanish)
- E mail: touristik@fwtm.freiburg.de
www.fwtm.freiburg.de

Favorite thing: You really must explore the Black Forest surrounding Freiburg. Shown here is the part of the forest right next to Triberg Waterfalls.

See more in my black forest travelogue.

Favorite thing: For all those who are interested in culture, museums, art collections the regional museums pass (Oberrheinischer Museumspass) is a great deal.

The Museums Pass covers more than 150 museums in the region, including Germany, France and Switzerland and such famous museums like the Art Museum in Basel and the Unterlinden museum in Colmar.

In Freiburg it covers e.g. the Augustinermuseum.

I purchased the short-time version, valid four days within one month. It costs 25 Euro.

www.museumspass.com (in German and French only)
E-mail: info@museumspass.com
Tel. CH: 061-205 00 40
Tel. D: 0761-707 83 82
Tel. F: 03 89 33 96 29

Favorite thing: Freiburg's old town was destroyed in WWII in large parts. Although it has been restored mostly in historical style you will not find an unspoilt ensemble anymore.

It is, however, still charming. Narrow cobbled alleys and especially the Baechle are picturesque and provide an atmosphere of the past.

Fondest memory: My favourite walk was early in the morning. I started about 7.30 on a Monday morning when the town was seemingly sleeping. Later, especially in the afternoon, the streets became more and more filled with crowds.

Favorite thing: One thing you will notice in Freiburg are the tiny canals on the streets called "Baechle". They are the remains of the medieval canals for the water supply of the people who lived and worked in the old town.

There is a saying in Freiburg that these foreign singles who step in the "Baechle" will marry a local soon ... so be careful (or not :-))!