Reporting from Erfurt, in the former East Germany, with Maria Henzler. This is part two of a series that began Wednesday night, and was originally published in 1998. I never wrote part three — but I know what I want to say.
We arrive as the last few volts of daylight drain from the late-evening sky. The vacuous, unlit, anonymous streets of the city are cobblestoned and narrow and one-way, jarring and agitating with that distinct 19th-century-medieval-Napoleanic vibe, and we vibrate over the cobblestones in a crazy right-angled pattern searching for an eternity before we finally arrive at the tiny, as in two-room, hotel where we were expected hours before. East Germany. It still exists.
Looming over the city, as we rattle through the cramped and insidious back-alleys, jamming to sudden stops at dead-ends and getting newly lost every six minutes, are a pair of millennium-old High Gothic Roman Catholic cathedrals; not one, but two of them, lurking on a hilltop, with their four spires thrust black and angry against the backlit sky. And they are following us everywhere we go. It’s worse than the shadowy images of late-night horror films. This is the living nightmare of art history students everywhere — to be stalked by two Gothic cathedrals, as if it were the night before the final exam.
And lucky us, our hotel is right across the street from these divine masterpieces, right at the base of the hill. And when the bells, which weigh in at around 10 tons each, get gonging — and they gong and clang over and across the centuries — it is an experience of transcendental negativity; it is the sudden onset of nightfall in the broad afternoon. They are dark and mean and out of tune and it’s just torture. And the monks up there like to ring them. Sometimes it feels like it’s never going to stop. One of these things, at 11.5 tons, is the oldest, largest, meanest free-swinging bell in the world. I would just love to take the clapper home for a souvenir.