Adam Tooze: recommendation

Transcript context

…Let’s say a good friend comes up to you and says, “I’ve never been to Germany. I have two free weeks. I want to go.” Again, this is without coronavirus. “Where should I go?” What do you tell them? You know the country well. Yeah. The first thing you’d say is it’s an enormously varied place, and it’s very big, and you really want to get a range of experience. I grew up in beautiful, sunny provincial Heidelberg, and it’s pretty difficult to recommend anywhere more highly than that for the tourism and to get the dolce vita sense of Germany. But it would also be, of course, crucial to visit a city like a Hamburg or an Essen or a Berlin. It would be the city where — if the universities could offer the sorts of terms and conditions and facilities that the American universities do — I would probably most like to live and work. That is not the situation, unfortunately, of the German university system. But it’s an extraordinary city. So it would be a varied tour. My wife works in the travel business, and she has her own boutique travel company. We were planning a trip that has just been canceled, unfortunately, that goes from Berlin to Dresden to Prague to Vienna, a sort of essential European tour with a historic theme and the best vineyards that we can find in central Europe along the way. I would say travel. Get on the train. Unless you’re a car nut, and you want to experience the freedom of driving a Porsche at 200 miles an hour, which you can do if you do it at 2:00 am. The roads are clean enough, and they’re smooth enough. But other than that, ride the train. Sit in an ICE going at, absolutely no kidding, 200 miles an hour, powered by solar power, and watch your coffee not even vibrate. It’s absolutely stunning. They have to put speedometers into the trains to make people aware of how fast they’re going. You watch the cars on the interstate, and these are un-speed-limited interstates. Just you zoom past them. You’re going faster than a Ferrari or a Porsche flat out. And you can literally sit there, and your coffee doesn’t move. Compare that, of course, with the experience of your average Amtrak ride. It’s the way to do it. Travel the country, see the countryside, do the extraordinary variety of landscape and culture because it’s an incredibly heterogeneous place. One of the bizarre projects of German nationalism was to weld it into a uniform country, which it just doggedly refuses to be. It’s Catholic and Protestant. It’s both rural and intensely urban. Experience that diversity. It is one of the great underrated tourist destinations, certainly, of Europe. Very hospitable, English speaking. What’s your favorite item in German food?…

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