Category Archives: Public art
Museumsdorf Bayerischer Wald, pt. III: Faith of Our Fathers
Not your Grandma’s Religion
One of my blog readers recently had a “culture shock” moment. He’s a nurse, and he was filling out a patient questionnaire with a German woman. When he asked her religion, she became upset. What went wrong? Religion and society …
Reminiscent Only of Itself
If this blog seems cathedral-heavy, that’s because I love cathedrals. Stunningly beautiful even in our day, cathedrals represented heroic effort and almost miraculous achievement in their day. Each one is unique. They’re not just buildings; they’re audacity and imagination in …
A Fish out of Water
An Afternoon Walk around Rodenbach
The town I live in is like Grandma’s cookie jar: I never know what I’ll find when I shut my front door and walk outside, but I can be pretty sure I’m going to love it. There are lots of …
My Last Garden, continued
Joe and I found the example graves at the Koblenz National Garden Show completely fascinating. They were so unlike anything we’d seen. Some were as elaborate and elegant as a Japanese flower arrangement. Others were just downright different. Joe’s favorite …
My Last Garden
Graves. Headstones. Birth and death dates. Are we in a cemetery? No, we’re back at the Koblenz National Garden Show, where the program assures us, “a romantic woodland glade is the perfect setting for cemetery landscapers and stonemasons to demonstrate …
A Circular Reference in Stone
Around the corner from the Deutsches Eck in Koblenz is a church that has stood, more or less (in spite of being renovated, bombed, and shot at) for the last twelve hundred years. This is the beautiful Kastorkirche, the Basilica …
A Monument from a Bygone Age … the 1990s
This enormous bronze equestrian statue of Kaiser Wilhelm I towers over the crowds at the Deutsches Eck, the spit of land in downtown Koblenz where the Mosel flows into the Rhine. Standing almost fifty feet high (14 meters) from plumed …
Flowers in Downtown Koblenz
This weekend, Joe and I drove to Koblenz to visit the National Garden Show, a traveling event which takes place every two years. For six months, a German city transforms part of itself into a blooming paradise, and millions of …