Germany: What's not to like?
Harry Pearson discovers a countryside idyll in Germany's Odenwald region - the only mystery is, why more of us aren't flocking there
One evening in early June a friend and I sat on the terrace of his family's holiday home on a hillside above a small village in the Odenwald, an area of rolling, wooded countryside that stretches from east of the Rhine in southern Hesse all the way to Bavaria. It had been 25C for almost a week and our children had spent the afternoon in an outdoor swimming pool filled with fresh spring water, while the grown-ups sprawled in the grass eating ice-cream flavoured with woodruff and big slices of baked cheesecake.
It was evening and we sat drinking a hefty, dark doppelbock from a local brewery, the splendidly named, Schmucker. "Do you think," my friend said, "other English people would like it if they came here?"
I took a sip of my beer and examined the view. On the other side of the narrow valley a herd of caramel-coloured cattle moved lethargically across a flower-speckled meadow towards their byre in a small half-timbered farmstead to which the kids went each morning to buy unpasteurised milk from a little old lady in a pinny. The only sound was the breeze in the scotch pines behind the house, the calling of a cuckoo and the rustling of some dormice that had taken up residence in the eaves. The Odenwald is the site of the Nibelungen Saga. Two miles from where we were sitting Siegfried clubbed the dragon Regin to death and bathed in his blood, but the benign and placid scene in front of me called to mind Heidi rather than Kriemhild. "Of course," I told my friend, "Who wouldn't like it? The problem is to get them to come here".
Aside from Munich and Berlin, English people show a marked reluctance to visit Germany. The German Tourist Board in London works tirelessly, their French counterparts, meanwhile, simply crook a finger, the Italians merely wink. Suggest a travel book about the country to a publisher and he or she will suck air and recall the time they did one a decade ago and the huge, unsold piles that still remain. It wasn't always like this. At one time the Black Forest and Rhine cruises were immensely popular with British tourists. But just as our national taste in wine has shifted over the years until the once apparently unstoppably popular Liebfraumilch has more or less disappeared from our tables altogether, so Germany has gradually slipped off the holiday map.
It is a pity, because Germany has much to offer and, since the arrival of the euro, appears somewhat cheaper to visit than its neighbours too. If Germany has an equivalent to La France Profonde (Deutschland Gemutlich?) then the Odenwald is surely it. Aside from a couple of small, well-preserved medieval towns, Michelstadt and Erbach, the main attraction is the gentle, hilly countryside, a place of high meadows and deep woods, where flocks of goats wander beneath the snowy blossom of apple and pear trees. We spent our week walking on the gravel paths that lead over the hills - the highest is about a thousand feet – watching out for wild boar, red deer and pine martens. On one we climbed up a wooden tower and, looking south-eastwards, could see the outlines of Castle Frankenstein.
We never took food with us, because as Jerome K Jerome observed in his typically genial celebration of a holiday in the Black Forest "Three Men On The Bummel" Germany is so well-ordered a place that no sooner has the hiker thought "Mmm, I could do with a drink and possibly a slice of cake," than he turns a corner and finds himself confronted by a rustic inn presided over by a convivial man in an apron who has pledged his life to that exact purpose.
The Odenwald is the only place in Germany where the local drink of choice is cider (Appelwoi). It's a dry, flat variety that is served ice cold in stoneware jugs called Bembels. Before we sampled it our friends cautioned us about its earthy qualities and assured us that, "It tastes better after the third glass". My partner is from Herefordshire, however, and as she remarked afterwards "If they think that stuff was rough we'll have to take them to Ross-on-Wye sometime".
Appelwoi is traditionally accompanied by Kochkasse, a semi-soft white cheese that my friend's son memorably described as "looking like a big plate of flab". The cheese is sprinkled with cumin seeds and eaten on sourdough bread with a big dollop of sliced pickled onions. The selection of cakes, amongst which the mighty Frankfurt Kranz (the family-sized version contains 16 eggs) is the stand out, may have more appeal to the less adventurous traveller, or those planning to kiss anybody in the next fortnight.
In the evenings, tired from the day's exertions, we sit outside and watch the sun go down drinking beer and raspberry eau de vie from the distillery in nearby Furth, listening to the woodpeckers and the first hooting of the owls. At midnight the streetlights in the village go out automatically plunging the valley into velvety darkness. "You, though," my friend says, "could try and persuade people". I tell him that I will do my best.