Arrival and Rothenburg ob der Tauber

I had never been to Europe. I was twenty-one, an undergrad at Eastern Michigan University, and I had signed up for a study abroad course called Literature of the Holocaust. The course catalog description had been straightforward: two and a half weeks traveling through Germany, the Czech Republic, and Poland, visiting the places we had been reading about all semester. The syllabus included Elie Wiesel, Primo Levi, Art Spiegelman, and Imre Kertész. The itinerary included Buchenwald and Auschwitz.

I had been preparing for this trip all semester. I had read the books, written the papers, discussed the historiography. I had a Holocaust and Genocide Studies concentration and had spent two years studying this material in classrooms. I thought I was ready. I was not. But that realization was still ahead of me.

First: Germany. I landed, found the S-Bahn, and stared out the window like the tourist I absolutely was. The landscape outside was green and ordinary—tidy suburbs, birch trees, a gravel switching yard. Nothing signaled that I was anywhere in particular. That ordinariness felt important later, though I couldn't have said why at the time.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber

The next day, the group headed south to Rothenburg ob der Tauber—one of the best-preserved medieval walled towns in Germany. The kind of place that looks like someone built a full-scale model of a fairy tale and forgot to take it down. Cobblestone streets, half-timbered buildings with exposed wooden frames blackened by centuries of weather, wrought-iron signs hanging over doorways in the shape of shoes, pretzels, and griffins. The Gasthof Greifen inn had a golden griffin on its sign, which turned out to be less unusual than it sounds. Everything was almost aggressively charming, in the way that places become when they've been preserved to within an inch of their lives.

Rothenburg survived the Second World War largely intact—unlike most German cities. The story goes that an American general was persuaded not to bomb it by the sight of the medieval walls and the pleading of a local. Whether or not that story is fully accurate, the town's survival was exceptional. Most of what you walk through in Germany was rebuilt from rubble in the 1950s. Rothenburg is genuinely old.

I wandered through narrow alleys and found a vine-covered Weinstube tucked into a quiet courtyard. Red tablecloths, a chalkboard menu, a museum sign just around the corner. The town was small enough to walk end to end in twenty minutes, but it kept delivering hidden corners—a stepped alley dropping down to a gate, a fountain in a square I hadn't noticed on the map, a door that opened into a garden that looked like it had been there since the Thirty Years' War.

The Medieval Crime Museum

Then things got darker—which, given the purpose of this trip, was going to become a pattern. The Kriminalmuseum, known in English as the Medieval Crime Museum, houses centuries of judicial and penal history: torture devices, execution protocols, records of witch trials. It is the kind of museum that is genuinely disturbing rather than sensationally so, because the exhibits are documented and specific rather than theatrical.

A display panel showed a "Folterprotokoll"—a Protocol of Torture from 1656, documenting the interrogation of a woman accused of witchcraft in Braunschweig. The document recorded, in careful German script, each method applied and the woman's responses. It read like meeting minutes. Someone was responsible for writing this down, for preserving the record, for ensuring that the procedure was properly documented. That impulse—to document, to formalize, to produce paperwork—would come up again at every site I visited on this trip, and it would feel less like a historical curiosity each time.

It was my first day engaging with the history of institutionalized cruelty in Europe, and it was only the 13th-century version. The documentation was the thing that struck me—not the instruments themselves, but the paperwork surrounding them. State violence has always generated paperwork. The 20th century was coming, and it would come with filing cabinets.

I left Rothenburg charmed and genuinely unsettled. It was beautiful in the way that only old, intact, un-bombed places are beautiful—a beauty that Germany had paid for by surviving, which was not nothing. And it had given me, on day one, the thing that every site on this trip would keep returning to: the proximity of the beautiful and the terrible, separated by nothing more than a few hours and a short road.