Kassel, Waldeck, and a Night in Frankfurt
The study abroad schedule had built-in breathing room. Not every day was a memorial or a museum. Some days were just Germany—green forests, old castles, trains that ran exactly on time. This was one of those days, and I was grateful for it. The weight of what was coming was already present, in the background, but there was also just the trip: the countryside, the food, the strange pleasure of being somewhere you have never been before.
Into the Trees
The Kassel area sits in the middle of Hessen, surrounded by the kind of dense deciduous forest that fills German fairy tales. Someone in the group had arranged a visit to a treetop walk—a wooden walkway suspended through the canopy, high enough that looking straight down made my stomach drop. The forest floor was thirty or forty feet below, a carpet of brown leaves and green ferns. The walkway swayed slightly when the group moved together. The view through the canopy in every direction was just more forest, more trees, the understory going on as far as I could see.
Waldeck
From there, the road wound up to Schloss Waldeck—a medieval castle perched on a ridge above the Edersee reservoir. The lake was created by the Waldecker Talsperre, a massive dam built between 1908 and 1914 under Kaiser Wilhelm II. A bronze plaque on the dam wall recorded its construction by the Preussische Staatsbauverwaltung—the Prussian State Building Administration. The engineering felt genuinely monumental. The dam held back the Eder River and created a reservoir that stretched for miles. The dates felt ominous in the way that dates often do in Germany: finished in 1914, just as the world the dam was built for began to collapse.
The castle above the dam was round towers and stone walls and a courtyard hung with German flags, exactly what you would expect from a medieval German castle. The Brothers Grimm collected their stories in this region of Hessen, and standing in the courtyard of Schloss Waldeck, that made complete sense. It looked like the illustration that precedes a story about what happens inside.
Frankfurt at Night
The next day, the group moved on to Frankfurt. I watched the German countryside roll by from the train window—farmland, small towns, industrial outskirts—and spotted something that stopped me mid-thought: a flatcar loaded with brand-new Audis, each one individually wrapped in a white cover with the four-ring logo embossed on the plastic, being transported to some dealership somewhere. I took a photo because it was the most specifically German thing I had seen, the confluence of engineering precision and consumer pride expressed through a train car full of very carefully packaged cars.
Frankfurt was a quick stop—a night and a morning, not enough to know the city. I found a Starbucks on a cobblestone plaza, which felt both like a defeat and like an inevitability. The collision of American chains and European urban fabric happens in every major city; you stop being surprised by it and just note it as a data point about how cities work now. But the real highlight was the evening: the Alte Oper, Frankfurt’s neo-Renaissance Old Opera House, lit up gold against the night sky. The building was destroyed in 1944 and rebuilt as a concert hall in the 1980s, keeping the historic facade while gutting and modernizing the interior. It sits on its own square, and at night, with the lights on it, it looks exactly like what it is: a culture that destroyed itself and decided to come back.
Tomorrow: Berlin. The trip would shift from forests and castle courtyards to the sites that the syllabus had been preparing me for all semester. I was not ready, but that was also the point.
