Magdeburg This was my fourth and longest visit to Magdeburg, a city that plays a huge role in my family's history, as described in My Germany.  I stayed with professors Christiane Laehnemann and Gerald Warnecke in their spacious home in the Cracau neighborhood for almost a week, and it was a wonderful base. I made day trips out to Dessau and Halle for readings and did two readings in the city, one at a book store for 45 people, the other at Otto von  Guerecke University for 80 students and faculty.   I sampled excellent wines from Sachsen-Anhalt while in town, had a tour of some of the old city ramparts and excavations with Pascal Begrich, and learned that the heavily fortified city had been so utterly devastated in the Thirty Years' War that it literally became a byword: Magdeburgesieren meant to destroy, to wipe out.  In one of my German classes, I had done a Powerpoint on the amazing architect and peace activist Hundertwasser, and his masterpiece in Magdeburg, the Gruene Zitadelle, was the last building I talked about.  Going inside was a unique thrill.  Various views of Hundertwasser's acknowledged masterpiece, which exhibits all his playfulness with color, line, and texture: A comical looking statue whose age and meaning I learned about only after leaving:     The Cloister of Unser Lieben Frauen, dating back to the 11th century   A view of the utterly peaceful courtyard Part of the crypt with pillaged Greek columns   A piece of the old city wall destroyed in the Thirty Years' War The only remains of Magdeburg's beautiful Baroque past   Another trace of Magdeburg's Baroque glory I spent the summer of 2010 taking private German lessons to improve my conversation skills but also to make it possible for me to do readings in German where the organizers had requested it.  It was a lot more complicated than I anticipated, as I describe on Huffington Post.  It was also a lot more fun than I imagined. I gave my first German reading in Magdeburg and was nervous, but relaxed as it went on, and my second and third in Dessau and Celle were much smoother.  One man came up to me at the third German reading and said approvingly, "I kept listening for an accent, but I didn't hear it."   Back to German Tour 2010 main page Back to Lev Raphael's main page All text copyright © 2001-10 by Lev Raphael.