Berchtesgaden

Alongside the beauty of the Austrian landscape lies the beauty of the Bavarian Alps.  There, at the foot of one Germany's highest mountains, is the town of Berchtesgaden.  We arrived by train.

Berchtesgaden is not tiny, but neither is it a large town.  It is very picturesque, offering ice creams that you could die for - or more accurately die of.  To be fair to Berchtesgaden its most extraordinary feature is its setting and probably its second-most amazing feature is its palace complex where the Bavarian princes lived.

 

 

Yet right up there with the word amazing is the railway station.  Trundled would be the word to describe the winding, single track journey through the mountains that brought us to the town.  Winding and stunningly beautiful.  The trains ran every hour which, given the isolation of the line, was relatively remarkable.  Finally the three coaches clattered over some points (US: switches) and came to a halt in Berchtesgaden station, the end of the line.  There, one could deduce from the timetable, the train stopped for 20 minutes before setting off back through the mountains on its return journey.

 

I think it was on platform (line) 4 that we stopped on.  Platform 4.  But wasn't there only one train at a time?  Why ever would you need four platforms?  And then there is the station buildings themselves.  They are absolutely huge.  Befitting a large town or moderate city perhaps - but a mountain town at the end of a single track railway?

 

It was not always like this.  Berchtesgaden had its railway for many decades in humbler surroundings until, in the mid 1930s a man called Hitler bought a country retreat in the hills a few miles away.  The date on the station says 1937.  It was actually completed in 1938 and here the likes of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain were welcomed for meetings of state.  The meetings kept the world leaders abreast with the plans and developments of the Third Reich.  The meetings were about as much use as the monumental station is today - all outward importance, no true function.

 

It reminded me of that other World War 2 railway monument at Auschwitz.  There a bleak track leads to a dead end.  Here in the mountains of Bavaria a beautiful track and a magnificent station are part of the same great dead end that is man's inhumanity to man.