Notes from the Eagle's Nest by Ann Banks
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On a glorious spring day in the Bavarian Alps, only a few snow-capped mountains over from where Julie Andrews sang, our party assembled for a six-hour ''health walk.'' The plan was to ascend the stunning Wimbach gorge and the valley above it, stopping along the way at Wimbachschloss, a hunting lodge built in 1784 for the last local prince.
Officially designated a Testwanderweg, or fitness trail, this itinerary is among several developed for the tourist office in Berchtesgaden under the guidance of a specialist in rehabilitative sports therapy. Health-conscious hikers can assess their fitness by monitoring their heart rates at designated points on the trails. The tourist office sponsors health hikes five days a week in the warmer months. So seriously do Germans take the idea of ''walking cures'' that the cost of such excursions is generally covered by national health insurance.
When I signed up for a hike, my fitness goal was modest: to keep pace with my fellow hikers - Germans all - and thus bring shame neither to my country nor to my personal trainer back home. Ha!
Never mind that two of my fellow hikers were over 70. Never mind that my companions carried no water and wore no hats. Never mind that one of them smoked!
Most of the time, I was able to keep up. Just. I might have counted this a triumph of sorts if the infernal heart monitor I was wearing hadn't been noisily broadcasting its opinion that I was overexerting myself. Everybody else's monitor kept a discreet silence; only I was exceeding my target heart rate.
As consolation, Hubert volunteered that our 74-year-old companion, a retired bricklayer from Cologne named Herman, had the fitness level of a very young man. Of more immediate comfort, Hubert reprogrammed my monitor to something less apt to set off the peeps.
I made up my mind to just try to enjoy the wander. There was plenty to appreciate. The sky was postcard blue, the light doubly intense as it glinted off snowfields high above the valley. In the distance, a percussion section of snowy peaks performed at intervals the muted boom of the spring avalanche.
Our trail led across the valley floor, at one time a lake bed and now a series of rocky washes, then up through a tall pine forest of the kind where fairies proverbially dwell. When we stopped for a rest, I stretched out on the mossy forest floor and watched sunlight dapple buttercups and Queen Anne's lace. As we made our way, Hubert recounted the legend of the Watzmann range, a sawtooth row of peaks that made up the valley's eastern wall. This ancient story of a king so detestably evil that the gods buried him under a huge pile of rock inevitably summoned thoughts of Berchtesgaden's more recent encounter with a reign of evil.
Obersalzberg, the mountainside that rises steeply above Berchtesgaden, is as darkened as any site in Germany by the legacy of the Third Reich. Drawn to the resort area by the stunning vistas, Hitler built there in 1933 an alpine retreat, the Berghof. Many of his top lieutenants followed suit, and what had been an idyllic mountain settlement became a wartime haven for the Nazi elite, as Albert Speer wrote in his memoirs, ''an open-air enclosure for wild animals.''
Quaint chalets on the mountainside were linked by fortified underground bunkers; a picturesque 19th-century guest house was appropriated for an SS barracks; Martin Bormann turned the high meadow of a once-elegant spa into the National Socialist version of a model farm. Gloriously scenic, Obersalzberg became the propaganda setting of choice for glimpses of the ''private'' Hitler. It was here that Hitler sported Lederhosen and patted dogs and children for the benefit of photographers.
With Germany's defeat, the United States Army took over Obersalzberg and made the mountain area into a resort again. It has since been restored to German control, but for half a century, the Americans ran it as a recreation center for soldiers and their families, complete with hotels, ski resorts and golf courses.
Perched atop Obersalzberg is the Eagle's Nest, or Kehlsteinhaus. The Eagle's Nest (a nickname given by American occupying forces) is an engineering marvel that was Hitler's mountaintop conference center, and is reachable only by state bus service. It sits at the top of a road so steep that I held my breath for most of the ride. Hitler feared this journey, too -- he made it to the place only about a dozen times.
A project of Bormann's, the Eagle's Nest was presented to the Fuhrer on his 50th birthday on behalf of the Nazi party. With its thick walls of granite block and outsize square windows, the structure was meant as a symbol of Nazi power; it looks cold and stark now. Inside, there is a restaurant within a series of imposing halls, one of which features a fireplace of red Italian marble: a gift from Mussolini.
At 6,000 feet, the Eagle's Nest terrace, where Eva Braun liked to sunbathe, presents one of the world's breathtaking panoramas. On a cloudless day, I stood on the terrace and was able to gaze past Salzburg's steeples, 20 miles or so away. I could make out a mountain called the Schlafende Hexe, the sleeping witch. To this craggy peak attaches another Bavarian legend: It is said that the Schlafende Hexe is on everlasting guard duty against the day the evil King Watzmann might awake.
The Eagle's Nest is administered by the tourist office and leased to a concessionaire. Every year, about 300,000 tourists -- mainly Germans -- come to take in the view; only a small fraction hear anything about its history. The American-owned company, Berchtesgaden Minibus Tours shows visitors through the Eagle's Nest. Besides a stop at the Eagle's Nest, the itinerary includes a drive through the Obersalzberg area, which has no historical markers. In the absence of signs telling what this or that structure was ''in former times,'' (as one hears the Nazi era described), we had our guide, Christine.
She told us that of the 50 buildings in Nazi Obersalzberg, 30 or so remain; the others, including Hitler's house, were wholly or partly destroyed during or just after the war. The nondescript Evergreen chalet had been Albert Speer''s studio; what looked like a refuse pile of wood cartons in a field had once housed Bormann's bees.
As we passed the ruins of a pigsty, Christine mentioned that tourists often took each other's pictures there, in the mistaken belief that it was the remains of Hitler's house, the Berghof. To obscure its location, the government thickly forested the Berghof property. But souvenir hunters, tipped off by conspicuous ''No Trespassing'' signs, manage to find their way to the site -- where they photograph, videotape and, in rare cases, leave offerings.
By the tour's end, as we descended the Obersalzberg road in the minibus, I'd had more than enough of that terrible chapter. I willed Christine to speed up, hairpin turns or no. A picture-book scene came into view; we could see down into the green valley with its clusters of fairy tale villages. ''Oh, it is hard to believe that it all happened in such a beautiful setting,'' she said.
History and scenery. Scenery and history. I'd come to Berchtesgaden believing, or perhaps only hoping, that each might be separately felt. That had come to seem impossible. Earlier, I'd listened to a young German woman as she struggled to explain in English the trouble with historical markers. The tourism authorities ''have to be very careful,'' she said. ''They can hurt feelings of some people very easily which had problems during Hitler time.''
This conversation marked for me the onset of what I thought of as euphemism fatigue. I began to feel as though every buttercup in the Wimbach valley was saturated with sorrow.
The next day, my last in Berchtesgaden, Christine's husband, David, invited me on a hike in the nearby Almbach gorge, ''probably the prettiest gorge in the Bavarian Alps,'' he added. It was as lovely as he promised. At its foot, where we began our climb, Germany's oldest marble mill still grinds hunks of marble into smooth pastel balls. Following a pathway cut into rock walls, we ascended alongside a wild mountain torrent. The crystalline water forms a succession of frothy waterfalls and blue-green pools, which are spanned by a series of 29 wood-and-iron footbridges.
Though not in any way unsafe, the steep climb requires concentration, and David and I talked little. It seemed quite a good thing I wasn't wearing a heart monitor, and also that David liked to stop now and again to admire the view.
From the top of the gorge, we climbed higher on a forest trail to the tiny farm settlement of Ettenberg. In the center of a green, buttercup-dusted meadow was a small stucco church, so white it might have been made of sugar cubes. A pilgrimage chapel, Maria Ettenberg, was built in 1724 on the site of a miracle. A picture of the Virgin Mary that had mysteriously disappeared from a local farmhouse was discovered hanging in a nearby linden tree. It was returned to the house but vanished a second time and found again in the tree.
The interior of the church dripped with ornate touches and was presided over by an imposing polychrome St. Florian in gold-leaf robes. Beside the altar were red-lined cases displaying traditional tin ex-votos.
A larger ex-voto hung on the wall. It was a painting of Ettenberg itself, the church outlined against snow-capped mountains that merged into high, white clouds. On the right side of the painted sky were shapes that from afar could have been a flock of birds. In fact, they were bombers -- part of the Royal Air Force Lancaster squadron that on April 25, 1945, dropped 243 tons of explosives on the Obersalzberg Nazi compound, not two miles away.
On the left side of the scene floats the figure of the Virgin Mary, swathed in cloth of such intense blue that it pales the sky. ''Thank you, Mary,'' says the legend underneath, for answering our prayers and sparing the community and church. A foot-long piece of bomb shrapnel that landed in Ettenberg is affixed to the wall under the painting.
David, who has been to the church many times, said he had never noticed the bombing-raid ex-voto. We looked at it for a while and agreed on something. On this exquisite golden afternoon more than 50 years later, we were inclined to add our thanks to those of the artist, that Ettenberg was spared.