DAY 4
3 AUGUST 202`1
MAGDEBURG TO LUTHERSTADT WITTENBERG
70 MILES

Magdeburg to Lutherstadt Wittenberg  was - well, you guessed it, more Elbe and little villages, pretty much the same as before.  The towns I passed through had that end of communism brutalist and decrepit style to them, although Dessau does at least have some resurrected remnants of the Bauhaus movement and style.  I visited Dessau and the Bauhaus school of houses last summer, and it is worth a visit for those of a style and architectural bent.  Places like Rossau and the outskirts of Wittenburg aren’t much to write home about.  However, central Lutherstadt Wittenberg , where I am as I write tonight, is lovely, all done up and renovated, no doubt buoyed up by the Protestant Gospel of Prosperity dollars that flow in from earnest and grateful Protestant visitors who seem to think that the home city of Luther is a place worthy of pilgrimage and patronage.  Not that we Catholics can talk, with all those Peter’s Pence squeezed out of us on account of Catholic guilt, going to Rome and providing the wherewithal to finance the Vatican.  All I know of Luther is that he suffered from chronic constipation and too much time in the privy, and thinking deeply and seriously as he waited to produce, gave him reformist inclinations.  Also, that he married an ex-nun.  The ex-nun bit sounds more troubling than the chronic constipation. I think it was Father Hannon , or maybe Father Hackett, who taught me that in A Level History , but then both probably were a bit partisan about the likes of Luther, and about Protestants in general.  It was still the time of ‘no salvation outside the Catholic Church’ and all Protestants were going to hell.  Happy days !

Lutherstadt Wittenberg  is very quiet.  In general, most places I’ve passed through have been very quiet.  I’m not sure where everybody is.  I would have though the Germans would be ‘staycationing.   But, there isn’t much sign of anybody about.  I feel like telling those brusque and rude Germans I come across in shops and restaurants that they should be very grateful that I’m here spending my hard earned British pounds to keep them in business.  I would, if I could speak German sufficiently well.

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Tomorrow is on to just north of Dresden.  I had originally hoped to go on further down the Elbe to Prague.  But, I can’t do that with the present restrictions - the Czech Republic is out of bounds for the British.  So I will stay in Germany and head west from the Elbe to meet the Main and then follow that to Frankfurt.  Bends and twists and oxbows included.  So there !

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