You know those vivid colour pictures of New England in the Autumn (sorry, Fall), brilliant in its reds and shades of reds and shades of brown. Even yellow. Well, that indefatigable traveller Arthur Reynolds sends in a few pages of Cara, the Aer Lingus magazine, with trees also aflame. It is not North America, but Heidelberg. Yes, the site of The Student Prince, the reputed capital of Romance with a capital R. If you've ever been there in autumn, the Cara photographs tell it all. The Castle of course, sets it off. The accompanying article starts with Mark Twain in his A Tramp Abroad. "One thinks of Heidelberg by day as the last possibility of the beautiful, but when he sees Heidelberg by night, a fallen Milky Way . . . he requires time to consider upon the verdict." (This writer doesn't.) We will come back to Twain, but it is worth remembering that long before The Student Prince arose, Germany's most celebrated writers, from Goethe on, had found the town on the river Neckar a place of beauty; Goethe, who felt in the town and its surroundings "something ideal", and through many of the most celebrated writers and poets it was so. In a book to hand there is even a poem by Sissi, the Empress of Austria. (She was known here for her fearless horse-riding). There was more than beauty, however. And Mark Twain's account of Mensur or student duelling in his day is exhaustive, no doubt accurate, but so bloody that many will turn the pages quickly.
He wrote in 1879 when, he tells us, the duellists wore no protection over their eyes against the sabres which, he writes, he could at times hardly see because of the halo of sparks. He describes the blood trickling down their faces, over the uniforms and onto the floor. When, you wonder, did the protective gear come in? On the other hand, he gives a delightful picture of a German professor coming into the lecture room already in full verbal flight, still talking as he mounted the podium and continuing imparting knowledge as he went out the door at the end.
Warm picture of German hospitality in the same town in that great travel book A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor, the story of his attempt to walk from Amsterdam to Constantinople in the winter of 1933. In Heidelberg, at the Red Ox Inn, the wife of the innkeeper refused to let him start off again on New Year's Day in snow and generally was as delightful as the Inn. The other side of Germany in 1933 is there, too.