Off the Autobahn

The same goes for the beer. In western Germany, most breweries have been swallowed up by huge conglomerates; in the east, a number of excellent local brands—including the pilsner Ur-Krostitzer, and the similarly named but Guinness-colored Köstritzer—have managed to evade both state socialization and corporate takeover. Winding our way south on riverside roads from Quedlinburg toward Naumburg, we stopped at Zum Reformator to investigate one of the region's new trends: independent brewpubs. Despite being named after Luther, this cellar bar in the town of Eisleben looked more like a stateside knockoff of a traditional German pub than the real thing, especially with the attached bowling alley and Internet café. The manager, Wilfried Werner, showed us around the brewery. "Just try to start a small business here," he complained. "The chamber of commerce refuses to meet with potential investors on weekends or during its long lunch hours." Werner's home brews, though, were none the worse for the town's indifference. Leave it to an imitation American theme restaurant to revive what is most German about Germany: beer.

Naumburg, at the southern end of our pork-stuffed sojourn, was less quaint but more true-to-life than Quedlinburg. We joined a gaggle of unemployed residents watching a televised soccer match in an outdoor café on the main square, which featured a handsome Gothic Rathaus and a number of tastefully restored, early bourgeois town houses. Strolling the side streets, we got a sense of how the old city must have looked in the final days of the GDR, when erecting cost-efficient prefab housing units, or Plattenbauten, took precedence over historical preservation. Our walk demonstrated one reason that Communism went under, although we both agreed that the dilapidated streets also had the decrepit charm of alleyways in Vienna or Venice. It was on one such cul-de-sac that we stumbled across the Friedrich-Nietzsche Haus, the humble boyhood home where the philosopher developed his adolescent will to power.

Nietzsche was a teetotaler; we had no such qualms. Naumburg lies in the middle of the Saale-Unstrut wine region, and a 10-minute drive took us past the 13th-century Naumburg cathedral and the Schulpforta Cloister—the elite academy that was the Saxon equivalent of Eton or Exeter—out to the vineyards in neighboring Freyburg. Suddenly, we could have been on the Rhine. At any of 20 family-owned Freyburg vineyards, visitors can sample a number of whites and (unusual for Germany) reds. Both were refreshingly dry and quaffable. We decided the wine was the reason Naumburgers seemed content with their lot. Throughout Saxony-Anhalt, the natives had echoed brewer Wilfried Werner's complaint that the tourist boom had yet to take off, but the staff of the Pawis Vineyard merely shrugged, as if to say, "We know what we've got, and we're happy not to share it with the masses." That would have made Nietzsche, if not Marx, proud.

With our last stop, the landscape gardens at Wörlitz Park, we left Rhine Romanticism for the Age of Enlightenment. Constructed between 1764 and 1800, mostly by Prince Leopold III Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau, an enlightened despot with time and money to burn, the 301-acre Wörlitz gardens are an 18th-century version of Epcot Center. Leopold filled the park not only with harmoniously planted flora, but also (to enrich the masses) with replicas of great architectural and sculptural achievements from various cultures and epochs. Our room at the Landhaus Wörlitzer Hof had a balcony with a park view, and we fell asleep that night with tired legs, edified spirits, and the cries of peacocks and swans in our ears.

Wörlitz was unlike anything else we'd seen on our drive, but then again there was no rhyme or reason to Saxony-Anhalt as a whole. It's a potential tourist attraction that has yet to get its act together. Which, of course, makes it a good place for travelers like us who hate tourist attractions and appreciate the randomness of a checkered history. We found ourselves hoping that the A9 would never be repaved, so that Saxony-Anhalt might remain the intriguingly miscellaneous agglomeration it is today: a place where the bumps in the road have yet to be smoothed over.

Jefferson Chase is a journalist and translator living in Berlin.