Düsseldorf

In February of 2019, I was going through simulator training for the second of two air traffic controller licenses. Because it was all simulation and hands-on training, I had my weekends off. The advantage was that I had next to no theoretical material to study, and my time off was 100% free. However, I was also restricted to just having the two days of the weekend off. I needed to be back home at a decent time Sunday night, to be ready for simulator sessions on Monday mornings.

This meant that I wanted to plan my weekend trips for cities with regular flights from Zurich. Düsseldorf was a destination with several daily flights. What also helped was that Düsseldorf has plenty of culture, enough to fill out a weekend. However, the amount of sights is also not so overwhelming that I would have to skip a lot of things either. Once I found cheap tickets with Eurowings, visiting Düsseldorf was essentially a no-brainer.

FRIDAY, February 15th

I flew with Eurowings from Zurich to Düsseldorf late at night, departing just after 9 PM.

The flight landed early. I took the airport SkyTrain over to a different terminal, where the airport’s train station is located. From there, I got on a commuter train into the city, known locally as an S-Bahn train.

After finally arriving at my hotel, I simply went to bed. It was close to midnight, and I was pretty tired.

SATURDAY, February 16th

After waking up and having had breakfast, I walked in the direction of the city’s Altstadt. The old town area is home to most of the city’s sights.

My first stop was actually the tourism office, to buy a so-called Düsseldorf Card. It’s a discount card that offers free use of the city’s public transport. The card also includes free or reduced admission at numerous sights.

After that, I walked around Düsseldorf’s old town. I stopped by two churches to pass some time. It was still earlier than the opening hours of larger attractions.

First was the St. Lambertuskirche, which was built in the 14th century. The Gothic church has a unique, twisted tower on top of it. It might not be easy to see on the picture. If you zoom in, you’ll notice that the tower isn’t straight.

The second church I entered was the Andreaskirche. This Dominican church was built in the 1620s with a pretty, white stucco interior. 

It was a beautiful morning with clear skies and sunshine, so I took a walk along the Rhine promenade. There are nice views all along the promenade.

Looking south from the city center, you can’t miss the tall Rheinturm tower. That’s exactly where I was going next.

The Rheinturm is definitely one of Düsseldorf’s main landmarks. The 240m (720ft) tall telecommunications tower has an observation deck and bar at a height of 168m (500ft).

The weather was fantastic that morning, so the panorama views of the city were really nice. I only went up there for the views, as the bar & café was incredibly overpriced. But that’s usual with such towers.

You could see all of the city, as well as the airport, visible in the background on the picture above. The river that runs past the city center is the Rhine river.

Just below the Rheinturm tower is the uniquely-designed Landtag of Nordrhein-Westfalen building. It is the parliament for the German state where Düsseldorf is located, known as North Rhine-Westphalia in English.

Looking east, you could see some parts of the surrounding region beyond the city.

After riding the elevator back down to the ground, I walked over to a nearby art museum. The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen displays their art collection at two different locations, called “K20” & “K21” respectively. Don’t ask me how they came up with those names. They are not adjacent house numbers, nor is the address of “K21” located at #21 of its street. One possibility is that K20 displays predominantly 20th-century art, and K21 was added later. However, the works at K21 are from 1980 to today. That doesn’t quite conform with a 20th and 21st-century split.

K21 is a roughly 10-minute walk from the Rheinturm, so that’s the one I went to first. The exhibit is actually housed inside a former parliament building from the 19th century. It was a display of contemporary art, which is a subject I just can’t get excited for.

I can appreciate more traditional paintings and I certainly enjoy photography. But one of the art installations at K21 was simply a prosthetic leg laying by the wall. That was it. I don’t call that “art”, that’s just a weird concept. Perhaps the most interesting of all the parts of the K21 museum was a net suspended from the glass ceiling. You can climb onto this net and around, and I’m sure there are some nice views through the glass windows.

However, only a couple of people could climb the net at the same time. There was quite a long queue, so I didn’t do it myself. 

Even though the Düsseldorf Card gave me free use of the city’s public transport, I decided to use the also free shuttle bus between the two addresses of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westphalen. However, it had become past 12:30 PM, so I wanted lunch before entering the other art museum. I had sought out a nearby traditional German restaurant and found it after a few minutes of walking.

It wasn’t too long since I had breakfast. I decided to have a pretty light meal, a sausage dish with a bread roll, potato salad and veggies.

After lunch, I walked back to the K20 location of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen. That was the one I still had not been to. It featured more so-so contemporary art pieces. What I found more interesting was a global collection of mostly paintings. Some of these included paintings from Russia, Asia, and Latin America. Some were recent, and some were from the 19th or 20th century. One example of a more abstract painting was Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky’s “Composition IV” from 1911. 

There were two Mexican paintings from the early 20th century that I really liked as well. One of them shows a teacher in a rural setting. There is an armed man on a horse beside her, a symbol of the Mexican Revolution. It was painted by Diego Rivera in 1923.

A beautiful landscape painting of the Iztaccihuatl mountain between Mexico City and Puebla was made by Gerardo Murillo in 1932.

After the art museum, I walked down the street to the Memorial Düsseldorf. Named Mahn- und Gedenkstätte Düsseldorf in German, it’s a small museum that covers the effect of Nazi Germany on the local region. Its permanent exhibit portrays children and youth from Düsseldorf. It looks at various storylines from different backgrounds, and how the Nazi regime affected each of them in different ways.

Many young German boys were misled or later forced by law to join the Hitler Youth. It was a youth organization based on boy scouts. Hitlerjugend members were increasingly sent to the frontlines as Germany was losing the war.

Other young Germans rejected joining various Nazi organizations, and were shunned from society, or imprisoned.

In the case of children with disabilities, they were often euthanized, against the will of their parents.

Below the museum building was an air-raid shelter used numerous times throughout the war.

Düsseldorf was an important industrial city with a harbor. This made it one of several targets for Allied bombing raids in western Germany.

The air-raid shelter below the museum is quite unique, because it has been preserved in its original form. The air filter pictured above was original. The sign uses a text font that was common within Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 40s.

Most of the doors and benches in the underground shelter are originals as well.

Following the Memorial Düsseldorf, I walked a bit further south to the Hetjens Museum. It is also known as the German Ceramics Museum.

The museum is not only about ceramics produced in Germany, but from all over the world. There were some really colorful pieces, particularly from Asia.

Also on exhibit were some Italian pieces made in Urbino in the 16th century. They depict various stories from the Bible or Roman times.

The Hetjens Museum’s collection isn’t huge, but I got free entry on the Düsseldorf Card. It was a worthwhile 30 minutes. 

Just next-door is Düsseldorf’s Filmmuseum. It details the history of cinema. Instead of simply displaying an endless line of movie posters and videoclips, the museum explains several filming techniques and special effects.

I certainly learned a thing or two, particularly about special effects from the time before CG animations. Essentially a lot of it has to do with camera perspectives. A lot of special effects were created by using physical scale models that were filmed such that they looked larger.

Some landscapes and city scenes were actually recreated by using detailed paintings as well. 

While visiting the Filmmuseum, I had gotten in touch with a friend of mine that lives in nearby Cologne. We had met a few years back while traveling in the Middle East. He was visiting Düsseldorf with another friend of his, and they were having dinner at a Chinese restaurant in town. I met them there and joined them for dinner, then we chatted for a while. After a couple of hours we split up, and I walked back to my hotel. 

SUNDAY, February 17th

Most attractions in Düsseldorf left on my to-do list didn’t open until 11 AM. Instead, I planned to go for a prolonged walk in the morning. I had breakfast at the hotel then checked out, and left my bag at the reception until later. I elected to leave my large winter coat behind as well, because the forecast was quite warm and sunny. But early in the morning, it was still quite cold.

I wanted to start the day at the Medienhafen area of Düsseldorf. To get there, I walked to a nearby bus stop, then rode the bus for about five stops. I had to wait quite a while for the bus. It wouldn’t have made a much of a difference if I had just walked. 

Medienhafen (Media Harbor) is an area of the city harbor that has been repurposed. Instead of silos, warehouses, and docking cranes, there are now office buildings, restaurants, and luxury hotels.

The modern, occasionally futuristic architecture is definitely worth the visit alone. Even if architecture isn’t a particular interest of yours, the buildings still look unique.

This part of Düsseldorf is quite a nice place to go for a stroll along the river regardless. A morning breeze made it quite chilly though.

After I had explored Medienhafen, I got on a tram across the city to Hofgarten. The Hofgarten is a park just north of the city center. There were quite a few locals enjoying the mild Sunday morning here.

Of course, in mid-February the park is less green than usual, but there are several lakes that are quite pretty. A couple of large flocks of birds congregated around them.

As you exit the southern end of Hofgarten, you enter the Königsallee, a shopping street known locally simply as “Kö”. There’s an art nouveau facade at the Kaufhof department store. Apart from that, most shops along the street are just various international fashion brands.

By now it was shortly before 11 AM. Soon the city’s museums and attractions were going to open their doors. I took the metro to the Schloß Benrath, on the southeastern outskirts of Düsseldorf.

The palace was built between 1755 and 1770, on the orders of Charles Theodore, Elector (ruler) of the Palpatine of the Rhine, a region of the Holy Roman Empire. I got my ticket just in time to join a guided tour of the main palace building right away. It’s not possible to visit the former living quarters of the royals without a guide. 

The castle has a characteristic pink exterior. This color is also used on the walls for several of the castle’s rooms. It’s a beautifully decorated baroque castle, with lots of symmetry in the various rooms.

There’s not a lot of furniture inside the castle. This is due to a desire to present the castle in its original 18th-century design. Most of the much newer furniture has thus been placed in storage. That doesn’t detract much, as it leaves a focus on the already lavish decorations.

The palace was divided into a separate section for men and women, also for the royal couple. This might not have been such a huge problem, as Charles Theodore and Elisabeth Auguste were cousins. They got married because of issues with inheritance due to a lack of male heirs on one side of the family. The couple had no kids together and spent very little time with each other. They weren’t always both at the castle at the same time.

At various points throughout the castle, there were hidden doors designed for servants. Although the servants were essential to the functioning of the castle, the castle was designed such that you’d rarely see them.

The servants had a separate set of rooms and corridors. These areas were mostly sealed off from the rooms used by the royals. 

The downstairs quarters were reserved for Charles Theodore and Elisabeth Auguste. Upstairs were four guest bedrooms, each with smaller adjoining rooms. 

After I had gotten a guided tour of the main castle building, I went to the café at a separate building on the castle grounds. It wasn’t a good choice. The food was decent at best, but the service was incredibly bad.

I had picked a tarte flambée (Flammkuchen) from the menu written on a blackboard on the wall. I told the waitress this shortly after I sat down. However, I needed another moment to go over the drinks menu. Well, she never came back for that until I requested a drink almost 30 minutes later, after I had gotten my food.

If that wasn’t enough, my food was handed to me without any cutlery! Usually, they bring that out after taking your order, unless knives and forks are already at the table. I waited for about 10 minutes before having to do the unthinkable. I actually had to signal the waitress as she walked by, so I could ask for a knife and fork! Unlike a pizza, you can’t eat a tarte flambée with your hands, so that’s not the reason for the confusion.

After all of this mess was over with and I had finished lunch, I went to check out one of the two separate museums at the castle. In the two side buildings which used to house the castle’s servants, there are museums for natural history and “European gardening history” respectively. I picked the first one. It wasn’t overly exciting, containing room after room of stuffed-out animals with not a lot of signage. It is clearly meant for families with small children.

Both of the museums are included in the price of admission for the castle though. As I was about to leave, the staff member at the reception told me there was a different exhibit upstairs. It was accessed via a staircase in the otherwise closed-off courtyard.

The exhibit was a series of photos and sculptures made by a local artist and animal enthusiast in the early 20th century, named Josef Pallenberg.

The pictures of Josef Pallenberg and his wife handling wild animals, including big cats, up close without any safety gear were quite extraordinary. It seemed as if he considered the animals as close friends rather than mere pets.

It should be mentioned that we have a different perspective on animal welfare and captive animals today. Still, it didn’t seem as if the animals were abused in any way. Unbelievably, none of the predators ever attacked Pallenberg. This might be evidence that they were satisfied with how he treated them.

I got back on Düsseldorf’s U-Bahn metro. When I arrived back in downtown Düsseldorf, I still had time for one more sight. Without knowing what was currently being displayed, I decided to visit the NRW-Forum.

The NRW-Forum is a gallery that rotates between exhibits on various different topics. At the time, the gallery was showing contemporary art photography.

Photography is one of my hobbies, so it proved to be a good choice. The collection wasn’t large, but by the time I had gone through the three exhibition rooms, it was time to leave Düsseldorf. The timing worked out well.

I took a U-Bahn train back towards my hotel, where I picked up my bag and coat. Then I walked to Düsseldorf’s central train station, not far from my hotel.

Not even 10 minutes after I got to the train station, I found myself on a regional train bound for the airport. Fortunately, the airport train was also covered by the Düsseldorf Card I had bought. I didn’t need to buy another ticket anywhere.

I got off at the airport’s train station and used the free SkyTrain to get to the terminal from which my flight was going to depart. The SkyTrain is a suspension railway between the airport terminals, with the train cars attached below the rails.

My non-stop flight back to Zürich with Eurowings in the late afternoon left a little behind schedule. However, the plane picked up the delay in the air, and we actually arrived a little ahead of schedule.