Time to appreciate a wealth of German beauty

To mark the festival of association football, try a bit of word association - with "Germany". Running a personal search engine through our memories and misconceptions can have unfortunate results. These may well begin with "terrible food", continue with a stereotype about the nation's territorial aspirations for everything from poolside sunloungers to Poland, and end - at least among English football fans - with the chant of "Two World Wars and one World Cup, doo-dah".

As a result of a mindset rooted in the post-war era, the vast majority of Commonwealth citizens neglect going to Germany - and we are the losers.

Germany is a near-perfect holiday destination. Whether you seek a world-class city-break (Berlin, Munich, Cologne), startling scenery (Bavaria and the Harz Mountains), or history and high culture (Dresden, Weimar, Bayreuth), the Federal Republic provides the answer. And with every degree of global warming, Baltic and North Sea beaches become that bit more appealing. Germany should be up there with France, Spain and Italy on the list of European favourites.

Germany is a profoundly beautiful, welcoming and cultured nation. I propose a journey that deliberately seeks places way off even the most eccentric - or erudite - tourist's trail. They also have names that resonate with a certain distaste: Neanderthal, Frankenstein and Rottweilers. And to vary the diet, I shall throw in a dash of Worms and the odd Wuppertal.

My trip, I confess, began inauspiciously with a cheap flight from England to a nearby airport. If your boarding pass reads "Dortmund", bad luck: you are about to have your prejudices reinforced. The plane lands at an airport on the edge of a city that was almost entirely wiped out by Second World War bombing.

Nothing unusual there: dozens of German cities were flattened by the RAF, and have been meticulously reconstructed according to the original plans. But not Dortmund. I spent what felt like a very long afternoon in the city, of which the highlights were a) the airport and b) the former Gestapo headquarters, now a museum aimed at keeping the memory of unspeakable cruelty alive.

Stay with me, though, because close by you can find a pair of intriguing attractions. First, make your way through the post-industrial detritus that pocks the Ruhr into a deep, thickly wooded valley. This was carved by the Dussel, the river that gains a "dorf" where it meets the Rhine. The vale is named, though, after a 17th-century romantic poet called Joachim Neander who used to meander hereabouts. His valley became known as Neanderthal. And when, in 1856, remains of a colony of proto-humans was discovered, the species was named Neanderthal man.

Neanderthals roamed around Europe and the western parts of Asia between 300,000 and 30,000 years ago; there is no truth that their tribal totem was a white flag bearing a red cross. Amid the blossoming trees you encounter sculptures representing a curious, stunted species with large noses. They were wiped out during the last Ice Age, their sad story told in the nearby Neanderthal Museum.

If Neandertal man had had a chance to design a public transport system, it might look like the one just south of here, in Wuppertal - a very long and very thin town, with homes and factories sprinkled along the slopes and floor of the valley formed by, you guessed it, the Wupper river.

In the late 19th century, Wuppertal needed a new transport system. The valley was already very crowded, so a surface line was out of the question. Digging an underground railway would have proved absurdly expensive for a small town, and so the German equivalent of Heath Robinson was brought in to build something that looks like a misguided vision of what the future will look like: the Schwebebahn, or suspended railway. Vehicles resembling floating trams whoosh in the manner of high-speed Zeppelins along the valley, suspended about 15 metres above roads and river by an elaborate system of pylons and cables.

Somehow the system lasted long enough to celebrate the centenary of its completion - despite a nasty incident in 1950 when an elephant, being carried on a promotional exercise, took fright and leapt into the river below. He survived, as has the Schwebebahn.

The carriages reach high speeds, and you might initially find the way they sway disconcerting. But they are addictive: besides the feeling of being on a municipal theme-park ride, you see a town from on high and from end to end.

After the full eight-mile stretch, you will demand another go. The flat fare of €1.80 ($3.65) is cheaper than Disney - and if you are travelling on a regional rail ticket, you get the ride thrown in.

Forty years after Adolf Hitler opened the factory that was to make the Volkswagen - a mass-produced vehicle designed by Ferdinand Porsche for the new network of autobahnen - Germans appear to have decided that they prefer their bahnen without the auto. The nation's public transport system is both a superb model of integration - connecting any tiny hamlet with any quarter of every big city - and amazing value. I bought a sequence of one-day regional tickets that allow unlimited travel on trains, buses, trams and preposterous aerial tramways for a low, fixed fare.

Services are extremely reliable, even in the most vicious of winters; a classic and long-standing advert for Deutsche Bahn is "Alle reden vom wetter. Wir nicht". (Everybody talks about the weather. We don't). Next stop on my cut-price, high-speed tour: Frankenstein's castle. This 13th-century fortress, just south of Darmstad, is straight out of central casting, and the inspiration for Mary Shelley's novel. One dark night in 1816 the writer ventured here to investigate a legend: that Johann Conrad Dippel, a mysterious physician-theologian, had conducted experiments using human body parts. His ghost is reputed to sit on the roof and replicate the research for a week each winter between Christmas and New Year.

The castle's name comes from the original owners, the von Frankenstein
family. Later, it became a military prison, then fell into disrepair. You are welcome to wander around the ruins, and inspect the life-size relief of a von Frankenstein in the chapel. You will also want to admire, from the ramparts, the splendid view of the Rhine valley: the artery of western Europe.

Time for dinner - at which point some travellers will run a mile, usually straight across the Rhine towards France. In the 800-plus pages of Lonely Planet's guide to Germany, not a single line is found for the places on my tour so far: Neanderthal, Wuppertal and Frankenstein's castle. But the book is far from silent about the food: "A land of meat, pickled cucumbers and potato dumplings," it opines, adding: "No part of the pig is safe from Bavarian chefs".

The Germans do like meat. All of it. They like to get every pfennig's worth from a pfund of fleisch, which means that if you have longed to know what sausage made from brains tastes like, you are in the right country. But anyone who eats meat should celebrate their fortune in being somewhere with such an appetite for animals. If miscellaneous minced organs do not appeal, try sauerbraten: beef marinated for an age, which melts in the mouth in minutes.

While German chefs have their work cut out to make the country more vegetarian-friendly, the brewers need no help. The German policy of purity (when applied to beer, at least) is a model prescription. Only water, malt, yeast and hops may be used by brewers: a simple recipe that creates a deliciously complex array of beers.

By the time I crossed the Rhine to reach Worms (no smirking at the back of the class, please), the light was beginning to fade.

I asked a man in a Mercedes for directions to the centre. He insisted that he would drive me there; and no, he wasn't a taxi driver.

The city that was once the seat of the Holy Roman Empire's parliament, or Diet, is best seen at dusk late in spring, when mist disguises the beauty of the city and cloaks everything in a Mitteleuropean melancholy - especially the vast Dom (cathedral), which has, er, dominated this European crossroads for nine centuries.

Germans pronounce the city roughly as "Vorms", to rhyme with "forms", and we should really get over our childish amusement at the name. Even so, I could not resist searching, unsuccessfully, for a Cafe Worms or a Worms takeaway.

So I slid into the Worms Youth Hostel ("slither in, wriggle out", could be its slogan), which, like all other hostels I have been to in Germany, is spotlessly clean and ridiculously good value. Just €17.50 ($35.50) buys you a sun-lounger with towel - sorry, a bed in a dorm including linen - plus the best breakfast Worms can provide. Tee hee.

A little further south, you may glimpse the occasional tourist, especially in Heidelberg: a sparkling university city. But keep going south to watch the scenery improve with every mile - and encounter another country. The most easterly point of France jabs in to the ribs of Baden-Wurttemberg just a few miles from the city of Karlsruhe. The river dividing Alsace-Lorraine from the Saarland is a curious no-man's land even 61 years after the end of the Second World War. From the map, I thought I could detect a bridge linking Germany with France. When I turned up, I found a tiny ferry shuttling back and forth across the river with a few cars and pedestrians until nightfall.

From here, most people head south into the Black Forest. But I wanted to meet the Rottweilers - about 25,000 of them, contentedly chewing the fat in the tranquillity that now prevails in the oldest city in Germany's south-west.

Rottweil once lay astride a European superhighway, which is how it came to lend its name to fierce dogs. The original hund came from across the Alps - indeed, the Romans and later traders brought the animal over the mountains because it was strong enough to get its teeth into an Alpine traverse. Rottweil lay on the main highway north, and happened to have some fairly robust sheepdogs. They were crossed to create the Rottweiler Metzgerhund - which translates as the butcher's dog of Rottweil.

The dog's reputation in Britain may be fearsome, but in Germany the Rottweiler is so well-regarded that it is the standard guide dog for the blind.

Rottweil is one of the most beautiful towns in Germany. With no strategic targets, the town evaded the sights of Allied bombers during the Second World War.

As a result, its Gothic Hauptstrasse looks as though it is the backdrop for the most fabulous of fairytales - perhaps one involving a young lad, a football and the Weltmeisterschaft (Germany's name for the World Cup, which I think has unfortunate overtones of world domination).

Rottweil is also splendidly provincial. To get the finest of panoramas, head uphill to the Hoch Turm (high tower). First, though, call at the tourist office to ask for the key for the gate. I was given it in return for, temporarily, surrendering my passport in the manner of an English hooligan.

From the summit, survey the majestic architecture. Let your eyes explore the hills - handsomely embroidered by human effort.

Then head for the convivial Cafe Schadle for a glass of the robust local wine and relax. For you, Tommy, the tour is over.

- INDEPENDENT