What Monastery Retreats Have in Common
However different the individual houses are, a handful of things run through almost every monastery retreat and shape the character of this category.
Silence is the key ingredient. It is not staged, it is part of the house. Long corridors, inner courtyards, a church where nobody speaks, a refectory where someone reads aloud during the meal or where the table is simply quiet, and a garden where you can sit alone for an hour without anyone disturbing you. A clearly structured day, often with canonical hours as the anchor, gives the stay its shape. You do not have to decide yourself when to eat, when the day starts or when a quiet hour would be sensible.
The monastery kitchen is simple, often regional and usually held to a high standard of craft, especially in houses that keep their own garden or farm. You get bread, soup, vegetables, a warm meal at noon, a tea in the afternoon. It is not the spectacular that does the work, it is the repetition. Then there are the walls: buildings centuries old, with proportions from a time when rooms still had their own resonance. Just walking into a Romanesque cloister changes the way you breathe.
Geographically you find monasteries in many micro-regions of Germany. Steinfeld Monastery in the Eifel, Nikolaus Monastery on the Lower Rhine, Gerleve Monastery in the Münsterland, Königsmünster Abbey in the Sauerland and St. Ottilien Abbey south-west of Munich are among the better-known addresses. To these add houses in the Odenwald, in the Allgäu, in the Bavarian foothills of the Alps, and a few in Austria. Which region suits you best depends less on the postcode than on the character of the particular house and on the kind of silence you are looking for.