The day after we visited Stralsund we toured the city of Lübeck, located in the German state of Schleswig-Holstein.
For a couple of hundred years, Lübeck was known as the “Queen” of the Hanseatic League, a powerful group of merchant guilds from 200 different cities. Its medieval center is now a UNESCO site known for its Brick Gothic architecture, just as Stralsund is.
Lübeck is one of those thoughtful cities that has a free audioguide you can download onto your phone, so we used that while we were touring around.
Our first stop is probably the most famous sight in Lübeck, the Holsten Gate.
It was originally a defensive gate built in the 15th century and its walls are over 11 feet thick. The Latin inscription above the arch translates to “Harmony within, peace without”. The gate was almost demolished in 1855 to make room for the railway, but one senate vote kept that from happening. Today there is a museum inside of the gate where you can learn more about both Lübeck and the Hanseatic League.
And yes, the gate really does lean thanks to the marshy ground. It’s leaned pretty much since it was built.
The buildings you see here are former salt warehouses on the Trave river.
The salt warehouses used to be “herring buildings” that were owned by the city and they were used to store, of course, herring. The buildings were bought by salt merchants in the 16th century. The salt was shipped to Scandinavia, Russia and other Baltic states and traded for furs and fish oil.
Like Stralsund, the most impressive Brick Gothic buildings in Lübeck are its churches.
The first church we stopped at was St. Peter’s, where for a small fee you can take an elevator to the top of the tower for some great views.
There you can see both the other side of the Holsten Gate as well as the salt warehouses that you just read about.
The brick church of St. Peter’s was built in the 15th century but was sadly burned to the ground in 1942 during a World War II bombing raid. It was completely rebuilt and it reopened in 1987, not for religious purposes but to host concerts, art exhibitions and other events.
Even though we hadn’t been walking around for long at this point, we decided to stop at the landmark Café Niederegger.
I had the Tipple of the Day, an Eiskaffee.
An Eiskaffee is not just an iced coffee. It has actual ice cream in it and it’s delicious.
Sean had some of the marzipan cake for which the café is famous.
There are two Café Niederegger locations right across the street from each other. We sat outside the smaller location on the market square and went to the bigger location afterwards.
On the top floor of the bigger location is a marzipan museum. All the figures you see there are made of marzipan. The guy in the top hat is Johann Georg Niederegger, the founder of the café, and that’s Santa Claus next to him.
Here’s the entrance to the smaller café.
It’s in the old town hall building, whose Renaissance staircase you can see over the entryway. You might be able to see that the bricks of the town hall are both red and black, which gave it quite a striking appearance.
Just around the corner from the town hall is St. Mary’s church, modeled after the gothic cathedrals in Paris.
In the Stralsund blog I mentioned the incredible height of the nave in a church there, also called St. Mary’s.
The nave of the St. Mary’s in Lübeck is even higher.
It ranks among the 20 highest church naves in the entire world, and is the highest brick vault in the world.
The Memorial Chapel shows some of the damage the church sustained during a World War II air strike.
When the roof collapsed, these two church bells – weighing over a ton each – fell and became embedded in the stone floor.
Listening to the audio guide outside the church, we learned that the St. Mary’s organ is the largest mechanical organ in the world. We were standing in front of this sculpture while listening.
Sean made a comment about that being the smallest organ in the world so he, of course, is going to straight to hell. So sad. And as if that wasn’t bad enough, he said he wondered why this altar piece had a member of ZZ Top depicted in it.
Anyway, the reason there’s a devil statue outside the church is because when it was being built, the devil for some reason thought it was going to be a wine bar. Thinking he would take over some more souls from the people patronizing the wine bar, he started helping out with the construction. When he realized that it was actually going to be a church, he picked up a boulder to smash one of the walls. As he was flying through the air, someone yelled at him to stop and assured him that a wine bar would in fact be built. The devil dropped the boulder, and the wine bar was built in the cellar of the town hall.
Oh, and Sean may or may not have taken a photo of me holding the devil’s organ.
The house seen here has an association with the Nobel Prize-winning author Thomas Mann.
It’s called Buddenbrook house after his novel Buddenbrooks. His grandparents lived in the house and its garden was adjacent to the garden of the house where Mann grew up. The book describes a house just like that one, which is now a museum.
Next up was a visit to St. Jacob’s, called St. James’ in English, a church for sailors since the middle ages. There is a lifeboat in the church that was salvaged after the training ship Pamir sank in the Atlantic in 1957.
Of the 86 crew members on board, only 6 survived. A sign near the boat (the guy in the photo is reading it) gives the history of what happened and explains that one of the men was rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard Cutter Absecon. You may remember from the Stralsund blog that Sean is retired from the U.S. Coast Guard (USCG), and also that we had seen a ship in Stralsund that is a sister ship to one owned by the USCG. It was just kind of weird to run across two references to the USCG on two consecutive days in two different cities in Germany.
Our next stop was the Hospital of the Holy Spirit (yes, we saw one of those in Stralsund too), built in the 13th century to provide care for the sick, elderly and poor.
I didn’t even notice this until I was looking at my photos, but on the right-hand side you can se a hand sticking out of the wall holding a candelabrum.
Parts of the hospital are still used today as residential and nursing facilities for the elderly.
I would love to go back at Christmastime because there is an artisan Christmas market inside the hospital every year.
This museum is called the Willy Brandt House.
Willy Brandt was chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1969 to 1974. He was born in Lübeck and later won the Nobel Peace Prize. He never actually lived in that house; it’s just where the museum is located. The house was offered up by the city of Lübeck because it needed extensive renovations. The German Federal government paid 2.8 million Euro, over 70% of the total cost, to renovate it.
Three people from Lübeck have won Nobel prizes – Will Brandt, Thomas Mann whom you read about earlier, and Günter Grass.
Like Thomas Mann, Günter Grass won the Nobel Prize for Literature. And like Willi Brandt, he has a museum dedicated to him in Lübeck called the Günter Grass House, but he never lived there. As of this writing he is still alive at 86 years of age.
Part of the museum is the Fuchtings Yard.
It was originally a monastic yard that was created to provide housing for the poor, particularly merchant’s widows. The houses you see there are still today rented at low rates to female pensioners.
We ran across this spray-painted message on our walk.
I was wondering if “Rascism” is a misspelling or if it’s some new form of intolerance that’s a cross between racism and fascism?
Our last stop on the walking tour was the Lübeck Cathedral.
As with all the other churches we’d seen so far on the trip, the interior was exquisite.
That crucifix dates from the year 1477. It always amazes me to see works like this that are over 500 years old just hanging out in the open for everyone to appreciate.
On our stroll back to the hotel we enjoyed some nice scenery.
That evening was when France and Germany faced each other in a World Cup game, so we watched the game at the hotel bar and rooted for Germany, who won.
Not a bad way to celebrate the 4th of July!
