April 5 - Luebeck

After breakfast we left for our planned visit to Luebeck but first made a detour to Bergedorf so that Monika and Lois could get some Euros. We were surprised when the bank wouldn’t cash Lois’s travelers checks, but Monika managed to get some money so we were OK for the day. As we took the interstate northeast to Luebeck road conditions were good and traffic was light so the intercity drive took only about an hour. Once there we worked our way downtown to a parking lot near the Holstentor (Holsten Gate) and prepared to walk around the city. Curiously, altho this city is fairly close to Hamburg, Monika had never visited it so this was all new to her as well as us. We walked the block to the Holsten Gate, a massive brick defensive structure dating to 1622 when Luebeck was a walled city. The old part of Luebeck lies on what is essentially an island in the middle of two arms of a river—the new harbor lies somewhat downstream from the old city as the river winds its way to the Baltic Sea.

From the Holsten Gate we crossed the river on a bridge and continued down the Holstenstrasse for a block before turning off to the Petrikirche (St. Peter’s church). We found that it had been converted to an art museum and, like almost all German museums, it was closed on Mondays so we continued on our way to Schuesselbuden street where we turned left to the old Rathaus. The Rathaus was, of course, smaller than the Hamburg version but I was surprised that the ground floor seemed to be all arches, no real building. Lois wondered if that was to leave room for merchants’ stalls underneath, and I certainly did not have any better ideas.

Right around the corner from the Rathaus was the Marienkirche. On the outside was a statue of a devil and the story was, that the devil was helping to build the church because he thought it was going to be a wine bar. When he found out it was going to be a church he lifted up a large stone to destroy what had been done. So the people promised to build a wine bar across from the church and he dropped the stone and sat on it. And indeed the “Rathskeller – a restaurant under the Rathshaus, that of course offers wine – is right across the street.

The Marienkirche is a very pretty gothic church with great stained glass windows and a beautiful example of an astronomical clock in all its glory. Monika said this was the church where in 1705 J.S.Bach came to listen to Dietrich Buxtehude because DB was the most renowned organist of his day. Lois had read that he walked 200 miles, which is quite a trek in any day or age. The church had posted a memorial plaque (and sold post cards!) about that event.

The church had a big pipe organ over to one side and a massive organ at the rear of the church, but we weren’t sure whether this was the organ that Buxtehude played or not because the church was bombed out in 1942. One room off the nave was a war memorial that contained the remains of bells that fell from the towers that night. It was a very moving experience to look at the smashed bells and contemplate the immense and often senseless destruction that occurs in any all-out war. An adjacent room had a set of pictures of the church before and right after the bombing, and those pictures graphically illustrated the extent of the destruction. The entire roof of the church was destroyed, the bell towers burned out, and the interior gutted. There are so many memorials to WWII destruction all over Germany that it is easy to see why their basic German political instinct is an anti-war stance.

We looped back to the Breite Strasse (Broad Street) past an antique store, where Monika found a doll she named Louisa Luebeck and I found five cheap (1 Euro!) German books including Jurassic Park for my “Easy German Reading” library. We also passed the Budenbrooks House, a beautiful pristine white building with a lot of Baroque ornamentation. Apparently the house inspired Thomas Mann in the 1920s to write about three generations of a German merchant family in Luebeck during the 1800s that he named the Budenbrooks. We had heard excerpts from that book (two volumes, really) read along with music during the concert at Reinbek Palace and Mann’s narrations were somewhat like a wordy poem—very leisurely and ornate (think Dickens). The house was a period museum, but I hadn’t read the book and it turned out that none of us including Monika (who had read the book in High School) was interested in climbing the stairs to see the house, so we moseyed on.

The Breite Strasse (Broad street) is in the main part of the old city and lined with old, ornate buildings. But the Karstatdt chain had one new department store there, and that’s where we stopped for lunch after a cloudburst dropped some rain and sleet on us. I suppose it was just trying to remind me that despite the really nice sunny week we had just enjoyed, it was Still Winter and not yet Road Construction. I grabbed a table while Monika filled a plate from the lunch buffet, and guess what, it was a designated Non-Smoking table! Wow! The non-smoking section was around a small play area for children, which seemed to be the de facto family section, and that may be the reason why Karstadt made it non-smoking. But maybe, just maybe, Germany will slowly edge into being an anti-smoking culture like the U.S. and this was just the first step in that direction—one can only hope. Of course then the German old-age pension system would have more retirees and be in even worse financial shape than it is now—the same curious things could happen as were rumored to occur in the U.S. when Congress discussed banning cigarettes. The apocryphal story is that a representative from the Social Security Administration opposed the measure because that would make too many people live longer and lead to a much earlier bankruptcy for the SSA.

Fortunately it had stopped raining by the time we finished Mittagsessen and we continued down Breite Strasse past an old hospital, the house of the seamen guild and the Jacobikirche (Jacob Church) to Burgtor (Castle Gate). We had intended to walk back along the river on the southern border of the central island, but the buildings in the old town were so pretty that we decided to take a different route back thru it to the Koenigstrasse. Rain was spattering at us a bit as we were on the final leg toward the Holstentor when I spotted the sign for the Theaterfiguren Museum (Marionette Museum) and we decided to at least take a look.

I talked Monika and Lois into joining me in seeing all the exhibits (3 Euro each), and we worked our way first downstairs and then upstairs thru four floors of exhibits, far more than I had really expected. The puppets and marionettes were in perfect condition and had labels explaining the country of origin and role each one was used for. These labels were only in German, but Monika and I translated for Lois as we traipsed thru the truly eclectic, if not eccentric, collection.

The exhibits covered marionettes and puppets of all types of western and non-western cultures, so our visit gave us some really great insights into an interesting aspect of world cultures. The European tradition was well represented with sets of marionettes from England (Punch and Judy), Germanny (Kasperle), and France. These were the typical puppets operated from above the stage with wires attached to sticks. The story for the origin of the French set of puppets was that a man who had lost his job turned to carving puppets and putting on shows as a way to earn some spare change. It obviously worked out and he turned to puppetry for a living. Many of the German puppets were from the family Schichl, which had 4 generations of puppeteers, some of whom were featured in a short film up on the fourth floor.

The traditions in Asia seemed to go back at least a century further than in Europe (maybe much farther!) and the clothing on some of these puppets was absolutely gorgeous—brightly colored embroidered silk with decorations like sequins. The technique was a little different for the Chinese marionettes because the puppeteer could be on one side of the stage swathed completely in black to blend into the background. One wall case had a complete set of figures from southeast Asia representing a queen, a princess, a prince, an alchemist, and a couple of royal advisers if I understood it correctly. They even had a large elephant puppet with hinged legs and a jointed trunk.

Some of the Asian puppets, however, were completely different than the European ones, in particular the shadow puppets. These puppets are 2-dimensional paper cutouts that were shown against a back-lit screen and moved by puppeteers also standing behind the screen. When pressed against the screen the light would pass thru the cutout and show clearly on the screen to the audience on the other side. Shadow puppets from China, India, and Indonesia were shown—some were painted and others were carved in very intricate patterns. The movie told us that the Indian shadow puppets were made from very thin goatskin that was flattened, carved, and painted to make the form. We were all quite impressed with the quality and detail of all these puppets, and I would strongly recommend other folks visiting Luebeck to stop by this museum for a couple of hours—the wide selection is fantastic.

From the museum it was a hop, skip, and jump back across the river to our car. Getting out of Luebeck was fairly easy, given it was a rush hour, and we started home on the autobahn thru occasional heavy showers. Right off the bat we hit a backup for a serious 2-car accident. Driving at the unlimited autobahn speeds, the accidents can be really spectacular in Germany and these two cars were severely damaged, but fortunately no one seemed to be hurt. We worked our way around using the rightmost lane and shoulder, but about ¼ mile further on we came to a car that had once been a top-of-the-line Porsche, but was now an A-1 hunk of scrap metal. The driver was out and talking on his cell phone, thank goodness, but god almighty was that car crushed in front, in back, and on the right side. The car was sitting all alone in the left lane, but glass and plastic pieces were scattered all over two lanes for a couple of hundred feet. Since clearly no other cars were involved in this accident, the only clue I had was that there were occasional puddles of standing water in the left lane at that point. All I can figure was that the Porsche driver was booming along at 200+ in the left lane, hit the puddle and aquaplaned, spun into the guard rail with the front end and then kind of spun along the guard rail smashing in the right and back sides. This was a bit disconcerting to me, but the German drivers were not apparently discomfited and resumed their normal high-speed patterns as soon as they had passed the accident scene.

In any event we made it home safely and had a nice Abendessen before settling in for some writing, crosswords, and television. One rather disturbing report was on the activities of Taliban adherents in the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The video clips demonstrated that they were armed and hoping for a comeback if any chance presented itself, and meanwhile carrying out guerrilla warfare in the border areas. More disturbingly, the reporters visited a Islamic school in Pakistan devoted to teaching the kids the Koran together with hatred of the U.S. The head teacher had all these 6-8 year old boys kneeling on their prayer mats, and when one boy didn’t do something right he whipped him with what looked like a rubber hose. The young boy was sobbing and shaking but stayed cowering on his little prayer mat trying to get it right, I guess. The boy certainly was getting an education in cruelty along with the fanatical version of Islam purveyed by the Taliban, but he is the next generation of terrorists. And to think that much of this is supported by money from our friends the Saudis. Perhaps it is simply the case that oil, like politics, makes for strange bedfellows.