Bach – Unravel Travel

Brandenburg and Magdeburg

I made my way from Berlin to Hannover stopping at the four cities strung along the old railway line (the modern high-speed trains run further to the north) – Potsdam, Brandenburg, Magdeburg and Braunschweig. The last (aka Brunswick) was in West Germany, but the others were in the DDR and still had a rather communist feel when I made flying visits in 1995 – and there are still traces of that today, though I don’t find it as quaint as I used to. They’re all relatively small cities that don’t get many foreign visitors, but there’s plenty to see.

Properly, Brandenburg refers to the state which entirely surrounds Berlin and the city’s full and correct name is Brandenburg an der Havel. The Havel river plays an important rôle – the Altstadt (Old Town) on the northwestern bank was a Slav settlement by the tenth century, but in 1157 the Teutonic Albert the Bear settled on the southeast side, in what is now the Neustadt, and became the first margrave of Brandenburg. However the cathedral was built on the Dominsel, to the east, which was independent from the city until 1928. It was a trading city, joining the Hanseatic League (which I wrote about here) in 1315, and later developed into a centre of the metal-bashing industries. Its historic buildings didn’t do too badly in World War II, and having survived the drab communist period, they’ve been well spruced up. Oddly perhaps, none of the great palaces of the rulers of Brandenburg and its successor state, Prussia, are in or near the city of Brandenburg, but I saw a few in Berlin and Potsdam. There are quite a few churches that are worth visiting, particularly some that are on the European Route of Brick Gothic – I recently mentioned Baltic red-brick Gothic in places like Lübeck and Lund.

Before the churches, however, I went to the Altstädtisches Rathaus (Old Town town hall, 1450-68), which is unusual for being a non-religious example of fully-fledged Brick Gothic, with its blind tracery and clocktower. In front is a wooden statue of Roland, one of Charlemagne’s heroic paladins, dating from 1474, which was a symbol of the city’s status as a free city within the Holy Roman Empire and of royal protection from the local nobles (I mentioned a similar one in Bremen). Oddly, there’s a houseleek (Sempervivum) plant growing on his head, something I’m more used to seeing at altitude on alpine hiking trails. Nearby, on the northwestern side of the Altstadt, is a pleasant promenade where the city walls once were, linking the Rathenower Torturm, the oldest surviving gate (1290-1320) and the Plauer Torturm (circa 1400).

The Altstädtisches Rathaus and Roland statue

Nearby, St Gotthardt’s, still the parish church of the Altstadt, was founded in 1131 immediately after the canonisation of St Godehard (bishop of nearby Hildesheim from 1022 to 1038); the cathedral was only founded in 1165 (although there was a mission to the Slavs from 948 to 983). The tower of St Gotthardt’s still stands, but the rest of the church was rebuilt in the fifteenth century in the northern German Brick Gothic style. The original Romanesque cathedral was also largely rebuilt in Brick Gothic style from around 1295 to 1460 (and restored in NeoGothic style in the nineteenth century); it’s a fine building, and there are lots of splendid painted wooden altars and memorials, and a famous Baroque organ, built in 1725 and largely unchanged. Just outside the cathedral close, the St Petri church was built in the early thirteenth century as the Margrave of Brandenburg’s own chapel and was then used as a parish church (although its tower was demolished in 1849).

In the Neustadt, the Katharinenkirche was rebuilt from 1381 to 1427, becoming an impressive example of Brick Gothic architecture – it’s a huge hall church that’s been rebuilt many times and now has an eighteenth-century gallery and a huge organ. On the south edge of the Neustadt, the church of the St Pauli monastery (c.1286) now houses an archeological museum. And I didn’t see this one, but about half a kilometre southwest of the Neustadt is St Jacob’s Chapel, dating from 1320; in 1892 it was in the way of a road-widening scheme and was moved about thirty metres west, and is now used as part of an art college.

Back in the Altstadt, near the bridge, the monastery church of St Johannis, dating from 1246 and rebuilt in 1411, was almost completely destroyed by a British bomb in March 1945 and rebuilt in 2015 (although the west end is obviously missing). Just west of the Altstadt, St Nikolai was the parish church of Luckenberg, a village which was abandoned in 1295; it was built between the 1180s and 1230, with a tower added in 1467, burnt down in 1945 and rebuilt (the brick east end survives from the twelfth century).

There’s a massive change of gear when you cross Neuendorfer Strasse from St Nikolai – house no.89A was the local outpost of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, in 1945-6, and immediately to the east on Nicolaiplatz (yes, they spell it both ways) is the chilling Gedenkort Opfer der Euthanasie-Morde or Memorial Site for the Victims of Euthanasia Murders. The Nazis came to power in 1933 and that same year opened their first concentration camps, including one here; in 1939 this became the Brandenburg Euthanasia Centre where they killed the mentally ill, developing the use of gas chambers that were later scaled up for mass murder at camps such as Auschwitz. Four information pillars stand on the site of the gas chamber and there’s a small museum (closed Mon-Wed, free).

By the river behind the Memorial Site is the Slawendorf, a reconstruction of an eleventh-century Slav village which opens at weekends and which, intriguingly, offers overnight accommodation in a hut (with, I assume, twentieth-first century toilet facilities). Given that Hitler also despised the Slav races, the location is perhaps not inappropriate.

But of course, for many people, Brandenburg means Bach concertos, although there’s no direct link with the city – Christian Ludwig (1677-1734), Margrave of Brandenburg, ran the Prussian court orchestra because his brother, King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia, the ‘Soldier King’, had no time for the arts; he heard Bach playing the harpsichord in Berlin in 1719 and asked him for some music. Johann Sebastian didn’t compose anything new but personally copied out the scores of six concerti grossi and dedicated the collection to the margrave. In fact they were not performed, probably because the orchestra wasn’t up to it, and he was not paid; the scores were only rediscovered in the Brandenburg archives in 1849 and published the following year. Mendelssohn, who was essentially responsible for rescuing Bach from obscurity, didn’t perform them, and then the manuscript was almost lost again in World War II when a train taking them to a safe location was attacked by planes. It was probably the recording by the exiled German violinist Adolph Busch in 1935 that brought them to their present position as some of the greatest (and most popular) musical works.

Magdeburg

Magdeburg is a city I’ve never stayed in overnight, but a couple of times I’ve gone from the station to the Dom (the Lutheran cathedral) and back; it’s still seen as a gritty industrial city that hasn’t changed much since the communist era. The old town is under a kilometre east of the Hauptbahnhof, on the banks of the Elbe river; try to go via the Roman Catholic cathedral in one direction and the Green Citadel in the other. The Catholic cathedral was founded in 1015 as the church of St Sebastian and rebuilt in 1150-70 as a Romanesque basilica (the west end and towers survive) and in the fifteenth century as a Gothic hall church. It was damaged in World War II and has since acquired modern stained glass and a fine pair of bronze doors; there are also some fine painted wooden altars. The Green Citadel was built in 2004-5 to designs by the eccentric Viennese artist/architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser (who died in 2000 on a cruise on the QE2) – it’s a self-consciously wacky block of apartments, shops and a small hotel, wavy-sided and topped with trees and golden balls.

Just north of the Dom, the Church of Our Lady has not changed much since the eleventh century; it’s part of a Romanesque monastery that now houses the state of Saxony-Anhalt’s main museum of contemporary art; unfortunately it was closed for refurbishment but should (Covid-19 permitting) re-open in March 2021.

The Dom itself is the oldest Gothic cathedral in all Germany, the largest in eastern Germany and, with one steeple just over 100 metres in height (and one just below 100 metres) one of the tallest in eastern Germany. Construction began in 1209 and was completed in 1520 – just a few years before it was taken over by the Lutherans. It’s the burial place of Otto the Great (the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I 962-973) and his wife Edith, Alfred the Great’s grand-daughter (and isotopic analysis of her bones has proved that she grew up in Wessex).

The cathedral was sacked during the Thirty Years War, and the stained-glass windows were destroyed; it was not too heavily damaged in World War II, except that the replacement windows were also destroyed. There are many fine memorials to local worthies and other valuable sculptures, as well as the Magdeburger Ehrenmal (Magdeburg Cenotaph) by Ernst Barlach (1929), an obviously anti-war war memorial that was controversial when it was installed and was removed during the Nazi period. Running south from the cathedral, Hegelstrasse is lined with grand buildings built between 1880 and 1914, with ornate stucco façades that are worth a glance.

Lübeck – the Hanse, Brick Gothic and Bach

Having spent a few weeks in the Hanseatic ports of Bremen and Hamburg and then on the Danish and Swedish sides of the Øresund and Kattegat, the funnel through which trade between the Baltic and the North Sea has to pass, it was good to get to Lübeck, the closest thing to a capital of the Hanseatic League, and to learn about its history. I wasn’t actually aware of the European Hanse Museum, which opened in 2015, and I’d also forgotten just how lovely the town is and how much more there is to see here – one night was not enough and I shall certainly have to return.

Actually getting in to the museum is quite complicated, even without Covid-19, with their over-reliance on QR codes, a touch pen and earphones, and entries every two minutes via an automated lift – although this was a response to the medieval stonework discovered during construction of the museum, and not part of the original scheme. Once through the first rather dark spaces, there’s an excellent museum that makes good use of the technology to allow you to see lots of added information if you want. Merchants from these towns on the south side of the Baltic began trading from the twelfth century, roving as far as Italy, Malta and Crete, and then eastwards to Novgorod in Russia; from the fourteenth century they were known as the Hanse, with over a hundred towns linked by their use of the Low (Middle) German language, centred on Lübeck. It was also Lübeck’s measures that became standard. By the sixteenth century they’d established kantors or collective trading posts in Novgorod, Bruges, London and Bergen, with smaller ones in Boston, Lynn, Bourgneuf-en-Retz, La Rochelle, Pskov and Kaunas.

The museum has interactive reproductions of trading posts, and focusses particularly on Novgorod, which was immensely important because of the fur trade and also its access to the Silk Route; the trade had been opened up by merchants from the island of Gotland, but from the early fourteenth century it had been taken over by the Hanseatic towns (there’s also good coverage of the developments in shipbuilding that allowed this). Convoys left twice a year from Visby (in Gotland), having elected a leader, and transferred their goods to local lighters for the river passage to Novgorord. The merchants spent either the summer or the winter there (the river being frozen from October to April), bartering cloth, silverware, weapons and other metal products for furs, wax and honey; the kuna or marten pelt was the notional unit of exchange. (The kuna is still the unit of currency of Croatia, as this was on another fur trading route.) Meanwhile the Hudson’s Bay Company was using the ‘Made Beaver’ (dried for a year) as its unit of exchange, so this was quite familiar to a Canadian.

A less exotic but equally profitable trade was in salt to Skåne (Scania, the southern region of what is now Sweden), exchanged for herrings which were in great demand across Europe for Catholic fast days. I’d come across reminders of the herring trade in Denmark and Malmö over the previous couple of weeks. There’s also a room on Bruges, which was the exchange point for spices and exotic fruits coming by ship from the Mediterranean (we think of Bruges as an inland town now, but it was a major port at the time). And there’s coverage of the history of Lübeck itself, and of the museum site – when you finish in the modern museum, you can go up behind to the remains of the Castle Friary, built on the site of what may have originally been a Slav fortress in the eighth century and then a Dominican friary and almshouse from 1227. It was converted to law courts in 1894, and on the lower level you’ll also see the early fourteenth-century chapter house and infirmary (which had underfloor heating, impressively enough).

The old town of Lübeck, famed for the finest Brick Gothic architecture in Germany, is a World Heritage Site; however much of it was destroyed in World War II (the raid of March 1942 was the RAF’s first major success in attacking Germany) and very carefully rebuilt afterwards. The area of the Market Square in particular was heavily damaged and there are now modern buildings on three sides and the superb Rathaus (City Hall) complex on the fourth side; dating from 1230-40, it was expanded in the next two centuries and in the sixteenth century the wooden oriel window and the external stairs were added, along with the splendid Kriegstubenbau or War Office. To the north, the long thin Chancellery extends all the way to Mengstrasse (where the gable façade was added in 1791), past the Marienkirche or church of St Mary, the city’s largest and most dominant although not its cathedral. Built between 1251 and 1350, it was the first church in the Hanse area in the Brick Gothic style and was much copied (for instance in Lund). However none of the copies matched the height of the Marienkirche’s nave, the world’s highest brick vault at 38.5 metres.

The great organ was built in 1518, destroyed in 1942 and replaced in 1968; Dietrich Buxtehude, who was the organist here for 39 years (and is buried here), was famed as one of Germany’s leading composers. Budding composers such as Telemann and Handel visited him here, and in October 1705 the twenty-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach walked almost 400km from Arnstadt to Lübeck to hear Buxtehude, then 68 years old, play. He took a month’s leave but stayed for three (by the time he’d walked home it was almost four), playing the organ, studying and copying scores – a hugely important experience for him. In 2017 the writer Horatio Clare recreated Bach’s epic walk, producing a wonderfully evocative series of soundscapes for BBC Radio 3, which alas are not currently available online (I’ll see what can be done about that) – but you can read his article in the Guardian, which focuses on the Brocken, the highest point of the Harz Mountains, which I visited a few days after leaving Lübeck, but which I’m sure Bach would have managed to avoid. There’s little doubt that from Lüneburg he would have followed the Old Salt Road to Lübeck, which ties in nicely with the Hanseatic League and the Danish/Swedish herring trade.

The World Heritage site’s Koberg zone, centred on the Jakobikirche (Church of St James) and Heiligen-Geist-Hospital (Holy Ghost Hospital), just north of the Marienkirche, also protects the whole of the eastern half of the old city, with street upon street of beautiful eighteenth-century houses. Three of these now house the Buddenbrooks House Literary Museum, the Günter Grass-House, and the Willy-Brandt-House. The first is dedicated to the writers Thomas and Heinrich Mann, born here, the second to the writer Günter Grass, who was not born here but lived much of his life here, and the third to the politician Willy Brandt, born here as Herbert Frahm; the Brandt Museum is free, the others not too pricey (and likewise the Marienkirche). It’s pretty astonishing for a fairly small city to have produced three Nobel Prize winners. The Buddenbrooks House is closed for a major refurb until 2023, but there are temporary displays at the Behnhaus (Königstrasse 9) and the Infocenter (Am Markt 15).

The Jakobikirche, consecrated in 1334, was not too badly damaged in World War II, and its organ (dating from 1467/1637) is one of the few in the world with most of its original Gothic and Renaissance pipework – it popped up on Radio 3 just the other day. The Heiligen Geist Hospital, dating from 1260-86, is a fine red-brick structure with beautiful murals – it’s well worth popping in to the main hall (free) even if you don’t want the full tour. Not far south is the Museumskirche St Katherinen (Museum Church of St Catherine), built around 1300 in Brick Gothic style (of course) and now an art museum housing modern sculptures as well as paintings by Tintoretto (The Raising of Lazarus, 1576) and Sir Godfrey Kneller, generally thought of as an English court painter but in fact born Gottfried Kniller in Lübeck in 1646. The two-storey choir and fourteenth-century stalls are worth a look, and on the façade are figures by Ernst Barlach (1930-33) and Gerhard Marcks (1947-48).

Further south, just beyond the relatively small red-brick Aegidienkirche (church of St Giles), is the St. Anne’s Museum Quarter, formed in 2013 with the merging of a cultural history museum and an art gallery (in the late-Gothic St Anne’s Priory, built in 1502-15), along with a new children’s museum and a café (how they love their museum cafés in northern Europe!).

The third of the World Heritage site’s zones covers the southwestern corner of the old city, from the Petrikirche (church of St Peter) to the Dom (cathedral) to the south; it also includes the Holstentor, the city’s iconic fifteenth-century gate, to the west of the city moat. The largely Gothic Petrikirche was virtually destroyed during World War II then reconstructed, with a lift added to reach the city’s best viewpoint. The Lutheran cathedral was founded in 1173, consecrated in 1247, and more or less completed in 1341 when the Gothic choir was finished; it’s big and fairly bare, but there are quite a few folding altarpieces on display, although the most famous, by Hans Memling, is now in the St. Anne’s Museum. The Paradise porch (1241-59), on the exterior of the north nave, is a wonderful display of medieval stone carving.

What else?

Marzipan is said to have been invented in Lübeck, although in reality it was just an improvement of an existing (possibly Turkish) product – almonds don’t actually grow anywhere near Lübeck, but the Hanseatic merchants were a reliable source. Lübeck marzipan still contains more almonds and less sugar than is normal elsewhere, and one of the leading manufacturers has a free museum and a café.

There was some interesting news coverage recently in Britain about Anja Thauer, born in Lübeck in 1945, who was a sort of German parallel to Jacqueline du Pré, two exciting young cellists who studied together at the Paris Conservatoire, and whose careers both ended tragically in October 1973, when de Pré was diagnosed with MS and Thauer committed suicide after an affair with a married man was broken off. Now her recordings are being rediscovered, and changing hands for considerable sums – the evidence seems to be that she was good, but not as good, or as exciting, as du Pré.