Day 16: Lübeck

Well, actually we are still in Hamburg for one more night, but we spent the day in Lübeck. After mailing a box of classroom materials and souvenirs that we have been gathering to our house in VT, we headed to Lübeck - just about a 45 minute train ride but a few hundred years back in time. As we left the train station and crossed the river to head into town we were greeted by the same gate that has been greeting visitors from the west for the past 500 years. Though the rest of the city ramparts are long gone, the massive gatehouse with walls 3 meters thick is still an imposing structure. Each metal post of the portcullis is larger than a human head. Alongside the gate house is a set of brick buildings formerly used for storing salt - one of the key trade goods that put Lübeck on the map. Given its fortunate location it has been a major trading post on and off for 800 years. The gatehouse has an excellent museum that made learning about the Hanseatic League interesting.

Further into town, we stopped in to see the Marienkirche which had originally been built in the 1200s but got its current look around 1350. Unfortunately the outside was being renovated and was mostly covered in scaffolding. The interior was astounding. The vaulted ceiling is over 120ft high - and it's made of brick! The lighting and the white paint combine to give the ceiling a sense of weightlessness. The design of the church with large arches and flying buttresses is truly amazing. It was the first of its kind in northern Germany and though it has often been imitated it remains the prototype for brick gothic architecture. The church was damaged badly during the bombing raids of WWII. It has been fully restored since. The only signs of WWII are an iron cross made of nails from the church in Coventry and two cracked bells, half buried in the church floor. The church in Coventry seems to have sent these small crosses to a number of German cities that experienced heavy bomb damage during WWII. The bells of one of the spires have been left half-buried in the church floor where they came to rest after falling from the collapsed and burned out spire during the bombing. There is a small memorial to the dead soldiers of WWI and WWII on the outside of the church. It helps to answer the question of how does a people remember its part in a widely condemned war. Also interesting are the monuments to Bismarck and Wilhelm I at the entrance to the city. It seems that the city is happy to have been delivered from Denmark as part of the wars of German unification.