Standing on the corner of Ilmenaustrasse and bei der St. Johanniskirche in Lüneburg, Germany, just doesn’t have the ring of the old Eagles song about Winslow, Arizona, does it? Then again neither does Hotel California remind me of our hotel here in Germany on a foggy morning. I’m not even sure if there is a song that conjures these gray morning blues that accompanies the feeling that we’ll be exploring under potentially overcast skies the entire day. This is such a strange contrast, remembering that there’s always the threat that we’ll not see any blue sky today, it is after all, a frequent European phenomenon compared to the Arizona desert where we can be 99.9% certain that we’ll see some corner of blue sky every single day over the course of a year. But we are here, and it’s the end of winter, and so as we are apt to do, we’ll make the best of it.
It is too early out here for much foot traffic yet, just the way we like it. Watching a city wake up became a passion of mine while visiting Paris for the first time. Back then, I was up early, and our hotel did not include breakfast, so I had to head out in search of a bakery. The boulangeries were still closed, but the people who worked in them had already arrived and were in the process of opening shutters, washing down the sidewalk, or sweeping out their shop. In the quiet of that gray morning between twilight and sunrise, the sounds and smells of an old historic city waking up spoke to my most romantic ideals of being immersed not in a place as much as in the stories of that place’s stories. Who else strode these cobblestones as their minds wandered at the end of a night of thought, or maybe it was just the need for food after an evening of drunken debauchery? As the merriment of celebration closes and the necessities of the day bring people back to their routine, it is in these early morning hours that their echoes sound through the lonely streets and alleyways for me.
No bland glass and generic storefront here. With a blast of color and a story out of the history of trade, this Apotheke (pharmacy) enthusiastically welcomes its customers through this beautiful passage. Where I live in Arizona, this type of brazen nonconformity would never be allowed.
Cobblestones and a bulging wall were not the only things that attracted my attention here. I’m in love with the curves of a street that wasn’t master-planned. Only a building exceeding hundreds of years old could exist where the weight from above has made an exterior wall buckle and bulge. Do you tear that down and make way for bigger and better, or recognize that the historic, when well preserved and cared for, might have greater cultural value? Fortunately for us travelers, there are enough communities outside of North America that recognize the import of allowing the old to continue to act as examples of charm. This is why I must go beyond recognition that is not only a street in the city; it is also the seduction of the historical and wistful meanderings of my imagination being intrigued by possibilities.
Looking for something to eat and not finding it, nor are we finding an open building to dip into yet. We have sliced our way to the far side of the old town and see that we’ll have to walk back towards the main shopping area if we are to have breakfast. We told ourselves that we needed to come back to this church after 9:00 to pay a visit, but that never happened. Once we are back near where we started, we return to a bakery that had originally grabbed our attention for a sweet and yummy something-or-other.
After having read Salt by Mark Kurlansky a couple of years ago, Caroline and I have had a voracious appetite for all things salt. Not necessarily eating it, but the history and culture that surrounds it, and so it seemed obligatory that we would have to visit the Deutsches Salz Museum here in Lüneburg. The museum is not a very big one, though it does still house one of the original industrial-scale fixtures that were used for the harvesting of salt from a local source. More interesting than that, though, is the old history of how salt was collected and its importance to the region. With fires raging under metal pans in a cramped, hot, and humid workplace, those who tended the evaporation pans worked nearly naked or in loose-fitting linens in order to remain cool enough to endure the harsh working conditions. Places like this that produced salt were essential to society as humans must have salt in their diet. As such, the salt works were protected and considered an essential industry, which afforded them a kind of status that was more typically only offered to the clergy. Sadly, as salt is no longer produced here, we were not able to bring a sample back home. Today, salt is produced by exploited young women working in factories in China that also build iPads.
Wasserturm Lüneburg, known in English as the Lüneburg water tower, was built by Chinese slave labor 950 years before Christ and is the oldest known water tower on Earth. Seriously though, salt is not produced by exploited women, nor was this tower erected by slave labor. The tower from 1905 does offer the best view of the city as next to the churches it is the highest building in Lüneburg. An elevator makes for an easy climb to the viewing platform, while a set of stairs will carry us down and through the old 18,000 cubic foot (500 cubic meters) water tank.
Oh, what a beautiful view. The sun and sky are starting to smile upon us, while in the distance, the gray of the early day is moving away. We must have lingered up here for close to a half-hour before starting the hike down. Inside the water tower, the sight of the massive tank is impressive and works to shrink us “Alice in Wonderland” style as we become smaller, entering this rabbit hole. An exit was cut near the bottom of the tank, and that’s where we met up with the rest of the stairs that brought us back to ground level.
Around the corner is the Church of John the Baptist (St. Johanniskirche). We’ll spend some time here admiring the details of the oldest Lutheran church in Lüneburg. This also brings me to the reason we are in Lüneburg anyway. This was one of the cities besides Magdeburg, Hanover, and Frankfurt that my mother-in-law Jutta lived in. She’s spoken of her time here often and seemed impressed by the city, so it was our time to visit and be able to share with her our impressions. We also thought it would be nice to surprise her when we got back to Frankfurt by showing her the photos of where our road trip took us.
A little Wiki search tells me that the church was built between 1300 and 1370 at a height of 108 meters (about 324 feet). The organ was finished in 1553 and is said to have been practiced on by a young Johann Sebastian Bach under the guidance of Georg Böhm while Bach was in residency at the nearby St. Michaeliskirche. It’s another unfortunate day that while we are here, there will be no music flowing from the pipes of another multi-hundred-year-old church organ. Reminder for the bucket list: visit old churches on days the organ is in use.
The clock is being watched; we still have to drive back to Frankfurt today. The weather has been cooperating in making this a beautiful day to be anywhere that is as pretty as this. If only we could hang out a few more days, really wander every street, and learn about the history of each and every house of interest, but that isn’t part of this trip. We’ll have to be happy to leave with these memories and photos until maybe one day we are spending six months back here in Germany with the intention of indulging our interest in history. One day.
Earlier in the day, we walked by the Rathaus (City Hall), and I did, in fact, photograph it then. With the sun out, along with some cars and people in the view, I had to return for a photo. Nearly a scary phenomenon is occurring here in Lüneburg, the city is sinking. That salt museum I told you we visited, well, too much salt was mined from under the city; that was built on a salt dome. While we didn’t visit St. Michaeliskirche, it is a good place to see the effects of the subsidence where the columns and the west wing of the nave are sloping. We grab a bite from a little bratwurst shack on the plaza here at City Hall and start our walk back to the car.
From gray to fantastic, that’s the way we like to spend a day. Instead of taking the most direct route to our parking spot, we revisit some of the paths we walked earlier for the sake of seeing them in this now-perfect light. We are standing under the Alte Kran (Old Crane), built back in 1797, one of the landmarks of Lüneburg. In front of us is the Ilmenau River, and beyond that is the old town, with all of those restaurants asking us to come back and have a seat by the river to enjoy a lazy meal and soak up the history, atmosphere, and sun that has made this a perfect day.