Well, I've reached the end of another week in Lüneburg, and at the same time the end of my first German Class. Intermediate German I ended today with a final exam, after covering a semester's material in about a month. It's a pretty steep learning curve, but living in the language helps a lot.
This summer, the Lüneburger Orgelsommer (Lüneburg's Organ Summer), has featured weekly organ concerts rotating among the three churches here. On Tuesday, I went to the organ and trumpet concert in St. Johannis. Entrance was free with my student ID, but I would have gladly paid to hear such wonderful performance. The concert featured David Staff on four (!) different kinds of trumpets, and Ryoko Morooka on both (!) of the organs at St. Johannis.
Yes, I heard both of those organs, playing Bach, in that church. It was amazing. Mr. Staff played the first piece on a "natural trumpet," the valveless trumpet for which composers like Handel (whose work he played) originally wrote. He played two versions of the modern trumpet, each with four valves, and also the zint (German for "cornett," and yes that is spelled correctly). The zint is an instrument made from an animal's horn covered in leather. It has six finger holes on top and a thumb hole on the back, much like a modern recorder. It is played, however, like a trumpet, with a similarly-styled, smaller mouthpiece. Effectively a mix between a trumpet and flute, the zint's sound matches its construction. It has the sharp, almost metallic quality of a trumpet as well as the airy, feathery sound of a flute. It has been described as the single instrument that sounds most-similar to the human voice. The zint was especially popular among Italian composers in the 16th Century. (For more information: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornett)
Next week, the final concert of the Orgelsommer begins at St. Johannis, but wanders through the town to the other two churches before it ends. That is definitely among the best ways I know to spend a Tuesday evening.
Wednesday afternoon I joined the German-Speaking Europe and Its Culture class for their guided tour of Lüneburg. The tour began at the Deutsches Salzmuseum (German Salt Museum), which chronicles the history of Lüneburg's salt production. Salt literally put Lüneburg on the map (the town was built around the developing salt works), and the wealth obtained from the salt trade gave Lüneburg its beautiful architecture which is still around today. The tour of the museum included a taste of Lüneburg's groundwater (26% salt), many scale models of past salt works, and a souvenir stamp of Lüneburg salt works' seal. There was even a diorama of Lot's wife as a pillar of salt, and a description of the Bible's references to salt.
In medieval time, salt was incredibly valuable and thus expensive (called the "white gold" because it was traded equally with gold, gram for gram) because it was the only available food preservative. Lüneburg profited immensely from producing salt as the exclusive salt provider to the Baltic Sea (thanks to Henry the Lion and the Hanseatic League). Following the Thirty Years' War and the collapse of the Hanseatic League, cheaper salt from the Mediterranean finally entered the Baltic trade routes, and outsold Lüneburg salt (though sometimes stealing Lüneburg's seal to sell cheaply-made Mediterranean salt at high Lüneburg prices). The Luneburg salt works remained through the 1970s, having undergone many technological upgrades since the 900s. When the oil crisis made production far from profitable, they closed. Much like Keweenaw copper, salt still remains underneath Lüneburg, but it is too expense to retrieve. Only the building housing the Deustches Salzmuseum (as well as a grocery store) still remains; the rest were razed when a Belgian "architect/city planner" scammed Lüneburg out of a large sum of money and a significant part of their constructed history.
Our tour then proceeded through the "sinking" part of town. Because of the salt works, and the many subterranean gypsum caverns, many of the houses in the oldest part of Lüneburg have sunk meters into the ground. For many of the houses, no restorative work was done, because that part of the city was home to the less-fortunate. Some houses, thought, like the one pictured above, did receive care. The left side shows how the building was restored in the 1950s; the right, how it appeared when it was originally built. The curious door to the attic is the crane house. Because basements were sinking and very often very damp, any goods or possessions requiring long-term dry storage were hoisted to the top of the house and kept there, out of the moisture.
We visited the Rathaus (city hall) courtyard next, a small garden nestled among the Rathaus complex. Built over centuries, the Rathaus is a labyrinth of hallways and doors that are not entirely interconnected. One must carefully consider his destination before choosing among its multiple entrances. Every aspect of the Rathaus is wrapped up in salt production. The money to build such a magnificent building came from the salt trade. The city council who presided inside were Sülfmeisters, wealthy landowners who had the exclusive rights of producing their own salt and voting. Political positions in Lüneburg were largely hereditary (passed down through generations as though willed to descendants), and many political decisions were passed (or not) based on familial relations.
Another prevalent feature of Lüneburg's architectural history is "rope stone," pictured above. The builders of Lüneburg (claim to have) invented this style, intended to tell all visitors that this was a harbor town. Lüneburg was a large city, but had a small harbor, and so was laughed at by cities like Hamburg and Lübeck (fellow Hanseatic cities with large shipping ports). Whether or not rope stone originated here, it soon spread throughout the Hanseatic League and northern Europe as a symbol of sea-faring trade.
Lüneburg's old harbor is now the Wasserviertel (water district), where I live. The Hotel Bergstrom, just down the street, until recently was the town mill, and still retains the dam and bridges. The German TV serial "Rote Rosen" (Red Roses) is set in Lüneburg, and the hotel figures prominently. As a result, many tourists (the modern "white gold") flock to Lüneburg to see if it really is as picturesque as the show portrays. It is.
My favorite part of the tour was our look inside the Alter Kran (the old crane). Still functional, but rarely used, the Alter Kran is one of very few surviving manual cranes in Germany. It remains, presiding over the Ilmenau River, because it was in full service until the railway came to Lüneburg, long after most cities had upgraded to steam-powered cranes.
When salt was discovered in Lüneburg so many years ago, the course of the city's history was forever changed. Almost every political decision was evaluated first on its effect on the salt works, then on its effect on the town's people. The city's architecture (and the preservation thereof) resulted from the salt works' wealth. The unique flavor of life in Lüneburg today owes many thanks to the salt of years gone by.
