Wittenburg and Leipzig - Religious and Cultrual Meccas

In the true spirit of a Robin and Jenn vacation, we decided that we could see both Wittenberg 1 1/4 hours southwest of Berlin and Leipzig, another hour farther southwest all in one day.

Public transportation in Germany has been phenomenal and Robin and I are getting quite good at reading the time tables, negotiating connections and buying tickets.

Wittenberg is the adopted hometown of Martin Luther and the birthplace of his protestant reformation. Since we only had two hours between train connections, we quickly found a cab to take us to the outermost part of the old town where we started our whirlwind tour at the Schlosskirche or Castle Church.

The original church was destroyed in 1760 and wasn't rebuilt until the late 19th century when Germany was united for the first time. It was here on October 31, 1517 that Luther nailed his 95 thesis to the door.

At the time the original church was built, the interior was only open to the common public on All Saints Day. I was wondering if this accounted for the reason the interior was more lavishly decorated than the subsequent church we visited.

 Inside we were able to see the tombs of both Luther and Philipp Melanchthon, Luther's fellow professor. There were also two larger tomb markers for the Wittenburg princes who supported the reformation. I am always fascinated by the ceilings of large cathedrals. The nave of the Schlosskirche is lined with the coats of arms of the German cities that became Protestant when they joined Luther's reformation.

Upon leaving town, we continued to walk along the cobblestone street to the town square. The street is lined with small, shallow canals that would have carried fresh water into the town and sewage out of the town during medieval times. Our walk along this rode was quite pleasant and charming but I suspect it wasn't always this way.

Our next stop was at the Stadtkirche St. Marien or the Town Church of St. Mary's. This is the oldest building in Wittenberg and Luther's home church where he preached over 2,000 times. Unfortunately, the exterior of the church was undergoing heavy renovations and much of it was covered in scaffolding.  The interior was quite plain in comparison to the Schlosskirche. However, both contained impressive pipe organs.

Our final stop in Wittenberg was the Lutherhaus, or Luther House in English. This was the monestary where Luther lived as a monk and then later, his resiedence with his family and school for his pupils.  The Lutherhaus is now a museum with many original paintings, manuscrips and other church artifacts.  I particularly enjoyed Luther’s original translations of the Bible from Latin into German.  We could see his actual notes in the margins of the hand written pages.

In comparison to Berlin and Potsdam, Wittenberg was a very small and quiet town.  The main road was closed to traffic and there was a market set up in the town square.  Many residents appeared to travel by bicycle and the cafes were quite crowded on this beautiful March day.  The Lutherhaus was only a short ten minute walk to the Hauptbanhnhof or train station and we made it back in plenty of time to catch our train to Leipzig.

Traveling through the German countryside, I was surprised at the amount of open farmland.  It appears that Germans (at least in the east) are very environmentally conscious. Groups of windmills dotted the countryside and we were told that many people don’t even own cars.

Leipzig is the home of many famous Germans, namely the writer Goethe, and musicians Bach, Mendelssohn and Wagner. The Leipzig Hauptbahnhof is one of the biggest train stations in all of Europe but it was well marked and easy to navigate.  Thankfully, I’m finding that transportation hubs all over the word, including the US, use the same symbols on their signage so finding our way through the German hauptbahnhofs has been no different than getting through Penn Station in New York.

The majority of the sights in Leipzig are located within the ring road of the medieval town.  Leipzig is more along the lines of what I expected to find of a European city -  narrow, winding streets with taller buildings not allowing sunlight to reach the road.

We started at Nikolaikirche, or St. Nicholas Church.  Built in 1165, it is Leipzig’s oldest church. In the 1980’s the church was the site of weekly prayer meetings which gradually became a forum for people to voice their anti-communist opinions.  From these prayer meetings sprung the Peaceful Revolution which eventually toppled the communist regime. I was more interested in visiting the Nikolairkirche to see the interior which consisted of ornate columns with fingers that appeared to support the ceiling.

Next we stopped at the Zeitgeschichtliches, or Contemporary History Forum.  The exhibit was on Mosaik, the comic book produced during the DDR regime. The exhibit was largely in German so it was a little difficult to understand, but I get the impression that Mosaik often mocked the DDR and the harmless children’s comic strip was really a forum for biting political commentary.

Just down the street was the Thomaskirche or St. Thomas Church. Bach spent much of his career here conducting the boys’ choir. Martin Luther introduced Leipzig to Protestantism at this church in 1539.  In front of the altar is a tomb where what historians believe to be Bach’s remains are interred.  As Robin and I learned in an e-mail from her brother AJ, Bach was not famous during his own time and he died almost a pauper.  If it were not for Mendelssohn’s efforts in preserving Bach’s legacy, he may have been largely forgotten from history.

Bach was buried in a humble graveyard and when his music was rediscovered in the 19^th century, aficionados exhumed three corpses that could have been Bach and compared them to portraits in an attempt to find the real Bach. The organ is new, from 2000.  While we were in the church we were fortunate enough to hear someone playing the organ.

Next to the church was the Bach Museum which had wonderful interactive exhibits, likely designed with children in mind, but Robin and I also found them quite entertaining.

The remainder of the evening, we wandered around the old town of Leipzig seeing the Altes Rathaus or Old Town Hall and Madler Passage where the statues enact a scene from Goethe’s Faust which was set here.  Dinner was at the Brauhaus which were becoming our favorite types of restaurant in which to eat, before heading back to the Hauptbahnhof.  On our way back to Berlin, we changed trains in Dessau, the home of the Bauhaus. I would have loved to visit the Bauhaus but I guess we can only fit so much into four days.

The Splendors of Potsdam

Tuesday morning we took a trip to Potsdam on the Havel River about a 40 minute train ride southwest of Berlin. Potsdam, the current capital of the state of Brandenburg started as a fishing village and then became a military fortress.  The city in its current form was largely shaped by King Friedrich II, or Friedrich the Great.

Potsdam was the summer residency for the royalty and they spared no expenses in creating a fairy tale setting.  It was the royal playground full of facades to transport the king and his court to exotic places around the world.  For example, we passed a pumping station on the river that was disguised as a mosque.  The minaret was its steam stack.

We passed the site of the former Garrison Church where Hitler took power on March 21, 1933.  The church was destroyed by allied bombing and today it is merely a construction site.

Our tour continued through the Old Quarter which was inside the original city walls of the military fortress. The king, in an effort to save money, hired an architect to draw plans for one building and then the king simply copied that plan 200 times. There is a large Dutch Quarter in this section. Because Potsdam was built on a swamp, the king brought in Dutch builders to sure up the land.

Next we passed by Sts. Peter und Paul Kirche and the French Cathedral.  Along the way I learned that Potsdam has a rich film history.  The city is the home of the first "talkie", the first color movie and the current Babelsberg studio.

I was also unaware of the role that Potsdam played in the Cold War. The city was divided in two, much like Berlin. The eastern sector was the headquarters for the Russian KGB. We drove over the Glienicker Bridge which was divided in half between the two governmental sectors. The bridge was actually painted in two different shades of green to delineate the boundaries. The dark side was for Berlin and the light side for the West. The two super powers frequently exchanged captured spies on this bridge in the middle of the night, notably Gary Powers, the American pilot shot down over Siberia.

Just to the other side of the bridge is the Glienicker Palace and park. The lion and lioness were a gift to the king and queen from the czar of Russia.

When we crossed back over the bridge, we entered the New Garden. During the Cold War this was another forbidden part of town occupied by the KGB but it more importantly is home to the Schloss Cecillenhof built in 1917 for Friedrich Wilhelm and his wife Cecilie. It was here from July 16th to August 2, 1945 that Potsdam Conference took place. I was able to stand in the very spot that Joseph Stalin occupied in the famous picture of the heads of the allied forces. We could also look through the window at Stalin's own desk.

The palace itself continued to follow the fairytale theme of Potsdam. It was constructed in an old English style country manor of Shakespearean times. The palace had several ornate chimneys as any large palace would have had for the fire places that heated its many rooms. However, when this palace was built, it had heat, running water and electricity. The chimneys are all part of the facade.

Upon leaving the New Garden, we drove to the Russian Colony Alexandrowka which was built upon the request of Frederick Wilhelm III in memory of his deceased friend Czar Alexander I and former members of a Russian soldier's choir. In order to keep the singers from getting homesick he replicated a traditional Russian village. The logs are just another facade over brick houses. By this point I was beginning to wonder if Walt Disney used Potsdam as his inspiration for Epcot.

One of the main reasons for coming to Potsdam is to visit the ornate Schloss Sanssouci, Frederick the Greats' favorite summer home designed in the rococo style. Our tour guide told us that this was a very small palace but I think that I could handle slumming it there in the summers.

Frederick was a learned and enlightened man and fancied himself as the people's king unlike his counterpart in France, Louis XIV. Frederick built the expansive park that surrounds the palace and tried to introduce new varieties of plants such as the Mulberry trees in which he was hoping to raise silk worms. Unfortunately he failed to account for the cold German winters which instantly killed his silk worms.

Frederick also receives credit for introducing the potato into the European diet at a time of famine. At first, people would not eat the potato. They said that because it came from under the ground, it must be the devil's food. Frederick launched an elaborate scheme in which he had his potato fields heavily guarded by his men. He was hoping this would make is subjects think that the potatoes were very special so that they would steal them from the fields. It worked brilliantly. Frederick is buried at Sanssouci along with his favorite dogs and people often leave potatoes at his grave site.

The tour concluded at the Neues Palais or New Palace. This was the final palace built by Freiderick the great and much larger than Sanssouci. According to our guide, Freiderick himself only used the palace once as he preferred the intimacy of Sanssouci. The servants’ quarters across from the palace are nearly as big as the palace itself and Robin and I decided that we actually liked their facade better than the facade of the palace. Neues Palais is currently undergoing extensive restoration work and the interior was closed in preparation for an installation celebrating Frederick's 300th birthday so we were unable to go inside.

When the tour concluded, we were dropped off at Sanssouci so that we could tour the interior. I was unable to take photos but I can tell you that the interior was even more ornate than the exterior. I was surprised however at how small the actual rooms were. I think that the ceilings were nearly as high as the widest dimension of most of the rooms.

After the tour, we walked through the gardens to the Brandenburg Gate, which actually predates the gate in Berlin and into to old quarter where we wandered around the shops and found a restaurant for dinner.

Before leaving Potsdam, we viewed the interior of Sts. Peter und Paul Kirche and walked down to the old Rauthaus or town hall. I also finally got to hear my first German glockenschpiel.