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Published: October 17th 2023
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It is Tuesday 19th of september and it is far too warm for the time of the year. We are with the three of us. Linda is the navigator, Miss Polo is our unsurpassed vehicle on 4 wheels and I am the one who will drive Miss Polo to a terra which has been incognita for us till now: the Baltic countries.
We are on our way to Lübeck, Germany, trying to escape the never ending road works between Bremen and Hamburg. At nine in the morning we left home, somewhere in Schiedam, The Netherlands. The distance is almost 600 kilometers. It is just a little part of the distance we are going to cover the next four weeks. Over 4000 kilometers we will drive. My goodness, that is one tenth of the circumference of our planet.
Lübeck I am told that Lübeck is famous for its marzipan. That in itself is already a good reason to visit this city. Once marzipan was a medicin. Ah, you are out of energy? Listless? Tired of everything? Three times a day a tablet of marzipan and you will dance the cha cha cha till late at night. In medieval times
they sold marzipan at the pharmacie. Now they sell at
Niederegger in the Breite strasse, hier in Lübeck: a supermarket with all kinds of marzipan, even coffee with marzipan, icecream with marzipan, you call it and it is there: MARZIPAN.
And it works. Energized by marzipan we hurry up through the streets of Lübeck, through the Glockensgiesserstrasse, the Grosse Burgstrasse, up to the
Europäisches Hanzemuseum, because apart from being the capital of the marzipan, Lübeck was also the very centre of the Hanze league. The Hanze had its roots in the 13th century, when people began to realize that making trade is better than making war. It looks like some countries still don’t understand how right these Hanze people were. Maybe their leaders should visit this outstanding museum once.
Hundreds of cities around the North Sea and the Baltic Sea were involved: towns in Belgium, England, The Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Denmark, Sweden, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. The traders even went as far as Novgorod in Russia, delivering salt, clothes and amber and coming back with fur, minerals and wax. Trade was thriving up to the 18th century. Wealthy towns were the result, which you still can see, like
here in Lübeck with its red brick mansions. The mighty
Holstentor, one of the four gates to the city,
shows how it all happened in the course of history.
Most towns in the world did not deliver a nobelprize winner. Lübeck produced three. Willy Brandt, Germans former chancellor, was one of them. In 1971 he got the Nobel Peace Prize. In the
Willy Brandt Haus in the Königstrasse we read that his name was actually not Willy Brandt, but Herbert Frahm. He changed his name to avoid detection by the Nazi’s.
Just around the corner at the Glockengiesserstrasse sits the Günther Grass Haus, the second Nobel Prize winner. Het got the prize in 1999 for literature. Once I read his most famous books: “The Tin Drum” and “Crabwalk”. We see some paintings and sculptures he made.
Thomas Mann For the third Nobel Prize winner we have to walk to the Mengstrasse. There is the
Buddenbrook Haus. It is the house where the parents of Thomas Mann used to live and that stood as a model for his novel “The Buddenbrooks”. I have never read that book, but shortly I read “The Magic Mountain”. It is a
masterpiece. Thomas Mann became therefore my favourite writer. I definitely wanted to visit the
Buddenbrook Haus. Unfortunately it is closed. Instead there is an exhibition on Thomas Mann in the
Behnhaus-Drägerhaus in the Königstrasse.
As a Hanseatic trader Mann’s father was the most important resident of Lübeck apart from the mayor. He wanted his son to become a trader as well, not a writer. The father must have been not so happy, because writing was in the blood of the family. Thomas Mann older brother Heinrich wrote “
Professor Unrat” where the movie
“Der blaue Engel” with Marlène Dietrich is based upon. While Heinrich is the cheerful one, the one who loves women and parties, Thomas is the serious one. He did not like what Heinrich was writing about. Heinrich had more the southern character of his Brazilian mother, tells the exhibition, while Thomas had the northern nature of his father.
Later I come to talk about Thomas Mann with the owner of the hotel (Rücksackhotel, Kanalstrasse 70; nice hotel by the way). ‘I am every day fighting with Thomas Mann”, she says. ‘Each night I listen to an episode of “The Magic Mountain”. I fall asleep with it.
It was a terrible man. Actually I like more Günther Grass. That really was a strong man. The wife of Mann arranged everything. The kids were not allowed to say a thing. They had six children. Four of them made suicide. Their daughter Elisabeth was the best. She left Germany for Italy, where she married an older man (Borghese). She became one of the founders of the “Club of Rome”.’
We talk about Thomas Mann's attitude during the war.
‘He wanted to have the Jews out of Germany’, she says ‘in spite of his own wife who was a Jew herself.’
‘But he opposed the Nazi’s’, I say. ‘He moved to the US.’
‘His kids insisted at that’, she says. She picks a book of a shelf:
“Auf Thomas Manns Spuren”. ‘Just read this’, she says, pointing at a sentence.
I read:
“Die Revolte gegen das Jüdische hätte gewissermassen mein Verständnis, wenn das Deutschtum nicht so dumm wäre meinen Typus mit in denselben Topfen zu werfen und mich mit auszutreiben” (Thomas Mann, april 1933)
. When we leave the Rucksackhotel next day, she gives me the book.
Kiel The whole trip to Kiel I think of the
sentence I read yesterday. What a terrible words did my hero write. Can he still be my hero? But I don’t have so much time to think these things over. We have to check in at the Ostuferhafen in Kiel for the ferry of DFDS to Klaipeda in Lithuania. Late that evening I drive our Miss Polo in the belly of The Victoria Seaways.
It looks like we are the only tourists. The majority are trucdrivers, shaggy, massive men with big heads and enormous bellies. Most of them speak Russian. There is a buffet where they scoop up big portions of meat and potatoes, followed by desserts of sweets which are even bigger than the main course. That explains the bellies ofcourse.
On deck we see the lights of Kiel disappearing behind the horizon. Downwards is the deck full with trucs, meticulously parked next to eachother on a distance of only 15 centimeter. Real craftmanship. But how do they come in their cabines these drivers, I ask myself, while laying on my bed, rocking on the waves of the Baltic Sea. And how do they come in with these enormous bellies? Before I know the answer I am
already asleep.
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