Lübeck city skyline
There are harmless and legal vices: seeing a person moving his finger across a map spread out on a table, guessing the capital of a strange country and reciting aloud the list of goods from an ancient trade route. They are pleasures that the nerd and dreamy schoolboy shares with the office worker locked in a screen. If you belong to one of these two categories, you will know that the hanseatic league is not an obscure order of Templar chivalry, but a commercial confederation of cities of the Baltic and the North Sea which, since the fourteenth century, grew, went bankrupt and reinvented themselves transporting wood, amber, wheat, skins or linen between the coasts of Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Finland, latvia, Estonia, Lithuania Y Russia . Read again, aloud, this last sentence, with the enumeration of goods and countries. If it does not give you pleasure or at least curiosity, you can now leave this report.
The family of thomas mann , a native of Lubeck – the medieval Gothic city of red brick, narrow streets and severe Lutheran discretion – was for several generations one of the prosperous protagonists of this Baltic commercial saga. Decline is more powerful narrative material than success and thomas mann had the 'lucky' to attend the collapse of the family emporium and the talent to recount it in his novel 'The Buddenbroks' . He gained literary fame and the contempt of the neighbors from him. Nobody likes to air the family dirty laundry in a novel, and even less so when those secrets are used by the spokesman to win the **Nobel Prize for Literature (1929) **.
Today, with the Hansa already gone, with trade playing a secondary role in the economy of the area and the tourists Replacing amber as merchandise on ships from Finland, the inhabitants of Lubeck carefully pamper the figure of Thomas Mann. The writer has become part of the catalog of local monuments, along with the church of Santa Maria , whose 125 meters high was financed in the 13th and 14th centuries by the city's proud merchants as a symbol of Hanseatic power.
Lübeck from a bird's eye view
The decline of Lubeck , which served as inspiration for the narrative saga of mann , also adopted an expressionist patina in the 1920s, to the point that the old commercial buildings, such as the Casa de la Sal, next to the river, became film sets, where murnau shot some scenes 'nosferatu' . Decadence and avant-garde expressionist twists marked the transition between the old market town and today's gracious tourist destination of marzipan museum, music conservatory, open-air concerts, and puppet museum.
A thomas mann he liked to escape from Lübeck to the nearby Travemunde to chat with the pilots, those professional hosts who show newly arrived boats the way to port. in those days, Travemunde it was a luxurious spa for the commercial bourgeoisie of the Baltic, with modest bathers in striped suits entering the water in a closed car , to avoid prying eyes. That car is preserved on the beach, along with rows of wicker armchairs covered in stripes of color that should be admired at sunset, during the blue hour (as the locals call it), when the ferries from Finland look like colossal blocks adrift. This type of seats, called strandkorb , are typical of the entire Baltic coast and the North Sea, and constitute a refined adaptation of the bather to local inclemencies. The depth of the seat and the size of the cover, as well as its reclining footrest, provide a comfortable refuge from the north wind and create the illusion of turning the beach into a lounge. The reader you can settle into one of these wicker armchairs and watch boats with an empty mind.
Color display in the form of bathing huts on Travemünde beach
Sometimes the mathematical routine of port schedules and routes is broken: recently, one of those ships coming from Finland collided with another ship at the entrance to the port. The pilot did not follow the instructions of the pilot, because he had already navigated those waters for more than 60 times , a magic figure that allows the captain to face the maneuver alone, that is, to enter someone else's house without ringing the bell. But something went wrong and the ship collided with another guest. The neighbors tell Travemunde that the Finnish crew, completely drunk as befits one who does not cross seas, but duty free with cheap alcohol, he was unable to evacuate the ship and had to resort to port personnel. The shipwreck remained a farce.
From the little lighthouse Travemunde where thomas mann I chatted with the pilots of the port, we can see the virgin beaches of Macklenburg–Pomerania , the German land adjoining Schleswig-Holstein , to which it belongs Lubeck Y Travemunde . History shows us that the best way to prevent urban rampages is to plant a beach of mines. It's what he did RDA (East Germany) during the time of the wall to prevent its citizens from fleeing to West Germany. The cold war passed, the wall fell, Germany was reunified, the mines and beaches of macklenburg They arrived virgins to the 21st century. A lesson to be taken into account by the Spanish Ministries of the Environment.
This article was published in issue 54 of Conde Nast Traveler.
Boats in the port of Travemünde