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Schleswig-Holstein: Districtless town Lübeck

Area: 214.22 km²
Population: 211,700

A town with a glorious past! - Lübeck a place of trade was established in 1143. The town did grow with breath-taking speed, it became the main place of the Hanse (a important trade federation in the middelage, which did include all countries around the Baltic Sea and also towns in south Germany, Netherlands, Belgium and Great Britain) and with this the politicially and economic midpoint of the whole Ostsee-Area (Baltic- Sea-Area). The town developed until the end of the 15th century to one of the leading towns of all of Europe. Beside a lot of other places, remembers the "Holstentor" (a city gate out of that time) and the "Heiligen-Geist-Hospital" even today from the past days does shine. The Ostsee (Baltic-Sea) watering-place Travemünde - the beautiful daughter of Lübeck - belongs since the year 1329 to the town area. The double headed eagle in the shield is a symbol for the "Reichsfreiheit" (this means, the town did understand only (!!) under the power of the emperor or the central government), which the "Emperor Friedrich II" awarded to the city in 1226. The "Reichsfreiheit" did first end in the year 1937, when the law, the "Grosz-Hamburg-Gesetz", did change this. (Two other exampels for such a free towns administration are the towns "Freie- und Hansestadt Hamburg" and "Hansestadt Bremen", which have this right also today.) The fall of the Hanse federation did not pass Lüebeck without leaving traces. With the effects and consequences of this, the town must fight also in a time, when the Hanse federation was even a long time a part of the past history. Thomas Mann (a well known poet), the biggest son of the town, did write this problematic nature of the loosing of importance in his world wide well known novel "Die Buddenbrooks". He showed this situation in a individual, often tragic, situation in the lives by the example of one singular family dynasty. The success of this surprisingly literary report shall not block the view upon the name of his quarrelsome brother Heinrich Mann, whose name is also inseperably bonded with Lüebeck. As well, as a politician and chief editor, Julius Leber, who was to become by the will of the assassians of July 20.1944, at the top of a democratic Germany after Adolf Hitler. Another son of the town is the well know former Politician and Bundeskanzler Willy Brand. Representatives out of the middel class and labor movement found and find inside the borders of the old Hanse metropolis a liberal home.

Lübeck today - this is a large town with 210000 inhabitants (in 1972 = 240000), a hub of the ferry traffic to Scandavia, increasing also to Poland, Russia and the Baltic States. It is a harbour with more than 12 millons tons of transshipment, a center of production of marzipan and also the production of preserved food from fishes. Lübeck is also a place of a college with conservatories and a medical universtity. But as in the past, today Lüebeck is the historical place to go to and also a relationship point in the whole northern Germany area: Upon a island is built the old center of the town with churches and trader houses, small passage ways and yards, in which more than 850 buildings are under the protection of a monument law, a cultural town that is building monument with a rank of european importance.

Sharon D. Hagler