Thursday, October 11, 2012
We decided to venture out of Dresden today and drove to
Leipzig, a commercial and business center of the former East Germany that’s
just over an hour away via the(speed limit-less) Autobahn.
Late 19th century leaders, World War II bombs,
and decades of postwar communist neglect left little of note in the city
center, but an ambitious effort to rebuild during the last twenty years. The result is a vibrant core, with ongoing
construction programs everywhere. The
renowned university boasts illustrious alums ranging from Goethe to Angela
Merkel, as well as a campus that includes towering new glass skyscrapers.
Leipzig is also proud of an important musical heritage. We
visited the simple Gothic St. Thomas Church and listened to a few organ pieces.
This is where Bach was music director and conductor of the boys’ choir, and
where he is entombed and greatly honored. Mendelssohn, too, is revered here, not so much
as a composer, but for popularizing the works of Bach, who had been forgotten
after his death.
The world remembers the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, but
the seeds of what is known as the Peaceful Revolution were sewn in Leipzig in
1982, when the parishioners of St. Nicholas Church began to gather each Monday
evening to pray for peace. That movement
spread from the lovely interior of the church to the streets of the city until
finally, in the fall of 1989, over 300,000 demonstrators filled the streets,
including the area of the headquarters of the Stasi, the secret police. They ultimately forced the resignation of the
country’s premier and, within weeks, the Berlin Wall had fallen. All around town, “’89” plaques mark sites
related to the events of the Peaceful Revolution.
We toured the exhibits at the Stasi Museum; the extent of
surveillance, the use of secret spies, and the restrictions on life here were
chillingly clear there. Those times are easily
within the scope of our memories yet, the way of life represented is hard for
us to imagine.
We enjoyed Leipzig, with its musical, commercial, academic and
political heritage all easily within reach of the casual visitor.
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