St. Marien and Marzipan: what’s doing in Luebeck

Luebeck was the second and last stop after Hamburg on this past weekend’s trip. Having lost my itinerary, forgotten my guidebook, and maybe only heard of Luebeck once ever, on the way there I asked one of the other students in the tour group what it was we were going there to see.

“Marzipan.”

The funny thing about a lot of international students hanging out together is that most of us still have very heavy and diverse accents, find entirely different parts of German speech utterly unpronounceable, and generally have a hard time understanding each other.

“What?”

“Marzipan.”

“Is that like a place? a church?”

“No, marzipan! To eat.”

I got a similar response, albeit inflected very differently, from 3 other students, and it was beginning to seem like marzipan was the thing to look forward to. And as it turned out, it really was the (very good) reason for going to Luebeck—that and another (you got it!) church.

The marzipan we have in the U.S. is pretty widely disliked, I think (though of course not so much as licorice). It’s way too sweet, made almost completely of almond extract and high fructose corn syrup, and the texture is really Play-doh-ish. In fact, it is a variety of Play-doh. I’m saying these things and yet I’m no expert, I have almost no idea! because since it’s so gross I tend to avoid it, toss its half-eaten, chocolate covered remains back into the box of Russell-Stover’s and move on with my afternoon. But it’s pretty different thing here, in that it’s actually made mostly of almonds—57% almonds! says the box of marzipan I bought. And it’s totally delicious and, even better, they make it in all different colors and sculpt/mold it into all kinds of shapes—baby Jesus, for instance, or a green bell pepper. I wish I had more pictures, actually, but my camera was nearly out of batteries. My favorite marzipan, though, is what seems to be the standard version, the “kartoffeln.” That is, “potatoes”—balls of marzipan dusted in unsweetened cocoa. It’s actually the least convincing of the endless marzipan object-mimicry, but it really tastes great. And they make marzipan tea! It actually tastes like marzipan, you'd be surprised. I kind of got into this marzipan thing.

That other, somewhat less funny thing we went to Luebeck to see was St. Marien (or St. Maria) basilica, possibly one of the most extraordinary and decidedly grim places I’ve been in a long time. The nave in St. Marien’s church is 38.5 meters, and the spires outside are 125. It was begun in 1251 and apparently set the style for about 70 other succeeding churches in the Baltic region. The night preceding Palm Sunday in 1942, St. Marien’s church was partially destroyed during a British air raid (similar to the story at St. Nikolai’s), and the bells crashed to the ground. The church was reconstructed/restored beginning in 1947 but the bells were left lying in memorial. Here are the pictures:

Perhaps the best and most optimistic thing about the church, though, is a completely ridiculous statue of the devil, twirling his beard and sitting on a rock outside the entrance:

The legend, as described on a plaque outside the church, is that when the first stones of St. Marien’s were laid, the Devil thought they were building a wine bar. He was excited about that idea, so he started to help build it. As a result of his efforts, the church was going up at a remarkably fast pace, until one day he realized what was going on. He was very mad about it, so he grabbed a huge stone to smash in the walls he had just been building when someone shouted to him, “Just stop it, Mr. Devil! Leave what has already been erected! For you we will build a wine bar here in the neighborhood!” So the devil was apparently okay with this, dropped the stone (the one his statue’s sitting on in the picture, of course), and right next-door the workers built the wine cellar of the town hall.

(!!!)