A real little jewel of a city

Bremen is an absolute darling of a city and I’m not just saying that because it hasn’t rained while I’ve been here. It is just gorgeous and would remain so even if the weather was worse. It doesn’t seem to get very many non-German visitors and that’s a shame. It would be an easy day trip from Hamburg and an overnight trip from the RuhrGebiet cities.

The hostel that I’m staying at is on the outer edge of the city in a mostly residential area which is nice. It means too that it’s got plenty of shops and places to eat nearby. I left my bag and headed into the city from here. The city like Lubeck, is built on an (almost) island. It used to be more complete but they have filled in a couple of the ends of the canal to make it into a long squiggly lake instead. The area where the city wall used to stand is now a lovely big park where you can ride your bike or walk your dog or feed the ducks.

I headed first into the area called Schoor which is the oldest remaining area of the old town (the church and town hall are older but have modern buildings around them now). It was mostly built in the 16^th century and the little houses are all higgledy-piggledy along the narrow laneways. It’s now full of craft shops and little cafes and pubs and is very cute. I had lunch in the Schoor Teestubchen which is a tea shop downstairs and a café up the very narrow little stairs. It’s very cosy inside and probably only seats 25 when full (and that would be very full). The building next door has an interesting take on the Town Musicians (they are everywhere here). Check out the photo with the really pissed off looking donkey.

After lunch, I visited the Church of St John which is on the outer edge of Schnoor before continuing on to the middle of town. The main church in town is over 1200 years old and is dedicated to St Peter. The current building predominantly dates from the 13^th century but there are sections that are from earlier in both of the crypts and the museum. These date from the 11^th century. The original church was built by the first bishop of Bremen, St Willhad (it must have been a tough gig if he got a sainthood out of it) at the request of Charlemagne who was spreading his empire north at the time.

The inside is a real mix but is predominantly gothic still. It is famous for its three organs not that I thought that they were particularly impressive but there are three of them. The side chapels are now used to display various art works and statues from the earlier church that are no longer used. There is a great set of wooden doors with stories from the bible carved onto them in one of the right hand chapels. This side of the church has modern windows while the other side has older style ones. Much of the stone was redecorated in the 19^th century so has some of those lovely floral patterns in the arches that they were so fond of.

In the back corner of the church is the dom museum which is free to visit and covers the history of the church and in particular the excavations done in the 1970s. The entire floor of the church was dug up and the graves of the bishops were opened (thirty or so in total). Incredibly when they opened some of the graves, the clothing was still intact even after a millennium. So they now have silk clothing from the 11^th and 12^th centuries on display in a special little climate controlled room (which they obviously don’t need since they survived 10 centuries buried in the ground with a dead bloke).

They’ve got quite a bit on the history of the church (in German only for the main part, though I think that you can hire an audioguide) and its three bishop saints (it really must have been a tough job working on those northern heathens). Unfortunately, the collection is lacking in any relics as they were all taken south during the reformation and since then the church has been protestant.

The middle of town used to be the church but they have since rearranged things a little and it is now more like the town hall that is in the centre. It is surrounded by three large squares, one of which has another church in it. In front of the town hall is the market square which is where you’ll find some more old buildings, the guildhall and the new parliament building (it’s hard to miss as it’s the big one made of glass). As you head around the side of the town hall is another smaller square that contains the Church of Our Lady and also the Town Musicians statue (this is the famous one that you can rub the noses of for luck). Continuing around the back of the town hall you come to the Domhof, which is now used as a market square every day but Saturday and is lined with enormous buildings from the 19^th century that mostly contain banks. It’s the home to the weird horse head fountain (not sure if I remembered to upload a photo). It may look slightly less odd when there is water in it (or at least I hope it does).

The town hall was built in the 15^th century but most of the front façade comes from the 17^th century and is built in the Weser renaissance style (they weren’t big on baroque in Bremen). It’s a very pretty building but is absolutely filthy. They are trying to decrease the amount of pollution in the centre by making all the cars that come in meet certain requirements but it’s going to take time.

The people in Bremen seem to struggle with the actual concept of a pedestrian zone. It seems like they don’t quite understand that in order for it to actually be a pedestrian zone it has to only contain, well, pedestrians. The entire centre of the city is marked as pedestrian but also contains trams (which do go quite fast and right out the front of the town hall), bicycles (who also go quite quickly), taxis and delivery vans. So you have to spend a large amount of time watching to make sure that you aren’t about to get run over while you are taking photos and it is hard to get photos of many of the buildings without vehicles or tram lines in them. But I guess that making the emission standards for the vehicles higher might decrease the number of vehicles so it’s a start. Making all the deliveries in the morning before the tourists get up might also help.

Out the front of the town hall but facing the cathedral is the statue of Roland. It’s very famous as is he, but I’m not quite sure who he is. The statue is the symbol of the freedom of the Hanseatic City of Bremen and has been since the 14^th century. I assume he won some fight.

Just a tip about the Musicians statue. If you are there in summer, go very very early in the day. I had to wait to get a chance to get a photo which didn’t have someone else rubbing the donkey’s nose and it’s March and there are virtually no tourists around. I headed from there to the Church of Our Lady, which is from the 11^th century and used to be the church of the council. It’s nowhere near as nice as St Peters but is worth a visit.

I then headed to the tourist office to find out about tours of the town hall. These are running four times a day at the moment and run in English and German on the same tour. It was lucky I did ask because I found out that they were closed on Tuesday because of an official event. So I signed up for the 3pm tour and headed off to kill an hour or so.

Bottcherstrasse is just down the side of the guildhall and was mostly built in the early 20^th century. There is one building that remains from the 16^th century and it now houses a museum. It’s now the home for a couple of museums, some really expensive shops and the casino. It’s nice but not as cute as Schnoor. It does have the glockenspiel though. I had missed the 12 pm performance and the next one was at 3pm so I wasn’t going to make it to that either so I decided to come back the next day.

I decided that I was in need of cake before the tour of the town hall but had run out of time to go to a café. I went to a little bakery in the square next to the church of our lady (sorry I’ve forgotten the name but it has 5 letters). I got a piece of Bauernkuche and it was really really really good. It’s got a biscuity base, then a thin layer of a custard like stuff and then blueberries, then streusel and icing sugar on the top. It was so good that I could have gone another piece but had unfortunately run out of time before my tour.

The tours start under the pair of horse and knight statues that are next to the side door facing the cathedral. The tours are run in both languages and the guide talks in German first and then gives a brief explanation in English. She didn’t give quite so much info in English as she did in German but I could understand both so it didn’t matter. She spoke so much slower than the guide in Lubeck so I could understand almost everything she said (and I had the English translation to make sure). There was a couple from Ireland who spoke no German at all so they would have missed out on a bit.

You only visit three rooms in the building but the tour goes for nearly an hour and covers the history of Bremen and the outside of the town hall as well. I’ll just cover the highlights of the first room from one side to the other as it’s easier than trying to remember the order that she described things in. The windows show all the coats of arms of the various families of the region but aren’t original as they have been broken several times. The council tables are under the window closest to the cathedral and have interesting chairs. The arms have a devil on one side and an angel on the other to remind the men to listen to both sides before they make a decision. The painting on the wall next to this matches the theme and is of Solomon. The story about the dead baby and the king that was above the door in town hall in Lubeck now makes vastly more sense to me. It must be a popular theme in the area. The story (which almost all the Germans seemed to know but the French group like me were clueless) tells of the wise King and the two women. One has a dead baby and one a live baby and they both claim that the live baby is theirs. The king decides to cut the baby in half and share it between the women, hence the soldier holding the baby up by its ankles with a sword in his hand. The real mother then says that the other woman can have the child as she doesn’t want it killed and Solomon then gives the baby to her. This was meant to encourage the council to make wise decisions rather than cut babies in half.

The little room behind the façade of the town hall had two purposes. The upper section was the library and when it was built was home to 13 books which was quite a substantial collection. The bottom section was built as a private meeting room for the council to discuss business as the rest of the room was open to the public. It wasn’t very successful for this purpose as the walls were very thin and people could listen through it. So it wasn’t used very much. It was redecorated in the 20^th century and is all red and gold inside.

The ceiling of the main room was built by the shipmakers’ guild and is therefore not unlike the inside of a boat. The pictures in the little circles are of all the kings of the region since Charlemagne (at least from him to the time when the room was built). They all look very similar and it turns out the painter used only six models when he was doing the portraits and just added beards and different clothing to them. I suspect that most of the kings were neither that young nor good looking.

The big picture of the harpooned whale is from the days when whaling was a big industry in Bremen. They used to occasionally come down the river and the painting is of one that was killed not far away when it got a little disorientated. It’s not a very popular painting and was taken down for many years but the current mayor is from the town where the whale was killed and he insisted that they put it back up again.

The model boats hanging from the ceiling are of actual boats that were part of the protective fleet for the merchant ships. The middle two actually have canons that work and they used to be used on special occasions. They are part of the reason that the windows are no longer originals because if you don’t open all the windows before setting off the cannons the windows tend to break. They don’t use them anymore because it tends to leave a lot of black dirt on everything.

The façade and the balcony out the front are the original and were protected in the war by building a large wooden box around the whole of the building and filling the gap with sand so that it couldn’t get burned by fire bombs. Someone was thinking in Bremen. The balcony was decorative only and the council had another wooden one out the side of the town hall that they used for making announcements. When Hitler came to Bremen in the 1930s he insisted that he wanted to use the front balcony but the locals neglected to mention that you step down onto the balcony so the floor is much lower than it appears and you can’t actually see over the top of the railing. So once Hitler came out onto the balcony he couldn’t be seen from the square below and they had to go and get him a box.

Underneath the town hall is the wine cellar which you can also do tours of but they are very expensive. It extends for quite a distance under the surrounding squares and buildings as Bremen used to have the monopoly on white wine for the region and therefore needed to store a lot of it.

We then moved onto the next room which is a function room in the new town hall. The new one was built much more recently but the architect worked hard to make the buildings fit together while making the modern section more functional. The most striking thing in this new room is the chandelier which is art deco and really quite lovely. The room has two levels with a gallery for women up the top. We then headed back down the stairs and out of the building.

After the tour, I wandered back to the hostel and checked into my room before going out to the supermarket (there are two close by to the hostel) and getting some stuff for dinner. It was an easy start the next morning and I didn’t set off until about 9am. It was cloudy but the forecast was for improvement in the afternoon. I headed for the park which surrounds one side of the old town. It’s the site of the former city walls and is quite a nice area. There is a windmill about half way along the park which you can actually go into at certain times. It was closed though and the park around it was also because of a fallen tree. I continued on until almost the end of town and then headed over towards St Stephan’s church. It wasn’t open but has a quite pleasant outside and some interesting old graves in the yard. I then headed back towards the centre of town.

Ansgarihof is the site where the church of St Ansgar used to stand. The church was pulled down in the 20^th century to make way for a really ugly department store. The nice building in this square is the Craft Chamber which dates from the earl 17^th century and has an attractive façade. I continued on to Sogestrasse which is the home of the bronze pigs. By the time I arrived here, the sun had come out properly and it was actually turning into a really nice day. I got some photos of the pigs, which are really well done but badly placed as it is hard to get a picture with a decent background.

I then continued back to the market square to try and get some photos in the sunlight. It was too early in the day though and the shadows were still a problem. At midday, I headed back to Bottcherstrasse to watch the glockenspiel. I was surprised to see so many people there because I’d not really seen that many tourists around. The music goes for nearly 10 minutes and is accompanied by a series of carvings of crossings of the Atlantic by sea or air. The music is much more pleasant than I thought it would be too.

I then continued down the street to St Martin’s Church which is on the edge of the river. Unfortunately, it closes at 12 so I just missed getting to see inside. I wandered along the river bank for a little while and sat in the sun against the wall. It was really very nice (except for all the people who wanted to come and sit in the sun and smoke). I would have stayed longer but my bladder was getting insistent so I had to head in search of a toilet. I walked through Schnoor to see if there was one there but the only one I could find was one of those in the street ones that you put money into the slot and the door opens. There is something slightly dodgy about those ones, so I continued on to see what else I could find. Eventually, I ended up in the toilets in Domhof and they are actually pretty good. You go down under the square but there is a little lady looking after them and they were nice and clean and smelled nice.

I decided that I was needing some more cake at this point (mostly because I was near the bakery from the previous day, I think) and grabbed some cake and a hot chocolate and headed to the town hall. It was really pleasant sitting under the balcony in the sunshine (except again for all the people who had come there to smoke. It always seems to me like 50% of Germans smoke and most of them seem to smoke those really stinky French cigarettes). Luckily, most of them went away once lunchtime ended and I could sit in peace for a while. I even got hot and had to take my jacket off for a little while. I could have sat there all afternoon and just watched the people walking by but eventually I dragged myself up and headed to the museum at Roselius Haus in Bottcherstrasse. This is one half of a museum which has modern art in one half and gothic art in the other. The house is the original in the street and dates from the 16^th century.  They have kept the interior much as it used to be and display the art and furniture and other household items, much as they would have been in the 16^th century. It’s quite attractive inside and while only small has some nice pieces. On the top floor it joins onto the neighbouring Paula Modersohn-Becker museum. This is the first museum dedicated to the works of a female artist and it shows both a large collection of her works and various temporary exhibitions, mostly of other female artists. At the moment it is showing a collection by Elfriede Lohse Wachtler who was clearly insane and had major issues with men as well. She actually ended up in an asylum and some of her work was done there. Modern art isn’t my thing but there are some interesting pieces in the collections and since the two are included in the one price, you might as well go and have a look.

I headed from the museum back to the large park which unfortunately was now being shaded by the buildings. I walked back to the hostel and ate my leftovers for dinner. The next morning, I was awake earlier than I expected and decided to catch the earlier train to Groningen. This was a bit of an issue because the reception didn’t open until 7.30 and the train left at 7.55. I managed to walk very quickly to the station and make it in less than 15 minutes in the end. I just made it onto the train in the end. So then it was into the Netherlands. Read on to hear about Groningen and the North of the Netherlands.