Whether By Design Or Happenstance

Max Liebermann (1847-1935)
Amsterdam Orphans In The Garden
1885
Hamburg Kunsthalle

Oil On Canvas
46 5/8 Inches By 38 5/16 Inches

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Liebermann, largely unknown outside Central Europe, was a very great painter. The artist mastered landscape painting, genre scenes and—late in life—portraiture.

Some like to classify Liebermann as an Impressionist, which I believe is an inaccurate characterization. Others like to classify Liebermann as an Early Modernist, another categorization I believe to be inaccurate.

Above all, Liebermann was, I submit, a Realist painter. His work is rooted in 19th-Century German Realist Painting—yet he was clearly influenced by various French schools of the second half of the 19th Century.

Liebermann was also a Wilhelmine painter through and through. Although he despised Wilhelmine politics and considered himself an Internationalist and a Cosmopolite, Liebermann—perhaps unknowingly—captured The Wilhelmine Era to perfection. Whether by design or by happenstance, Liebermann is unmistakably one of the three or four most quintessential Wilhelmine artists.

The irony is that, while The Wilhelmine Era was ongoing, Liebermann was viewed as much too revolutionary, far too French, and entirely out-of-step with the period. Today an opposite view prevails: Liebermann is considered too conservative, too German, and too-closely-tied to the conventions of his time.

During much of his life, Liebermann’s work was appreciated exclusively by connoisseurs. It was only once Alfred Lichtwark, perhaps the greatest art historian of the day, became in the 1890s an ardent advocate of Liebermann’s work that the artist’s reputation grew by leaps and bounds, in Germany and elsewhere.

From the early 1870s until the onset of World War I, Liebermann spent every summer in the Netherlands, working out-of-doors, all day, every day, no matter the weather.

One of Liebermann’s favorite subjects was the wards of the municipal orphanage in Amsterdam, housed in the former Saint Lucy’s Convent (and now home to The Amsterdam Museum).

For over twenty years, from 1876 onward, Liebermann painted dozens and dozens of canvases at the orphanage. “Amsterdam Orphans In The Garden”, from 1885, is one of the most renowned of Liebermann’s Dutch orphan paintings.

“Amsterdam Orphans In The Garden” is a riveting and ravishing work. A reproduction scarcely begins to do justice to the artist’s subtle-but-brilliant color scheme or his complete mastery of natural light.

We must have devoted half an hour, perhaps more, to a study of the painting while we were in Hamburg in 2006. At the time, the painting was hung in a large gallery devoted to nothing but Liebermann paintings—and “Amsterdam Orphans In The Garden” had been placed alongside Liebermann’s most famous work, “The Net-Menders”.

Magnificent as is “The Net-Menders”, I thought “Amsterdam Orphans In The Garden” to be the finer artwork.

The Highest-Paid Artist Of His Time

Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier (1815-1891)
The Sergeant’s Portrait
1874
Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Oil On Canvas
28 11/16 Inches By 24 3/8 Inches

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“All of us will be forgotten, but Meissonier will be remembered.”—Eugène Delacroix

Meissonier may have had Delacroix in his corner, but it has not helped Meissonier’s long-term reputation that Napoleon III, Queen Victoria and Kaiser Wilhelm were among his most ardent admirers.

Meissonier is being rediscovered today, slowly but surely, after being written out of art history books early in the Twentieth Century.

The artist’s small but exquisite canvases—he left behind a handful of large-scale history paintings, too—show a command of draftsmanship, a subtle and sure mastery of color, and a remarkable attention to detail that is never permitted to overwhelm a composition.

In November 2006, over the course of three visits to the Kunsthalle, we must have spent an hour, even more, with “The Sergeant’s Portrait”. It overwhelmed everything else in the room, including Franz Von Lenbach’s famous (and excellent) portrait of Franz Liszt, hung immediately adjacent to “The Sergeant’s Portrait”.

The finest Meissonier in America, a painting of a vanquished Napoleon immediately after Waterloo, is in The Walters Museum in Baltimore. That particular Meissonier was on display in March 2009 when Joshua and I visited The Walters, but it was hung near the ceiling in a salon-style room and, for practical purposes, could not be viewed (as was the finest Lenbach in America, a portrait of Otto Von Bismarck, hung near the ceiling in the very same Walters gallery).

In person, “The Sergeant’s Portrait” is riveting. My mother says that extreme subtlety of coloration is what first attracts the viewer’s notice, after which the viewer focuses on the persons depicted and, finally, the drama being played out. It is only after a few minutes of study that the viewer begins to marvel at the proliferation of detail captured in the painting and starts to realize that the canvas is the work of a great master, comparable to the work of the great masters from the Dutch Golden Age.

“Menschen Des 20. Jahrhunderts”

The photograph above is iconic in Germany, and well-known in the United States.

The photograph was taken by German photographer August Sander (1876-1964) in the summer of 1914 in the Westerwald, and was part of Sander’s “People Of The 20th Century” project, a project Sanders began in 1911 and continued well into the 1920s.

In Germany, the photograph is known simply as “Young Men”. In the U.S., the photograph is often titled “Three Young Farmers On Their Way To A Dance” or some variant thereof.

I do not understand why the photograph has become iconic. It is, by and large, a pretty unremarkable photograph.

The photograph caught my eye when I saw a high-quality print for the first time at Hamburg’s Museum Of Arts And Crafts in 2006. It is one of few photographs from a large display of German photographs we viewed that I remember vividly more than five years later. Nonetheless, I have not a clue why the photograph somehow became embedded into my brain.

The photograph may be seen as representing the end of an era—everything was to change in August 1914—and yet the photograph has absolutely nothing to do with the forces of history or social change or the coming cataclysm. It depicts three not particularly interesting and not particularly intelligent and not particularly characterful and not particularly appealing young men posed stiffly for the camera on a rural pathway while attired in their Sunday best. To read more into the photograph, including any sweeping historical themes, is not justified.

Someone that appreciates the photograph more than I, New York-based cultural writer David Propson, has written the following of the photograph:

Yet through Sander's camera we also see more. His famous "Young Farmers On The Way To A Dance", their cravats carefully tied and canes in hand, look far more like dandies than men of the earth. There is comedy in the affected seriousness of these youths, whose frames don't quite fit their pretensions. Sander's idiom may have been the individual portrait, but his theme was man in relation to his society.

I remain unconvinced. I do not see Propson’s proposed theme in the photograph.

And yet the photograph continues to stick in my mind.

Revolution

Revolution in Hamburg in November 1918.

Immediately following The Sailors' Revolt, revolutionary movements broke out in most large German cities. The movements were not to be quelled until 1919.

The gathering in the photograph occurred in the very center of Hamburg.

The handsome Greek Revival structure in the background now houses a Burger King franchise.

Hamburg Stadttheater 1900

The Hamburg Stadttheater in 1900.

The Stadttheater served as home of Hamburg Opera from 1827 until the building’s destruction in the 1943 air raids. (Hamburg Opera became Hamburg Staatsoper only in 1937, at the insistence of the National Socialist government in Berlin.)

The 1827 building was designed by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, but all evidence of Schinkel’s design was obliterated in 1873, when a new overlay was applied to the building’s exterior. The 1873 overlay was a grotesque attempt to make the building more “grand” and more in keeping with Hamburg’s status as Germany’s center of trade, a status the city acquired after the 1870 German unification. From 1870 until 1900, the city of Hamburg grew by leaps and bounds—its population swelled tenfold and its wealth multiplied many times over to the extent that Hamburg became one of the most important cities on the European continent—and the new exterior of the Stadttheater was intended to reflect the city’s mounting significance.

The 1873 overlay, part Neo-Classical and part Neo-Renaissance, was very much a horror—and the new features pasted onto the original façade were wrongly scaled to boot.

This was a building that deserved to be destroyed—and, after the war, Hamburg city fathers never contemplated rebuilding the original structure. This was so despite the fact that a reconstruction was very much possible: the exterior walls had remained standing, and only the auditorium and public promenades had been destroyed by bombs and fires (the stage and backstage and administrative areas had been saved from destruction by the iron fire curtain).

Josh has already written about the strange fate of the building during and after the war.

The Hamburg Staatsoper of today is only one-third post-war, something few persons realize. Two-thirds of the building is the 1827 structure, extensively modernized in 1926.

Hamburg Kunsthalle II

This photograph depicts the original Hamburg Kunsthalle, an 1869 neo-Renaissance structure that, miraculously, emerged from World War II largely unscathed. (In contrast, Hamburg’s Central Train Station, two blocks to the south, was totally destroyed by Allied bombs.)

A second, neo-Classical building was added to the Kunsthalle in 1919. A third, international-style high-rise building (from which this photograph was taken) was added in 1997.

Only the original Kunsthalle building is of architectural interest. The 1997 building, especially, is very poor, hopelessly out-of-date by more than thirty years at the time of its completion.

Hamburg Kunsthalle

The Central Staircase of Hamburg’s Kunsthalle, Germany’s largest art museum.

The Kunsthalle occupies three buildings. The building in the photograph is the oldest of the three, completed and opened to the public in 1869.

Visitors enter the Kunsthalle on ground level through the doors at the bottom of the staircase, and ascend to the galleries on the second floor.

The Kunsthalle, a fascinating yet immensely frustrating museum, is nowhere near as stately and impressive as this photograph suggests.

The foyer at the top of the Central Staircase is one of only two rooms in the Kunsthalle that is remarkable.

The other is the Grand Foyer on the ground floor, sheathed in marble and lined with marble columns. The Grand Foyer is now home to a very fine and very elegant restaurant.

“I Dream With Open Eyes, And My Eyes See”

Moritz Daniel Oppenheim (1800-1882)
Portrait Of Heinrich Heine
1831
Hamburg Kunsthalle

Oil On Paper On Canvas
17 3/8 Inches By 13 5/8 Inches

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Moritz Oppenheim’s famous portrait of Heinrich Heine was painted in 1831, the year Heine was forced to leave Germany for France, where he lived in exile for the rest of his life.

If to the Germans Heine remained an outsider, to the French he remained a German. Never entirely comfortable in Paris living a life of banishment, Heine ached for his homeland.

Denk ich an Deutschland in der Nacht,
Dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht,
Ich kann nicht mehr die Augen schliessen,
Und meine heissen Traenen fliessen.

When I think of Germany by night,
My dreams turn into fright,
My eyes can no longer sleep,
As I break down and passionately weep.

Heinrich Heine (1797-1856)

"Can I Have Never Seen You?"

Another important 19th-Century German realist painter virtually unknown in the United States is Leopold Karl Walter Von Kalckreuth (1855-1928), who by inheritance was entitled to use the title “Graf” (“Count”).

Kalckreuth’s works, known for their deep melancholy and the artist’s exquisite capturing of North Germany’s subtle and somber light, unique in all the world, have been attracting attention in Europe in recent years.

This is because several Kalckreuth canvases have been the subjects of highly-publicized ownership disputes, such disputes arising from The Third Reich’s practice of forcing Jewish owners of art to sell their holdings at artificially-low prices (when such artworks were not outright confiscated by the state).

I have never been disappointed in a Kalckreuth painting. Every Kalckreuth canvas I have had the pleasure to view has been a work of the finest quality.

When we visited the Hamburg Kunsthalle in November 2006, four Kalckreuth paintings were on display. Alas, the near-legendary “The Twilight Hour”, owned by the Kunsthalle, was not among the four—and this disappointed us greatly, as “The Twilight Hour” was on our list of essential Kunsthalle German paintings we had most wanted to study in person.

The four Kalckreuth paintings that were on display were all well-known, as Hamburg possesses the world’s most important cache of Kalckreuth artworks.

Prominent among the four was the famous portrait, “Wolf, The Son Of The Artist”.

“Wolf, The Son Of The Artist” was painted in 1900, when Wolf was thirteen years old.

The painting is charming and disturbing in equal measure, a gripping portrayal of a child on the cusp of abandoning the cocoon of childhood and embracing the responsibilities and realities of adulthood. The boy is revealed as intelligent and civilized—and introverted and melancholy. The painting serves as a frightening precursor of the son’s suicide six years later.

Wolf Kalckreuth was a precocious poet, whose works had already been published at the time of his death at the age of nineteen. He was a close personal friend of Rainer Maria Rilke, who wrote his celebrated poem, “Requiem For Wolf Kalckreuth”, shortly after the young man’s death. During his short life, Wolf made a profound impression on everyone who knew him.

Anton Webern was studying “Requiem For Wolf Kalckreuth” on the afternoon of his death.

Might the text have provided inspiration for a “Cantata No. 3” from the pen of the great composer?

The world shall never know.

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Leopold Kalckreuth (1855-1928)
Wolf, The Son Of The Artist
1900
Hamburg Kunsthalle

Oil On Canvas
46 Inches By 36 Inches

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A preparatory drawing for the above painting is part of a temporary exhibition of German works on paper, all from a private collection, currently on display at The National Gallery Of Art in Washington.

I note that the drawing was even mentioned in a recent article in The Washington Post. It is gratifying to see 19th-Century German art, which was supremely accomplished, at last receiving some attention in North America.

Three Women In Church

American museums’ holdings of German art are woeful.

American museums are hospitable venues for works by Hans Holbein The Younger and a small number of German Expressionist artists from the early 20th Century—but American public art collections are otherwise largely bereft of German art. It would be impossible to recreate the history of German art through American holdings, although a handful of institutions—most conspicuously, The Kimbell Museum and The National Gallery Of Art—are, belatedly, trying to make amends.

The reason for this shortcoming is simple: the finest American private collections (which went on to form the core collections of our finest museums) were acquired between the American Civil War and the Depression of the 1930’s, a period during which German art was virtually unknown among British and French art dealers—and it was through British and French art dealers that American robber barons made the bulk of their art purchases.

A prime example of an important German artist virtually unknown in the United States is Wilhelm Leibl (1844-1900), a German realist painter who spent his best years living among and painting the peasants of rural Bavaria. Leibl was a German Gustave Courbet, and Leibl’s work rivals the quality of his more famous French counterpart.

The importance of Leibl’s work was recognized in Germany during his lifetime: much of his oeuvre made its way into German public collections while the artist was still active. And yet Leibl paintings have made no headway in the English or French-speaking worlds (although Leibl artworks are much-admired in Russia).

Art scholars, as well as the artist himself, believed his greatest work to be “Three Women In Church”. A representation of three generations of women at worship, the deeply-moving “Three Women In Church” made Leibl famous overnight throughout Central Europe. The painting became instantly iconic—and it remains so today in German-speaking lands. The painting is as famous in Central Europe as “American Gothic” is in the United States. Postcards of “Three Women In Church” have been available since the year the masterwork was unveiled, and they remain bestsellers to this day.

Leibl worked on the painting for three years and six months. Meticulous attention was paid to the women’s devotional attire as well as to their individual expressions of piety. The attention to detail is reminiscent of Dutch Old Masters—and, fittingly, Vincent Van Gogh was one of the painting’s most ardent admirers.

“Three Women In Church” sneaks up on the viewer. A single quick glance at the painting reveals nothing, but the viewer is slyly drawn in by the remarkable detail of the women’s clothing and the church pews, after which attention shifts to the solemnity and sincerity of the facial expressions.

I first witnessed “Three Women In Church” at the Hamburg Kunsthalle during our trip to North Germany in November 2006. It was hung among other Leibl paintings, all of which were very fine, yet “Three Women In Church” was certainly the most riveting of the group.

We were pleased that this particular masterpiece was on display. During our time in Hamburg, many celebrated 19th-Century German paintings owned by the Kunsthalle were not on display—and this was because fourteen rooms of the Kunsthalle normally devoted to 19th-Century painting had been turned over to the once-in-a-lifetime Caspar David Friedrich exhibition, an epochal exhibition if ever there were one.

The richness and subtlety of “Three Women In Church” cannot be captured by photographic reproduction—yet a photograph at least can suggest the power and fascination of the painting.

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Wilhelm Leibl (1844-1900)
Die Drei Frauen In Der Kirche
1881
Hamburg Kunsthalle

Oil On Wood
45 1/4 Inches By 30 3/4 Inches

The Adoration Of The Magi

Master Francke (Active In North Germany 1424-1436)
The Adoration Of The Magi
1424
Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Tempera On Panel
39 5/8 Inches By 36 3/4 Inches

The Birth Of Jesus

Master Francke (Active In North Germany 1424-1436)
The Birth Of Jesus
1424
Kunsthalle, Hamburg

Tempera On Panel
39 5/8 Inches By 36 5/8 Inches

Johannes-Brahms-Museum

Hamburg is home to Johannes-Brahms-Museum, one of many museums throughout Europe devoted to the great composer.

Hamburg has a deeper claim to Brahms than any other city, and this is because Brahms was born and raised in the city of Hamburg.


It was in this house on Peterstrasse that Brahms was born in 1833. The Brahms family lived on the first floor, on the left side of the building. The photograph was taken in 1891, six years before Brahms’s death.

The house no longer stands—it was destroyed in the 1943 firestorm—but Peterstrasse was recreated in the 1960’s and 1970’s, and an attempt was made to restore Peterstrasse to its ancient pre-war form, which dated back to the Renaissance and Baroque Periods.


The Johannes-Brahms-Museum lies on Peterstrasse, but not on the actual site of the birth home. The museum, with an unmarked and nondescript entrance, is a few doors down from where the Brahms birth home formerly stood.


The museum is small, and seldom visited (or so we were informed by museum personnel). It occupies only a few rooms and has very constricted hours. In both regards, it very much reminded me of the Puccini museum in Puccini’s family home in Lucca.

The Johannes-Brahms-Museum displays a collection of keepsakes that illustrates the life and work of the composer. Letters, photographs, autographs, concert programs, books, periodicals, artworks and sheet music are on display.

The composer’s writing desk is housed in the museum, as is one of Brahms’s pianos.

The bust of Brahms in the photograph below was sculpted by Ilse Conrat and is on loan from Hamburg’s Kunsthalle. It is one of many busts of Brahms that Conrat created, including the famous bust that lies over Brahms’s grave in Vienna.


Brahms’s family was very poor, and did not spend much time in Brahms’s birth home. The Brahms family lived in a proliferation of different homes in Hamburg’s poorer neighborhoods, changing abodes every few months either because the family could not afford to pay its rent or because the family needed to relocate to ever-cheaper lodgings.

Brahms’s father held a wide variety of jobs—among other things, he played bass in the orchestra of the Hamburg Opera—but the family was never able to accumulate any money.

Brahms continued to return to Hamburg with some frequency until he was in his mid-forties, by which time his visits to his hometown became sporadic.

Oddly, there is no street in Hamburg named after Brahms.

At least the plaza in front of nearby Laeiszhalle, Hamburg’s primary concert hall, is now named after the city’s most famous native son. However, the plaza was not christened Brahmsplatz until 1997, the centenary of the composer’s death. Given the German love for music, I am surprised it took 100 years for Hamburg to name a street or plaza for such a seminal figure that arose from the city’s slums.

Colonnaden

Near Esplanade is another of Hamburg’s most elegant thoroughfares, Colonnaden.

Originally built in 1876 and 1877 as a private road to link Jungfernstieg with Dammtorbahnhof (Hamburg’s second-largest city train station), Colonnaden quickly became Hamburg’s most elegant address. Colonnaden derives its name from its street-long row of arcaded columns—and quite a lengthy street it is, too.

Colonnaden is lined with splendid, historically-important Neo-Renaissance buildings, with richly-decorated facades, all arcaded. Nearly all of the buildings on the street were designed by renowned architects and, unlike Esplanade, almost all of the original buildings on Colonnaden remain in place.

Colonnaden is now a pedestrian street. Gracious apartment buildings sit atop expensive, sophisticated shops and fine dining establishments.

Colonnaden remains one of the most exclusive addresses in Hamburg proper.

Esplanade

Hamburg enjoys a proliferation of long, wide, elegant promenades in the city center, all originally created to combine high-quality edifices for upscale shopping and gracious, stately living.

The oldest of these fashionable promenades is Esplanade, created before The Great Fire Of 1842.

This elegant street was commissioned by the city and based upon Berlin’s most fashionable thoroughfare, Unter Den Linden (“Under the Lime Trees”). Its construction occurred between 1827 and 1830.

The postcard below, from 1830, presents Esplanade as it looked when it was brand-new.


Only one of the street’s original houses still stands. That house is mentioned as being the home of Hans Castorp’s grandfather in Thomas Mann’s novel, “The Magic Mountain”.

Since World War II, this entire area has become nothing more than a commercial zone. The street remains spacious, and a few elegant buildings from earlier eras survive, but most of the street is now given over to office buildings and hotels, a few of which are undistinguished 1960’s high-rises.

Ground levels of office buildings house shops, restaurants and cafes.

Hamburg’s largest casino is on Esplanade, making Esplanade a well-traveled, vibrant street at night.

Zollenbrucke

Fifty yards away from Trostbrucke is Zollenbrucke, a sandstone bridge from the 17th Century. It is Hamburg’s oldest bridge in continuous use.

Zollenbrucke used to span Groeninerfleet, a canal that was filled in after the war. The bridge no longer serves a structural purpose.

The bridge takes its name from a former customs house that once stood on the spot.

Of Hamburg’s 2300-plus bridges, Zollenbrucke is the favorite of the public. The bridge is now a pedestrian walkway, a veritable overlook upon the point at which Groeninerfleet formerly flowed into Nikolaifleet.

Laeiszhof Und Globushof

On one side of Trostbrucke is Gebaude Der Patriotischen Gesellschaft. On the other side are two famous counting houses (“Kontorhauser”) known as Laeiszhof Und Globushof.

Laeiszhof Und Globushof are the only two large-scale counting houses in Hamburg to emerge from World War II undamaged. The buildings long served as headquarters for the Laeisz Shipping Company, whose founder gained worldwide fame by providing funds to erect Hamburg’s main concert hall, Laeiszhalle.

Laeiszhof, dating from 1897 and 1898, is the older of the two buildings. It is a severe, modern reinterpretation of a Northern European Renaissance structure.


The Neo-Baroque Globushof, from 1907 and 1908, has a less formal façade and features numerous sandstone decorations. Copper models of ships sit atop its spires, and very impressive they are. The entrance facade is decorated with statues of Wilhelm I and Bismarck.


The ships of the Laeisz Shipping Company were long known as the world’s fastest. The successor owner of the Laeisz Shipping Company continues to occupy both buildings.

We examined the interior of the Laeiszhof, which was full of splendor. Grand stairwells, mezzanines, skylights, rotunda, courtyards: the building had every possible luxury of its time, all befitting a palace of commerce.

The building still uses old-style German elevators—the type that runs continuously and has no doors—and we rode the elevators as a lark.

We also made it into the Chairman’s Office, a lavishly-appointed suite crammed with model ships and historic ship memorabilia. I don’t think we were supposed to be there but, once inside, we were allowed to look around to our heart’s content by a gracious secretary. She even presented us with a copy of the company’s annual report as we departed.

Perhaps she thought we might buy shares.

Trostbrucke

Gebaude Der Patriotischen Gesellschaft abuts Trostbrucke, a small but historically-important bridge that spans Nikolaifleet, one of Hamburg’s dozens of canals.

Trostbrucke was erected in 1881. It is one of countless bridges in Hamburg, a city that boasts more bridges than Venice and Amsterdam combined.

When erected, the 1881 stone bridge replaced a wooden bridge from the 13th Century. It is decorated with statues of Bishop Ansgar, who founded Hamburg’s first Christian outpost in 832, and Count Adolf von Schauenburg, who founded Hamburg’s merchant district in the 12th Century. These two historic persons were chosen because the bridge was intended to note the important connection between Hamburg’s religious history and its merchant history, the two foundations upon which the city was built.

Trostbrucke (“Comfort Bridge”) was given its name because prisoners on their way to be tried at the town hall were comforted for one last time on the bridge.

From the middle of the 13th century until the 1842 fire, Trostbrucke was the very center of Hamburg’s Altstadt.

Gebaude Der Patriotischen Gesellschaft

Near and to the rear of Hulbe-Haus is Gebaude Der Patriotischen Gesellschaft.

In 1765, Hamburg’s middle-class intellectuals founded a society to support measures for the improvement of the public good. This society became known as Die Patriotische Gesellschaft (“Patriotic Society”). Its building, accordingly, is Gebaude Der Patriotischen Gesellschaft.

A surprising number of establishments now maintained by the state has come into existence as a result of this society. Between the years 1767 and 1898, the society founded Hamburg’s first trade school, the first German poorhouse, Europe’s first savings bank, and various spas and public libraries in and around Hamburg. The society also organized Hamburg exhibitions of new inventions. Today the society supports scientific and technical innovations, as well as young artists.

The society’s Neo-Gothic building, seen today in a simplified and renovated post-war version, was built between 1845 and 1847. It was one of the first important buildings to be completed after The Great Fire Of 1842. The building is located on the site of the former Rathaus, destroyed in the conflagration.

World War II left its mark on several parts of the building. The effects of bomb damage may still be seen if one examines the building closely.

Before the war, Die Patriotische Gesellschaft maintained a remarkable and renowned library in its main building. All 120,000 volumes were lost in the air raids of 1943.

Hulbe-Haus

Just as Hamburg’s Rathaus emerged from World War II completely unscathed, several notable buildings nearby also escaped wartime damage and destruction.

One such building was Hulbe-Haus, a beautiful 1910 building built in Dutch Renaissance style. Hulbe-Haus is notable for its layered steeple topped by a golden cog, the symbol of North German port cities.

Hulbe-Haus has become a minor landmark of the city of Hamburg, and this is so for three reasons. First, the building protrudes several yards into Monckebergstrasse, Hamburg’s main shopping street. It is the only building that protrudes into the lengthy, grand boulevard that connects Hamburg’s Rathaus with the city’s main train station (“Hauptbahnhof”). Second, Hulbe-Haus is one of only two buildings on Monckebergstrasse that was not obliterated by wartime bombs and the ensuing fires. Third, Hulbe-Haus lies atop the very center of Hamburg’s first settlement, Hammaburg, erected in the 9th Century.

Hammaburg was an ancient fortress after which the city of Hamburg was named. Hammaburg was also Northern Europe’s first Christian outpost—the fortress Hammaburg served as a diocesan town and the missionary center for all of Northern Europe. Indeed, Christianity came to Northern Europe via Hamburg, and it did so hundreds of years after Christianity had spread to most other parts of Europe.

The streets around Hulbe-Haus have been the sites of numerous excavations since 1962. A nearby office building displays in its basement excavations showing the remnants of what once was the bishop’s residence. The remnants are almost one thousand years old. The basement is open to the public, and we made a short visit. A couple of ancient stone walls and a few ancient stone columns were on display, all illuminated so that they might easily be viewed by visitors. It was not particularly impressive.