Leipzig Book Fair, Part III: Founder Time or Kaiser Time?

Back to Leipzig!

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St. Thomas's Church.
The big Bach statue was on this side of the building.

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Visiting the Thomaskirche was an odd experience.

I knew that extended family members had lived in Leipzig and undoubtedly entered the building some 200 years ago. Also, of course, Bach had worked there for years. It is also a tourist magnet, attested to by incongruous orange table umbrellas in the rear, but I was the only tourist there.

It was as if a grey network of shadows of past people and events were traced over the building itself, or I were treading over a lot of invisible footsteps.

I tried to read a tombstone beside the church by standing at just the right angle, but the inscription was best suited to be read either when it wasn't raining or if one took a pencil rubbing of it. 

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy's statue
a stone's throw from the St. Thomas Church

Near the church, lawns with the statue of Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and, downslope, an old memorial to Bach were pretty. Taken with the aged trees and the Gründerzeit apartment buildings, the not overly broad roads, the atmosphere was like what I imagine it must have been around the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It was unsurprising to read (after returning to Berlin) that a lot of imperial-era buildings in Leipzig had been spared from aerial raids during World War II.

—It's cheeky to say this as I'm not a specialist in this time. But 'Gründerzeit' or 'Founders' Age' seems to me like a misleadingly respectable term for the epoch after the Franco-Prussian War. Overseas I think it marked the apex of German colonialism, including the genocide of Hereros in Namibia. I'd argue that foundations for 20th century wars and repression were laid as well, and the Franco-Prussian War wasn't nice either. Whereas 'Kaiserzeit' captures more ambiguity, in my view. You can picture Wilhelm I trotting around Berlin on a horse as a delighted public goes on, or picture bloody imperial politics; and both are true.—

I also admired the massy pink magnolia blossoms on the tree in the Thomashaus yard, adjoining the church.

The old memorial pillar for Bach

It was a good day to pass Bach's statue beside the church. One or two days earlier he'd had his 339th birthday, and flowers were still standing at its base.

An antiques(?) shop in Leipzig's inner city

It was around 8 a.m. and the church bells of the neighbourhood underscored it. I'd determined to begin returning then to Leipzig's Hauptbahnhof and travelling to the trade fair grounds.

A GDR architect's attempt to mingle old and new...

After wiggling through an alley and up another street or two, leaving the historical city centre behind me, I emerged out into a large open space. A turn-of-the-century Deutsche Bank building stood at a street corner. An intriguing park with a green slope and the pale white statue at its top (which I was too exhausted to try to walk up to) was to the left. But I wasn't in the right line to reach the Hauptbahnhof.

The City-Hochhaus skyscraper with the 'mdr' logo was close by, and it was showing me the different logo on its eastern face. So I reorientated myself.

Near Leipzig's Ring-Café.
Exhibit A of the gloomy lighting conditions
on this particular morning
(I'd thought this photo wouldn't turn out at all)

Fortunately a tram station exists handily near the Ring Café, opposite.

(I'd thought that Berlin had been 'special' in getting fancy classical-inspired architecture of Frankfurter Allee during the first decade of Soviet occupation, but clearly Leipzig had received it too. The Café was impressive even if, again, no one was going in or out at this hour; so the grand scale of the architecture was underused.)

I was delighted to see that its announcement board spelled out 'Leipziger Messe' as its destination: this would spare me a longer walk to the Hauptbahnhof. While I waited for the tram, I saw the stately towers of the Neues Rathaus.

I'm not sure how watertight my rights to take the tram without buying an additional ticket were. But morally I was going to buy a ticket to the Book Fair later anyway, the possession of which would entitle me to using Leipzig's local transit.

Entering the tram now felt premature as the Fair would only open at 10 a.m.... But once the right tram arrived and I was inside, rain began to pelt the windows: it felt rather clever not to roam outside. The rain also dispelled, along with my weariness, the idea of walking 6 km to the trade fairgrounds. After leaving the Hauptbahnhof station behind us, we went on and on and on along the Delitzscher Straße ....

I was wearing an FPP safety mask. Whenever I did so in Leipzig I had the impression that one or two people in my train or tram compartment had a strong reaction to it... It was a relief when another passenger hopped on board the tram wearing a mask, as if to show it's not that weird.

(I'd just seen the mask as a minor precaution for travelling long distances in enclosed spaces in cold-and-flu season. The choir I sing in still requests weekly testing for Covid and I had no intention of infecting any elderly ladies with a respiratory illness. So I didn't think much of wearing a mask. But in the end it was an opportunity to learn that attitudes in Leipzig seem less nonchalant than in Berlin.)