Hanseatic League

March 1

Today I visited Bremen, which makes the third Hanseatic city I’ve seen, after Hamburg and Lübeck. My cousin Marian and her husband Bryan are visiting from California, and this was the first stop on a whirlwind tour of Deutschland. While they had a good dose of typical rainy Hamburg whether yesterday, today the sun shone through the clouds, and it was like a miracle to see colors and blue sky. In Hamburg we have enjoyed a sunny day about once a month since last October. I found myself staring at a large orange table umbrella like a thirsty desert-crosser at an oasis.
The Hanseatic League of cities was a cartel of merchant guilds controlling key ports in Germany and Scandinavia during the middle ages. Member cities ringing the North and Baltic seas formed a trade network moving goods in and out of Europe – and protecting ships from pirates – from the 12th to 16th centuries. They controlled access to international markets via shipping, and they retained their wealth with a minimum of tariffs and imperial taxes. The hanseatic League was an effective cartel until other large-scale global shipping networks arose in the 17- and 1800s. In Germany, these port cities were governed by merchants who grew rich enough to buy their independence from local lords in this period, of which they remain fiercely proud. Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck were the last remaining cities of the Hanseatic League when it collapsed in the late 1800s, and they joined the newly formed German nation as city-states. (Wikipedia has a good article at www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League)These cities all retain some shipping activity, and Bremen is still an important port in Germany, but Hamburg has continued to flourish as primarily a port city. It is among the top ten highest-volume ports in the world today. Marian wondered what could possibly be in all those containers, “Maybe we should stop importing so much crap from China.”

So a harbor boat tour is an imperative experience to understand the city. Yesterday we set out on such a “Rundfahrt” through the container ships, scrap metal piles, oil refineries, and stout 1900s brick warehouses that define the harbor. One feels like a feather floating on the water among such towering industrial ships and cranes. We saw a stern-heavy loaded ship being towed upriver by two tugboats. There was a Costco ship being loaded by a crane the size of a skyscraper, slinging 30-foot containers around with grace. The harbor is at once a museum of changes in shipping technology over time, a model of modern efficiency, and a vast construction site building the new infrastructures of tomorrow. Actually, most of the gigantic Hafen City development project is re-using old warehouse sites for millions of square meters of new residential, retail, and office space. It will roughly double the urbanized area within 2 km of the magnificent Rathaus, or City Hall.

Today in Bremen, we found another formidable Rathaus, this one with an arched breezeway lined with citizens basking in the rare winter sunshine. There was also a freshly refurbished gothic cathedral, with unusual blue and red painted columns. We stumbled upon “Böttchersallee”, a narrow, winding alley lined with art shops and sculpture. Walking into its perfectly preserved main square made you forget yourself. “I feel like I’ve traveled back in time,” Marian said.

My visit to Lübeck was last December, and included a tour of the Rathaus. It was the chief city of the Hanseatic league at its zenith in the 14th century. The long shadows cast by the civic pride from that heyday remain today. Each Mayor from the 1300s onward is memorialized with a plaque or a bust – which is quite a feat. There was an intricate wood carving showing the harbor in its early days, and at it peak in the 1600s, buzzing with tall-masted ships, bound together for lack of shore space.