Lübeck old town

Historic Hanseatic City of Lübeck
UNESCO world heritage
	Lübeck old town (north view)
National territory:	Germany
Type:	Culture
Criteria :	(iv)
Reference No .:	272
UNESCO region :	Europe and North America
	History of enrollment
Enrollment:	1987 (session 11)
Extension:	2009

View of Lübeck's old town from the northeast, August 2007.

By clicking on the picture, explanations appear .

The Historical Old Town is the historic center of Lübeck and the largest German memorial area of the UNESCO World Heritage . It is located on a 100 hectare, densely built island surrounded by watercourses and the remains of the ramparts, which was added to the list of world cultural heritage by UNESCO at the end of 1987. This historical island between the Trave and the Elbe-Lübeck Canal is surrounded by the remains of the medieval city wall with the preserved city gates Burgtor and Holstentor as well as the early modern fortifications and port facilities of the 19th century. The view of the old town is dominated by the seven towers . The street view is characterized by numerous gabled houses from different epochs, including the brick Gothic . Behind the gabled houses are typically the Lübeck corridors and courtyards .

Today the old town as the inner city is administratively one of the ten districts of Lübeck. Around 12,000 people live in the mostly smaller houses in the old town.

Foundation and development

The re-establishment of the city followed after a major fire under Henry the Lion in 1159 on the Bucu peninsula between Trave and Wakenitz, named after the Slavic castle located there . The medieval town planning for the new merchant town on the area measuring about two kilometers in north-south direction was extremely simple and highly efficient. An overriding road to the south was carried out from the castle gate in the north. In addition to the market square , two more squares were created on this route, the Koberg and the Klingenberg , between which the north-south route runs on two parallel streets, the Königstrasse in the east and the Breite Strasse in the west. The subordinate developments to the west and east , known as Rippenstraßen , go from these streets , so that rectangular building blocks emerged. The city was initially protected by the surrounding water and a brick city wall. Historically, the city is divided into four quarters . Today this division of the city into quarters, which was effective until the 19th century, is meaningless and the terms associated with it have also largely become meaningless.

Destroyed buildings in Alfstrasse in 1942 in Lübeck's founding district

In the early modern period, a fortress was built around Lübeck, which made it one of the largest fortifications in Northern Europe. These fortifications have been dismantled since the beginning of the 19th century in the course of the softening, as the development of the port of Lübeck, the advent of the railroad and industrialization made it necessary. The construction of the Elbe-Lübeck Canal, opened in 1900, brought about the greatest topographical intervention. Lübeck's old town was transformed from a peninsula to an island and the Wakenitz was dammed up in its current bed. The fortifications also fell victim to the expansion of the port of Lübeck. The Trave and the city moat were considerably widened, especially in the area of the northern wall peninsula , in order to gain harbor basins for the emerging steamships. Even today, however, individual bastions can be clearly seen in the Lübeck ramparts, especially in the section between the former Mühlentor and the Holsten Gate. For details of the urban development of Lübeck since the lifting of the gate in 1864, see also the main article “ Urban development of Lübeck since 1864 ”.

organization

Lübeck's old town is historically divided into four quarters . At times the houses were counted under the influence of the French administration. However, after the Lübeck French era , street-related house numbers were reintroduced. For the purposes of reconstruction planning and urban redevelopment, the city was divided into its blocks, these were numbered and given consecutive numbers for the entire old town island. They can be looked up in Lübeck's cityscape recording, which records all the parcels in a cadastral manner and graphically reproduces the views of all buildings at the time of the recording. Some of these blocks, mostly located in the more central areas of the shopping city, were given block courtyards in the course of the reconstruction after the Second World War , in which the rear parts of the property were merged into a single property for the delivery of the neighboring properties. These internal block courtyards have belonged to the city and are managed by the city

World heritage since 1987

Not the entire old town island was designated as World Heritage in 1987. Due to the ICOMOS evaluations in 1983 and 1986, the part that was destroyed in March 1942 by the air raid on Lübeck was excluded . For a long time, the exact scope was not clearly defined, as the area monument was roughly marked by hand with a thick felt-tip pen on the map in 1987 . A digitized map with an exact representation of the world heritage area has been available since 2009, coordinated with the UNESCO bodies. This map shows three areas: Area 1 consists roughly of the northern and eastern old town from the north side of the Fischergrube along the street An der Untertrave around the castle gate and following the street An der Mauer to Mühlenstraße . Continue on the east side of Mühlenstraße and Königstraße to through Pfaffenstraße and Breite Straße to the Fischergrube.

Area 2 includes the southwestern old town, as the quarter from Holstenstrasse to around Lübeck Cathedral , also known there as the cathedral quarter . In this area, the boundary in the mapping runs partly through the building blocks and borders on area 1 in the Mühlenstraße area.

The smallest section 3 comprises the town hall with the office building , the Marienkirche with the former chapel Maria am Stegel and the upper Mengstraße with the Buddenbrookhaus . The three sub-areas cover a total of 81 hectares (over 80% of the total area) of Lübeck's old town with a surrounding buffer zone of around 694 hectares.

The preserved parts of Lübeck's merchant quarter, such as around the Schabbelhaus in the lower Mengstrasse, are not part of the world cultural heritage.

In total, there are over a thousand secular buildings in Lübeck's old town, also individually listed . Many of them come from the brick Gothic period , which in general Lübeck parlance also generously includes the brick renaissance period .

literature

Manfred Finke: UNESCO world cultural heritage old town of Lübeck, city monument of the Hanseatic era. Wachholtz Verlag , Neumünster 2006. ISBN 3529013358
Klaus J. Groth : World Heritage Lübeck. Listed houses. Schmidt-Römhild , Lübeck 1999. ISBN 3795012317