Lübeck lions
The Lübeck lions are four animal statues that represent life-size lions , which on the one hand symbolize Lübeck's emergence as a lion city , but also stand for the ability to defend itself as such. Two of them have achieved worldwide fame thanks to their placement in front of Lübeck's Holstentor with the landmark .
The merchant Johann Daniel Jacobj (1798–1847) had the two resting lions made in cast iron by Christian Daniel Rauch by the Royal Prussian Iron Foundry in the middle of the 19th century and had them set up in front of his house at 19 Großer Petersgrube . After his death they came into the possession of a wine merchant named Pflüg, who had them set up in front of the Hotel Stadt Hamburg am Klingenberg . Here is Thomas Mann seen her as a child and in his Tonio Kroger installed:
- There was the hotel, and it was the two black lions that lay in front of it and that he had been afraid of as a child. They were still looking at each other with an expression as if they were about to sneeze; but they seemed a lot smaller since then.
This luxury hostel, which temporarily housed many celebrities on the Klingenberg , was destroyed in the Second World War , but the lions survived the Palmarum bombing night in 1942 .
After they were housed in Lübeck's St. Anne's Museum after the end of the war , they have been resting on low stone plinths out of town at the end of the small park in front of the Holsten Gate since 1949. There they are popular photo opportunities for tourists. Her picture can be seen on numerous postcards. For the Gazelle of Fritz Behn on the other side of the intersection in front of the Movenpick Hotel, they seem not to care. Due to the serial production, casts of this Sleeping Lion and this Waking Lion can also be found in other places in Central Europe.
The two cast bronze lions in front of the castle gate on the north side of the castle gate bridge at the entrance to the castle field are not as well known as those in front of the Holsten gate . Nevertheless, the waking lion and the wounded lion are often included in photographs of the northern city gate, such as in some pictures by the Lübeck photographer Thomas Radbruch . These were created in 1913 by Fritz Behn for the Lübeck consul Heinrich Leo Behncke as the owner of the Nutteln estate near Parchim . They were not set up in Lübeck until 1931.
As a gift from the Dräger family, there is also a copy of the Brunswick Lion in front of Lübeck Cathedral . The original is the oldest free-standing ore sculpture north of the Alps, clearly influenced by the Capitoline Wolf . In the cathedral itself is the gilded sculpture of a lioness from the Romanesque period. The lion belonging to her did not survive the fire in the church during World War II.
As early as the Middle Ages, the Lübeck foundryman Hans Apengeter made an aquamanile in the shape of a lion, which is now in the Germanic National Museum .
The “Löwe von Lübeck”, on the other hand, was a well-known warship in the Lübeck fleet at the end of the Hanseatic period.
The iron lions in front of the Holsten Gate ...
... the left and ...
… the right one,
as well as the striding gazelle in sight ...
Left castle gate lion
... and the right one
Brunswick lion in front of the cathedral ...
... and the lioness in it.
Aquamanile from the 1330s
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literature
- Jan Zimmermann : Take the lions out of circulation! Restoration required, implementation desirable. To the iron pair of lions on Holstentorplatz . In: Lübeckische Blätter 162 (1997), pp. 358-361.
- Hans Blumenberg : Tonio Krögers Löwen. In: Ders .: Löwen , (posthumously) Frankfurt am Main 2001, pp. 109–118.
Web links
Notes and individual references
- ^ Name spelling according to Klaus Bernhard: Plastik in Lübeck - Documentation of Art in Public Space (1436–1985), Lübeck 1986, No. 7