Schönes Wochenende in Leipzig

Last weekend Jacob and I took a little day trip to Leipzig. The railway here offers tickets that they call "Happy Weekend Tickets," where you can have up to 5 people ride all day long for 35 Euro. You can't take the major express trains, but all regional trains are fair game (once I used one of these tickets to make my way across the entire country, switching from regional train to regional train).

So we hung out with Bach for the day...

...and brushed shoulders with the Schumanns and Mendelssohn and Wagner too. Oh, and I can't forget Nietzsche and Leibniz, Goethe and Schiller... The list goes on. Leipzig has attracted many dynamic characters over the years.
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We started out our day at the Nikolaikirche (St. Nicholas Church).

This church is famous for being the site that started the movement to bring down the iron curtain. Starting in 1982, they began having prayer meetings for peace here every Monday night. People felt that it was a place where they could come and express themselves, voicing their dissatisfaction with the conditions under which they were living. Although these meetings did include Christian religious elements, they were open to everyone, and the attendance grew to include a diverse representation of the population; everyone was starving for a chance to talk about the things that troubled them.

The communist party sent representatives to these meetings in order to make note of those in attendance and restrict their priviledges. Still, the meetings grew to the point where they filled the church every week (2,000 people) and had more meeting outside. Eventually, in October 1989, the party decided to put a stop to the meetings, sending 1000 party members, along with police and troops to break it up. But the 2,000 people inside the church were joined by 10,000 more holding candles in the square surrounding the church. In an entirely non-violent way, the party members and troops were drawn into conversations with the people and withdrew on their own. As one member of the GDR Central Committee put it, "We had planned everything. We were prepared for everything. But not for candles and prayers."

Below you see a plate in the ground of the church square, in remembrance of that demonstration. It's hard to see in this picture, but there are footprints in the metal, of all sizes and shapes, to represent the huge crowd.

Here is another feature of the church square: a column that is just like the ones inside the church. I like that they put one of these outside -- I think it serves as a nice reminder that the divine is not restricted to the small constraints of our churches; it is up to us to carry an openness to Mystery out into the sqaure, into our daily activities.

Next, we wandered around the city center, eventually making our way to the Thomaskirche (St. Thomas Church). This was the church where Bach worked as the Cantor for the final stage of his career. While he was there he was highly productive, undertaking large projects such as writing the Passions, and his cycle of Cantatas for every week of the year.

The curch has a very pleasant atmosphere, so we sat there for a while, enjoying the neo-gothic interior and the nice pews (actually, lovely wooden banks with comfortable wooden seats that fold down individually).


Below, you can see one of the stained glass windows of the church -- if you zoom in you can see that Bach is pictured in the center. Another one of the windows shows Mendelssohn. The others are more traditional, showing St. Thomas, and other religious scenes.


Although this is not the original burial place for Bach, they moved his remains here, below the alter of the church:

When we circled back to the Thomaskirche after wandering around some more, at first we were disappointed to see crowds of people at the doors. We had been hoping to go in and take a closer look at some things.

When we got closer, however, we saw that people were lining up to enter for a concert given by the oganist and the Thomanchor (a boy's choir that dates back at the very least to 1254). We gladly paid the 2 Euros each, and went in to hear a program of Bach, and a couple of other choral works -- one of which was written by an 18 yr. old member of the choir!

All together, it was a beautiful day.