Headin' Up to Bremen with the Animals

Gerhard Marck's "Town Musicians of Bremen."

The Free Hanseatic City of Bremen has always had a lot going for it.  Sitting on a pretty piece of real estate in north western Germany, it was a major player in the medieval Hanseatic League.  The vast wealth gained from maritime trade and its status as a Free Imperial City of the Holy Roman Empire made it a major regional power.  In the 19th century millions of Germans left from Bremen's coastal port of Bremerhaven, looking to start new lives in the Americas.  Badly damaged during World War II, the city was rebuilt and is once again a vibrant maritime metropolis as well as one modern Germany's remaining city-states.  Despite this long and eventful history, the city is perhaps most famous for its association with something wholly imaginary: a fairy tale.  

The Town Musicians of Bremen (German: Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten), as presented by the Brothers Grimm, tells the story of a group of old farm animals (consisting of a donkey, dog, cat, and rooster) that decide to start their lives anew and become musicians in the liberal city of Bremen.  In the story, the animals never actually make it to Bremen and decide instead to live out their days in the comfortable (former) hideout of a group of bandits.  Nonetheless, the association of the musically inclined group with Bremen persists up to today, with the city being the official terminus of the German Fairy Tale Route.  Personally, I'd always imagined the Town Musicians to be a swinging jazz band, playing something like "When the Saints Go Marchin' In."

Bremen's Marktplatz including the town hall
(left) and Bremen Cathedtral (right).

I visited Bremen in the spring of 2011 as part of "Hanseatic Tour", through northern Germany.  Easily reached from Hamburg (where my hotel was) in about an hour, Bremen has a large, brick gothic style main station that matches well with the city's character.  A few minutes walk from the station brought me to the city center.  With its narrow, cobble stone streets, soaring cathedrals, and a market square (Markt Platz) that's also listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, Bremen doesn't have to do much to impress visitors.

Böttcherstraße.

Just off from Markt Platz is a fascinating, cramped little street called the "Böttcherstraße".  The modern, expressionist architectural and artistic features of the street did not set well with the Nazi government of the 1930s.  Instead of being destroyed, however, the area was actually preserved as an example "degenerate art."  These days, the little street is packed with boutiques, cafes, restaurants, galleries, and one building even has a regular Glockenspiel that I had the chance to watch. 

The next stop was to visit the Bremen Cathedral itself.  Formally known as St. Petri Dom zu Bremen, it is a wonderful example of north German brick gothic architecture that originated in another lovely Hanseatic city, Lübeck.  The interior, I have to say, was perhaps the most beautiful of all the old, gothic churches I visited during this trip.  Perhaps it was the distinctive yet gentle blue and red stripes inside the massive main hall that charmed me so.

Interior of the Bremen Cathedral.

Visiting churches in Germany is always a bit of an odd experience.  Germany, like much of Western Europe in general, is an overwhelmingly secular, non-religious society.  As the home of the Protestant Reformation as well the home of the relics of the Three Magi, there's certainly no shortage of religious history and culture around.  With few exceptions, however, the churches I've been to seem in practice more like tourist attractions than major pillars of people's (spiritual) lives. Indeed, the majestic Cologne Cathedral ranks as the most visited tourist site in the entire country.  But how many visitors or locals for that matter stick around for Mass, I wonder?  In any case, I enjoy churches since they serve as nice resting places during my travels; quiet spaces in which to slow down and collect my thoughts.  I always make it a point to drop some spare change in the collection box and light a candle while offering my silent homage.

But the silence was disrupted when my stomach growled.  With the appetite gained after all the wandering around, I had initially thought I would seek out something traditionally German.  "Vegetarian" and "German" are not two terms one immediately associates with each other but there are a few, if quite downplayed, standard herbivore friendly dishes that can be usually found.  In the end, I settled for something quite un-German: JACKIE SU - urban street kitchen.  I had a wonderful meal consisting of some kind of pumpkin curry with rice and mango juice.  While eating in the chic urban street interior, I tried hard to figure out what exactly the style of cooking was.  After much thought the answer was clear: ambiguous Asian.  At any rate, the food was great.

My trusty Baedeker guidebook suggested Bremen's Schnoor neighborhood was worth a visit and thus I set out to explore it.  Schnoor was the area where many of the city's sailors, traders, and fishermen lived and worked in Bremen's maritime heyday.  Now it's a protected historical district known for the many old (often renovated) buildings and sometimes narrow, narrow streets.

Around the Schnoor district...

...with its many narrow passages.

A sampling of Bremen's coffee samplings.

It was late afternoon and the perfect time for a leisurely cup of coffee.  A street just across from the town hall presented me with two choices: Starbucks or "Kaffeehaus".  Naturally I choose the latter.  Although more famous as the home of Beck's beer brewery, Bremen also has a long history as being a center of the European coffee trade.  If you've had a cup of coffee in Germany in the past 200 years, the beans probably passed through Bremen.  Aside from merely selling the stuff, the city is also is known to have the finest coffee in the land.  I had a café au lait (German: Milchkaffee) and was not at all disappointed.

While sipping one of the finest cups of coffee I've ever had in my entire life, I got to thinking about me sitting in a place like Bremen and being able to actually drink coffee.  So many of the foods we take for granted originated in far away lands.  Coffee for instance, was originally discovered in Ethiopia, introduced to Europe via the Middle East, and is now mostly produced in South America.  Other New World staples that conquered the world include potatoes and chilli peppers.  Oranges and tea came originally from China and bananas from South East Asia.  But now it's possible to buy all these items at even the most Spartan of supermarkets.  The word that came to my mind while pondering it all was  interconnectedness or 'interbeing' as Thich Nhat Hanh eloquently terms it:

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.

And after the thoughts on interbeing, globalization, and how for the first time in human history all the world's people are "one people", I brought myself back to the matter at hand: my cup of coffee brought to me by the world.

A cup of Bremen's finest, with a wafer on
the side