Mann und Marzipan

Lübeck, a forty-five minute train ride north-east of Hamburg, is connected to three Nobel prize winners – Thomas Mann, Günter Grass, and Willy Brandt. It is also the home of marzipan.

While each of the Nobel prize winners has a Haus dedicated to them, we visited only one on Monday – the Buddenbrookhaus, dedicated the works of the Mann family, in particular one work, Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks (which I love, hence our visit).

From 1842 to 1883 Mengstraße 4 was the family home and business headquarters of the Manns, a family of successful businessmen and local politicians. When writing Thomas Mann used the home, and the town around it, as the setting for his novel about the rise and fall of a Lübeck business family. Unfortunately in 1942 the house was destroyed by fire after a British air raid, and only the façade was left. The house was restored in the 1950s, and became a museum when it was bought by the city in the 1990s.

In the absence of the original fabric of the building (except for the façade), the foundation did not try to reproduce the house as it was during the residence of the Manns. Instead it has been decorated in contemporary style, as an exhibition space rather than a historic building. This has freed them to do some interesting things.

The ground floor, behind the entrance shop, has a permanent exhibition on the lives and careers of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and Thomas’ children, with photos, documents and artefacts, and extensive labels in German and English. If you new nothing about the Manns before you entered you would learn everything you needed to know here. The next floor is an exhibition space, but the top floor is the gem. As well as a centre for Mann scholars, they have recreated two rooms from the book, the Dining Room and the Landscape Room, where most of the action takes place. It is the night before the family moves out of the house, when Thomas Buddenbrook dreams of things that have happened there. You take a copy of Buddenbrooks in your language (there is a shelf with a range of translations) and walk around the rooms, reading the passages noted on the labels and imagining the scenes happening before you. In spite of myself I found it emotionally involving. The family record book noting Toni’s engagement, Hanno’s puppet theatre, the harmonium with the music from Tristan und Isolde – can something be ‘authentic’ when the information and physical materials are imaginary or unoriginal? Perhaps because our imaginary geographies are a way of ordering our world they can be as important to us as the physically-real ones. The map we followed in Paris was as much the one in our hearts as the one in the guide book.

Eventually reality called and we sought lunch. I.G. Niederegger brought marzipan to Germany in the early nineteenth century (he is mentioned in Buddenbrooks), and from there it spread all over the western world. Anyone who enjoys almonds and sugar should be grateful to the man. The Café Niederegger is conveniently located just around the corner from Buddenbrookhaus, directly opposite the Rathaus (Town Hall). The ground floor is their retail outlet, a wonderland of shiny paper and chocolatey smells which detained us briefly on our way out. Upstairs they serve fabulous quiche lorraine in the kind of décor that works in Germany but in Sydney would make me ill.

I should note that as we were waiting for our train Hamburg station we investigated the newsagents. I have never seen a newsagents that sold Nietzsche and Hildegard of Bingen alongside Stephen King and Dan Brown. I would like to have seen Nietzsche’s lost work, Mann und Marzipan: ‘The map we follow in our stomachs is the most important of all. And he strode forth from his cave into the valley below in search of noms.’