Leipzig 1931

YouTube’s relentless algorithms invade our minds with recommendations designed to trap us in an ever shrinking universe constructed from our innermost prejudices and secret preferences but there are rare moments when they pull a hidden gem from the deep seams of mediocrity and something of unexpected beauty rises to the surface.  Which is how this mesmerising, sunlit portrait of a world that was creeping toward a dark decade of destruction and mass murder landed on my screen. For 30 dreamlike minutes we travel through the high summer streets of Leipzig watching the city street life in orbit around a tram driver’s view of a world in motion.  None of this was planned - the film was produced for driver training purposes.

Along the way an army of local citizens saunter across the tram tracks - businessmen and lawyers, street cleaners, road repairmen, shop workers, window cleaners carrying ladders, postal workers, and a succession of handcarts and trolleys to and fro, desperate to avoid any unseemly haste, each one calculating their margin of safety to the last second. No sign of the stereotypical Teutonic submission to rules and regulations in 1931 - motorists drive their cars, trucks, and delivery vehicles at every conceivable tangent across the path of the tram.  Cyclists, male and female alike, weave through the traffic as if defended by an invisible forcefield.  Most alarming are the passing horse-drawn wagons piled high with parcels, packing cases, sacks, beer barrels and items of furniture that make slow and deliberate turns in front of the oncoming tram just seconds away from tragedy.

In the suburbs the tram runs along the centre of broad, straight boulevards lined with trees.  Closer to the city we pass along residential streets with tall mansion blocks, streets that contract on the approach to the city before expanding again into grandiloquent squares and plazas linked by busy shopping streets where luxury hotels trade side by side with stately department stores and shopping arcades. Tram tracks divide and converge at complex junctions and snake around opera houses, banks, court rooms, theatres, museums and concert halls. A thousand commercial signs of every dimension announce their services and compete for attention. City landmarks, including the massive Hauptbahnhof and the Hotel Astoria glide past. For the dedicated observer of street life it’s a glorious treat.

 

Great Railway Stations No. 16: Leipzig Hauptbahnhof

There are many cities larger than Leipzig that have to be content with train stations no more than half the size of the one that serves Leipzig. This can be explained by what happened in 1898 when the city fathers began to devise a plan to combine all the city’s stations into a single building. Inflated with civic pride they commissioned a train station on a gargantuan scale commensurate with their estimation of the city’s importance. Since the Middle Ages, Leipzig had been a major centre for trade fairs and with its university, concert halls and classical music academies, associations with J S Bach and Mendelssohn it could also claim to be a centre of high culture. So there was some basis for their self esteem. Planning for the station began in 1898, construction started in 1909 and by the time it was completed in 1915 it was Europe’s largest station by surface area with 26 platforms to admire, sheltered by an enormous six bay train shed. Two massive entrances, each with a domed entrance hall, projected forward from a 5-storey elongated terminal building which gave on to a cavernous concourse of intimidating proportions.

After the war Leipzig became part of the DDR and the extensively bomb-damaged station was renovated at a stately pace - only fully restored in 1965, more than 20 years after it was attacked. After reunification commercial priorities dictated the scooping out of the concourse floor with a modern subterranean shopping centre slotted into the newly vacant space. The retail intrusion opened in 1997 and subtly changed the character of the space from a place alive with the excitement of arrival and departure into a shopping experience with ancillary rail travel as an optional extra. These three postcards celebrate the new station in all its magnificence. They appear to be based on artists’ impressions and may well predate the completion of the buildings. One is postmarked in 1914, a year before the new station was fully operational. The photographs are from January 2019 when I changed trains there.

Postcard of the Day No. 52, Leipzig

This is a puzzling postcard – it appears to be a festival of advertising placards held aloft by men in hats and overcoats. Competing messages are everywhere and in the centre an insignificant figure (labelled DRGM - Deutsches Reich Gebrauchsmuster - German Registered Design – is this satirical?) brandishes an under-nourished Christmas tree. We seem to be present at a giant carnival of commerce, a parade of publicity. This may be a complete misreading of the situation and comments and corrections would be more than welcome. The city of Leipzig is noted as a major centre of trade and its reputation is further confirmed by the two cards shown below. One presents another busy street scene in the centre of which an oversized cigarette mounted on cartwheels is manoeuvred along the highway – an artfully disguised super-gun or an inducement to take up smoking. The second card shows a Constructivist tower adapted for displaying posters for consumer products. Absurdly tall and out-of-scale, it totally disrupts the architectural harmony of its immediate surroundings but the fact that it was selected as a postcard subject suggests it was the object of some local pride. It’s an impressively brazen concept that makes no concessions to civic values.