The Place of Limes

Hooray! Thanks for playing, friends. I like free association. Convinced that the truth couldn't possibly be more fun than your imaginations, I did a little research on Leipzig and you lucky, lucky people get to hear what I found out:

Leipzig is the place of limes. Somewhere around the 8th century, a group of Slavic settlers called Sorbs founded a city about 100 km south of what is now Berlin. This group of people focused their religious energies on the veneration of the lime tree and named their new home "Lipzk" (place of limes) in honor of their arborescent ardor. Eventually Lipzk, place of limes, morphed into Leipzig, hometown of Johann Sebastian Bach and epicenter of the Peaceful Revolution of 1989.

On Saturday we saw the St. Nicholas Church, famed for its age (it was built in 1165), mixed architecture styles (because the process of building it took so long that the original Romanesque style was no longer fashionable...) and the fact that it took the entire East German government by surprise with the nonviolent protests that brought ten of thousands of citizens into the streets in fall of 1989, sparking the "Peaceful Revolution" that paved the way for the bloodless reunification of the two German states. A bewildered East German official said, "We were prepared for everything... everything except candles and prayers."

We saw the St. Thomas Church, which would have been significant for the fact that Martin Luther preached and disputed there once, except that is totally overshadowed by the fact Johann Sebastian Bach, the (Lutheran!) church musician, worked and composed there for dozens of years. We saw a Motette service there and heard the St. Thomas Boys' Choir, which has been continually in existence ever since Bach was the choir director.

Then we went to the Stasi Museum and saw the evidence of how the East German Office of Homeland Security routinely, minutely, obscenely invaded the lives and privacies of its citizens. Then we stopped at the ultra-modern train station-slash-shopping mall to eat dinner and window shop.

Over a thousand years of history in a day. No wonder Lessing once said of Leipzig, "I'm coming to Leipzig, a place where the whole world can be seen in miniature." The place of limes.