Lübeck: The town that said no to Hitler

Flying Ryanair is a pretty horrible thing to do at any time, but there is one advantage of flying it to Hamburg. With its customary reliability, the airline does not make too much noise about the fact that its Hamburg airport is in fact five minutes in a taxi from the centre of Lübeck (and not quite so near the centre of Hamburg, which is a mere 40 miles down the road). However, Lübeck is a sight – or rather a collection of sights – well worth seeing.

Like its much bigger neighbour, Lübeck was a key port in the Hanseatic League. Although it was badly bombed in an RAF raid in 1942, Lübeck has been so well restored to most of its medieval mercantile glory that in 1987 it was made a Unesco World Heritage Site. To look at it now you see that common architectural language familiar from the cloth towns of Flanders, right up through Holland and into Germany, and out again east as far as Gdansk and Riga: big brick churches, little brick houses with stepped gables, cobbled streets and a remarkably enduring sense of the past. For those with a literary cast of mind, Lübeck was also the home of Thomas Mann, and his novel Buddenbrooks was set in 19th-century Lübeck. His childhood home next to the impressive Marienkirche is also a museum. Much of the town remains as Mann would have known it, if you ignore a somewhat charmless main drag of Sixties-built chain stores. All you need to do in Lübeck is walk. In two or three days you can see most of its architectural splendours on foot, so take some good walking shoes....

Hitler in fact hated Lübeck because it refused to allow him to campaign there in 1932. He punished it in 1937 by ending its 700 years of independence and incorporating it into Hamburg. The bombing of 1942 was due to the significance of the port to Hitler's war effort. Inside the Holstentor, amid displays of armour and many seafaring relics, is a magnificent wooden model of the town in medieval times: many of the streets and buildings are still recognisable and functioning today, and seeing the model brings home to the visitor what a stunning job of restoration has been done to the town....