Hanseatic Lübeck

An hour and a half from Kiel on the train; a city with medieval buildings, little narrow alleyways, nineteenth century facades and nightlife. It's moments like these that I realise just how crowded Europe is. Lübeck is lovely, charming and interesting, with a sense of the past and the future which Kiel lacks.

Yesterday Mum and I went to the Thomas Mann house and saw an exhibition about his children, all six of them. It was really the first time I've read about Germans who renounced theircitizenshipp and actively helped the Americans and British in WWW2. Erika Mann was a warcorrespondentt and one of her brothers served in the army. She wrote and article about how the reason there were no anti-Nazi spies in Germany was because their were none- anti-Nazis that is. Her articles all had beginnings like: It takes a German to understand the Germans: Returning from six months at the front the daughter of ex-German writer Thomas Mann explains the German soldier. You have to put the forties voiceover on it to get the full effect. Knowing what was happening at the time made reading her chipper, we're in it for the boys type articles even more creepy.

On a lighter note, one of the other daughters, Elizabeth Mann, who lived the longest, had a dogtypewriterr and samples of the script her dog had written. It was mostly nonsense with the occasional bad cat and good dog slipped in. The audio guide also had a recording of her singing and her dog playing on his dog piano. There's a play in that somewhere.