Bauhaus and Lutherstadt Wittenberg

Leaving Leipzig with the goal of reaching Berlin, I got on the train headed for Lutherstadt Wittenberg, but while reading my guide book, I saw that if I took a small detour I would end up in the town of Dessau, which is famous for being the home of Bauhaus architecture. So, in the spirit of, "follow where the wind takes you", I made the detour and stopped off in Dessau to walk through the Bauhaus campus of Gropius.

This is the backside of the original Bauhaus "Bauhaus". What I take from this is that when these buildings were first designed and built in the 1920's, they were sparse and non-detailed in comparison to the richly ornamented buildings of their predecessors.

They are stripped to their essence, radical for their time....

...they seem just kind of "run of the mill" today. But to put myself into the shoes of a citizen in the 1920's and having only seen the highly detailed stuff from before, this must have been radical. I guess that's how we might see those Frank Gehry buildings today.

Martin Luther, yeah THAT Martin Luther.

Here in the Saxony-Anhalt Region's town of Lutherstadt Wittenberg (formerly just Wittenberg) was where on October 31st, 1517, Martin Luther posted his famous 95 theses criticizing the Catholic church.  

I arrived in the early evening and took a walk around town as the sunset. Beautiful. Here's the Stadtkirche, in which Martin Luther gave many a sermon.

This is the tower (added after the 1500's) of the Schlosskirche which is across town and where....

....on these doors, Martin Luther posted his famous 95 theses.

Ok, actually, that was a picture of the real door. The church is undergoing renovation and this is what it really looks like.

The evening I was out walking around, there was some kind of performance going on and I ducked into the back to listen to some religious music (I think, or it was opera). But one of the best things of the night was I was out at a cafe getting tea and cake and it turns out the cafe I was at was run by Sicilians who had come to the former East Germany because ten years ago, there was a demand of Italian food and gelato (much like the same migration of Italians to West Germany after WWII). They were so happy to meet an Italian "speaker."

This small chapel, right next to the Stadtkirche, is the Corpus Christi Chapel, in which in 1518, Martin Luther appealed to the Pope to set up a council to try Luther as a heretic.

In 1520, at the place of this oak, Luther burned his document declaring his excommunication from the Church. Man, the early 1500's were full of action in Europe with both the Renaissance and the start of the Protestant Revolution. Whew.

I like this statue of Martin Luther that I found in my hotel.