Inside it is bedlam. The next train to Lubeck departs in 8 minutes but the ticket machines are complicated and make no concession to anyone without the firmest grasp of the native language. Nearby stands a railway-man straight out of central casting - blue coveralls and baggy cap, thick boots and the various implements of his trade hanging from a leather belt. He is looking at some sort of well-thumbed maintenance schedule in his hand. I try my basic German and without looking up, he jabs a thumb at the next booth and utters something that could mean anything. But it's a sign of sorts and I press a few buttons as the crowd of impatient commuters swarms around me.
We make the train by the skin of our teeth. As the minute hand on the platform clock hits departure time, there is the merest of shudders and our comfortable carriage glides forward completely noiselessly. We see that we are on the Copenhagen express. The journey takes about an hour and within twenty minutes the green and placid countryside of Schleswig Holstein starts to roll by. It is drowsily peaceful in that way that air and road travel can never be, but the narcotic depth of our relaxation is suddenly and sharply disturbed by an inspection. We have the wrong ticket. Huh? Harry arranges his face into a look of mild concern and Occy does an elaborate little pantomime of alarm that suggests we might have hurt the official's feelings. Two identical middle aged ladies across the aisle console us with sympathetic smirks and make discreet clucking noises. The inspector seems mollified. "So, life is too long, no?" and he departs.
It is a short trudge from Lubeck station to our hotel where our welcome is brisk but courteous. The twins share a comfortable room decorated with eye searing stripes of red, orange and blue, and I am shown to one where the idea seems to be factory chic. The heavy zinc covered occasional table has stout wooden wheels and looks as if it had been used for moving concrete. Everything is black or grey but there is a vast walk-in shower with water pressure that could hose mud off a tank. We have arrived.
This is to be a wander. We have no itinerary other than a few nights here and then a couple in Hamburg. The twins have already started at university and this is a sort of bonus leg to their own summer adventures. I just love travelling with them - they take it all in and never comment with a pre-conception. My receptiveness is clouded by prior knowledge and a partiality to experiences of which I already have a happy memory. It is is a kind of comfort journey, where the new is not so easily registered. But they do see it and yet respect my narrower vista.
The Holstentor fills our view. I remember it from the old 50 Deutschmark note. Its plump and bulging towers, filled with imaginary gold and topped by conical slate roofs are emblematic of the prosperous burgher ethos of this ancient Hanseatic port. Lubeck is described as the Venice of Germany although it sits on two islands in the River Trave rather than in a lagoon. During the Cold War, the eastern edge of its suburb was pressed right up against the Inner German Border. Now the sight from within the spire of Saint Mary's church is a calmer one towards the boundary with Denmark rather than the razor wire, watch-towers and "death strip" of the demarcation line with Communist Europe.
I am a foody. We head to the Rathaus and descend to a vaulted chamber where the walls are covered with armorial shields and roe antlers that hang above solid brown furniture and stiff linen napkins. We are shown to our own "booth" which is a tiny room with an oak door and narrow leather benches set against wooden partition walls. There are pictures of pheasants, facsimiles of merchant ledgers and photographs of one of Lubeck's most famous sons, Thomas Mann. Occy just loves the mystery of our apparent seclusion, but I can see that Harry is steeling himself for a "briefing" from his father and makes some light hearted comments about the heavy ambience. I give up after a few "facts" and soon we are enjoying a happy evening and delicious meal - veal dumplings, rosti, creamed herrings and spiced cabbage.
Lubeck boasts two Nobel Laureates for literature, their awards separated by seventy years. But wandering around, I later sense that the town's attitude towards both Thomas Mann and Gunter Grass is more nuanced and ambiguous than the photos in our booth at the Ratskeller would seem to suggest. The civic monuments to each seem to be rather low key and unobtrusive. Mann was an unpolitical reactionary descended from that comfortable burgher class that was the focus of his most famous work, Buddenbrooks. Yet he fled from Germany to the USA where he was lionised amongst all the other emigres from Hitler's regime. His constant themes seemed to be fate, decay and death. Whether in his own unhappy family circumstances (his supressed homosexuality and the suicide of his son), the Alpine sanatorium of The Magic Mountain or the tortured decline of Aschenbach in the more explicitly titled Tod in Venedig, the darker motifs of the German Romantic movement were ever present. He seemed to be both a German and of the merchant class against his will, and the rejection implied by his self-imposed exile was a rebuke to his countrymen.
Gunter Grass too subverted the bourgeois ethos of his adopted town. In The Tin Drum, the posturing Matzerath was one character by which Grass accused the burgher class of too easily falling in with the Nazis, their moral failure emphasised by the way it is seen through the eyes of "the other", in this case the stunted child Oskar. The author was an almost exact contemporary of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, to whose own style of "magic realism", Grass's work was frequently compared. But the German's indictment of the complicity of his fellow citizens was later denounced as hypocrisy when he revealed, at a sixty year remove, that he too had served in the Waffen-SS as a teenager. He died in 2015, a year after Marquez, and achieved a redemption - his house in Lubeck bordered that belonging to Willi Brandt, revered statesman and former Social Democratic Chancellor of the Federal Republic. Walking around Brandt's property, it's clear that it is his aura that shines on that of his erstwhile neighbour next door, rather than the other way around.
The twins don't seem to be too fussed by any of this, although Occy shows interest in a section of the Berlin Wall that stands in the politician's garden. But her perspective is that of someone looking at a piece of "modern art" or at the chunk of some ancient ziggurat. The history and thus the context of how this unlovely blob ended up in Willi Brandt's yard (he was also the mayor of West Berlin) seems to be of only tangential interest. Harry is absorbed by his own thoughts and merely glances around. But it's a lovely sunny day and really what is the point of getting vexed by their own interpretation of something I think is settled. My mistake here is not to probe their reaction and thus to learn something that is fresh and new.
We take a walk down to the banks of the Trave. En route, I mention with all the confidence of an aficionado who has just read the guidebook that Lubeck is "famed" for its marzipan. There is a shop right there. We go in. The sales "assistant" immediately sizes us up as irksome tourists - this is plainly an emporium for people who take marzipan seriously and we are firmly dissuaded from touching any of the heavily wrapped offerings. Occy is fully aware of this rebuff but is too polite to make a comment about it and leaves the premises with an air of carefree dignity. Having enthused but now feeling rather foolish, I buy a token handful of silver wrapped lumps. They are bland, sugary and revolting - nothing like the thick yellow almond paste that went around my grandmother's Easter and Christmas cakes.
Our meander along An de Obertrave is wonderful. Here and there people are swimming in the shadows cast by the waterfront houses with their "Dutch" style gables. Roses grow out of the pavements to climb their half timbered walls and the cobbled alleyways are tranquil and overlooked by window boxes. Well used bicycles are propped unchained beneath ancient gas lamps. It is a serene experience and further on there are boats, yachts and barges tied up and quietly bumping against the banks. Later we enter one of the many beautiful churches and look inside the mediaeval infirmary and "dormitory" for the elderly. There are exquisite carvings, reliefs and statues for which we would have had to queue for hours to see in Florence: here we have them entirely to ourselves.
We travel on the "local" back to Hamburg. The seats are uncomfortable but, needless to say, we are absolutely on time. The city had to be almost completely rebuilt after the fire-bombings and infernos unleashed by the RAF during the War. There was no time for a careful re-construction of ancient thoroughfares - Hamburg is a massive working port near the mouth of the Elbe and the citizenry had to rebuild their own lives quickly. There is no sensitivity about "heritage" here, as seems more obvious in UNESCO protected Lubeck. We head down to a bar standing on a wharf of the elaborate canal system that joins the Elbe at various intervals as it passes through the city. As the British planes above set fire to the city below, people flung themselves into the boiling water or were asphyxiated as the towering flames sucked in all the available air. Afterwards, humans could only be identified by the charred remains of their teeth. Now, the granite mass of the river seems to bulge between its banks and moves below us like a remorseless tongue of volcanic lava.
Across the water stand some massive naval dockyards: a huge supply vessel is being gently nudged towards its moorings by two squat tug-boats. Beyond is a refinery and there is the occasional jet of flame as gas is ignited into the atmosphere. Everything else is black and blue and grey and jagged. Cranes crank away lifting cargoes and other indeterminate lumps along the jetties. It is a scene of industrial Valhalla but there are dots of human activity. More immediately in view is the new Elbe Philharmonic, standing only partly complete on yet another spar of the wharf. It is a stunning vision - a mixture of silvered golf ball and egg box, perched above the niebelungen scrambling of the naval yard across the river.
Our hotel is just a comfortable as the one in Lubeck and the staff are well-groomed, courteous and efficient. There are no interns, newbies or "guest workers" here - everyone looks and moves as if they could be running the whole business. We head out for a late evening meal and find a restaurant by the side of a busy dual carriageway. A more charmless spot you could not hope to find, but the place is buzzing and the food sensational. An affable waiter takes us under his wing and guides us through some amazing wines - Moselle and a delicious red from Baden. We all happily scoff and chat away and plan our ramble for the following day.
We cover a lot of ground, completing a wide circuit around the lakes in the middle of the city and head back to the site of the old town square. It is a hot day but we agree to visit the main art gallery. It is deserted. Occy is relentless and wants to see everything. I attempt some exposition of the vast painting of Frederick the Great before his troops on the eve of Rossbach, but she has not come here just to listen politely to her old man droning on about his slight knowledge of the Seven Years War. On and on we go and I have to admire her love of the quirky and unusual. The heat is absolutely stifling and Harry and I eventually slump together on a bench in one of the airless lobbies. We are shaken awake and goaded up to the top floor where she has discovered some sort of workshop. Inside are fantastical papier-mache creations that look to be a design for a carnival float. Everything is painted back and white. Enough. We flee down the stairs and emerge gasping onto the street.
That evening is spent down on the Reeperbahn. The title "Red Light District" hardly does it justice and the imagined ambience of seediness, incognito writhing and predatory pimps is entirely absent. This is to sex what Waitrose is to food retailing. In the middle of the thoroughfare is the famous picture postcard police station. One seriously gorgeous citizen sidles past us with a brazen stare and a perfect smile. I try to kid myself that she has batted her eyelids at me rather than my son. But there are in fact very few sex workers around. Instead, the boulevard has been given over to a mass of pop-up bars with wide television screens. It is the first night of the World Cup in Brazil and the hosts are playing unfancied Croatia. We cram ourselves into a tiny space and Harry squeezes himself towards the bar. It is all pretty disappointing and after a lacklustre start Brazil put a goal into the back of their own net. We retreat.
Our last day is spent in Altona. Although a suburb, it has some grand civic architecture and rose filled public parks. There is gigantic fountain spouting between the figures of two bearded centaurs writhing with a surprised looking fish. But the area is eerily quiet and the famous town hall appears to be closed. Once again, we appear to have a chunk of one of Germany's largest cities to ourselves. Altona used to have a large and prosperous Jewish community, but there are no signs of re-population. Perhaps I am just imagining the silence. Meanwhile Occy is taking a picture of her brother made to look as if one of the fountains is jetting out the front of his trousers. We laugh.
That night we go past the Saint Michael church, standing in a vast concrete plateau with its statue of a rather energised looking Martin Luther, and head towards a narrow strand of all that remains of Hamburg's original old town. It is a cramped alley full of lopsided gingerbread houses where most of the outer wall woodwork is painted a uniform green. But it all feels pretty lifeless. We find a small restaurant and are taken to an upstairs gallery with an uneven wooden floor and low rafters where you can bang your head with ease. We seem to be the only ones there but we are tired and there is no mood to press on somewhere else. Our desultory conversation is broken by the appearance of an enormous and bearded old man dressed as a sailor and carrying an ancient accordion. We politely compose ourselves to listen to the "entertainment", but he gives us a cross and suspicious stare and presses on to a private room whose occupants we have only just detected. One or two of them poke their heads around the door to look at us. Soon, the accordion wheezes into action and the company warms up. After a short while, they are really belting it out - sea shanties and goodness knows what. Later he emerges, sweating heavily but wearing the same irascible scowl. As he passes our table where we are now paying our bill, I notice that he has a small iron cross pinned to his lapel.
We head back to our hotel. There is a blast of a ship's horn on the Elbe. The flames from the far off refinery continue to probe the sky.
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