Respecting historic workmanship
Visitors to Mühlhausen often spend several hours just walking through the streets. On the two market places, the Untermarkt and the Obermarkt, they are quite likely to hear organ music coming from either the Divi-Blasii-Kirche or the Marienkirche, which both have very fine organs. In the Divi-Blasii-Kirche, the organ was rebuilt to the specifications of Johann Sebastian Bach who was organist there in 1707-1708. The church is one of the many Gothic Hallenkirchen, a type of ecclesiastical building common in late mediaeval Germany, in which the nave and aisles are of the same height under a single undivided roof, with shorter transepts or sometimes without transepts at all, and with the choir included in the overall hall-like central space. Thus there was less division between congregation and priest, an interesting development worth comparing with the post-Reformation tendency to make the pulpit, rather than the altar, the centre of the church, thus stressing the importance of the sermon and the Bible (in the language of the people) as against the Latin liturgy.
The German King Heinrich VII (1220-1235, son of the Emperor Friedrich II) gave this church to the Order of the Teutonic Knights in 1227. The Order had two houses in Mühlhausen, one of them just inside the walls near the church, and both are still standing today. The Teutonic Knights were the organisation largely responsible for Christianising and colonising Eastern Europe, leaving huge and magnificent fortifications to mark their progress. (See the article Across Germany by Water in 1890 part two) If you look closely at the church walls you can see that individual stones carry mediaeval stonemasons' marks, which reveal much about when the church was built, who the masons were and which lodge they belonged to. When a journeyman stonemason completed his training and was awarded the title of master stonemason he received his own official mark with which he thenceforth "signed" the blocks of stone he had hewn before they were inserted into a building. In the case of Mühlhausen many of the marks indicate a connection with the chief lodge in Strasbourg. The present Divi-Blasii-Kirche was built largely in the early fourteenth century on the site of an earlier Romanesque building and shows the influence of French Cathedral Gothic particularly in the style of its pillars and the rose window in the north transept. In the stone blocks various masons' marks are still visible, although somewhat under threat from modern cleaning methods, which tend to remove the surface of the stone. Some have unfortunately already been cleaned so thoroughly that they are almost unrecognisable.
The importance of dealing gently with remnants of past workmanship has not sufficiently been acknowledged to date. City administrators have often been far too keen to present their cities as tourists would seem to expect, quaint, photogenic and tidy. They forget that the past was not mass-produced to please us nowadays but evolved at the hands of individuals suiting the needs of their own time and without modern machinery. One of the oldest parts of Mühlhausen, the tanners' quarter, makes precisely this point. It is full of tanners' warehouses from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries built higgledy-piggledy along narrow water channels - water is essential to tanning - and with high wooden drying lofts. One tanner is still carrying on his family business today. There is nothing neat and tidy or particularly pretty about this area, but the details, for those who take the time to look closely, are fascinating. Endless numbers of hands have been at work creating solutions to practical needs out of whatever materials were available, such as a wrought iron railing on a small bridge over one of the many streams. The railing is roughly fashioned and the bridge no more than a few large stone slabs looking as if they had originally been intended as gravestones. Or a solid-looking eighteenth-century door that was once elegantly finished by a local carpenter and set into the side of a house originally inhabited by a tanner with his family and apprentices. If the house is made habitable again, will the renovators restore the door or will they simply throw it into a skip and replace it with a modern version, so much less trouble?
