Mistakes after Re-unification
Mühlhausen still has to see the gradual economic improvement in Germany that is finally overcoming the strain of paying for re-unification. In the nineties of the previous century mistakes were made. There was ugly opportunism behind some and naivety behind others. Some were just the result of bureaucracy not restrained by an informed public used to preserving its heritage.
Part of the fine city wall was removed to make way for what one can only describe as a perfectly hideous shopping-centre and multi-storey carpark.
Outside the Frauentor, the only complete remaining gateway in the wall and a chief tourist attraction, renovation left a bald, bare view which still needs more trees to relieve the blankness. The "before and after" photos show what it looked like in the early 1990s and ten years later.
The view up the Steinweg, the main street that runs right through the middle of the old inner city, is beautiful, ending as it does with one of the the two Deutschordenshöfe, houses of the Teutonic Knights, and the Marienkirche. That is to say, the view was beautiful until it was spoilt by a three-storey shiny new shop in place of the dignified nineteenth-century parcel post office and, worse still, by a square glass and metal cubicle housing a newspaper kiosk and an automated telling machine, the whole thing planted in the centre of the pavement and looking very much like a public lavatory.
On the Untermarkt opposite the Divi-Blasii-Kirche, stood a characterless 60s hotel, until it was replaced by a bright salmon-coloured bank building a few years back. And not only the hotel went but also two entire street-corners, thus sweeping away several more of the original houses. The new bank just happens to stand right opposite the superb Gothic church famous for several organists and composers, most notably Johann Sebastian Bach.
Mühlhausen lies on ancient trade routes that cross Germany from the Baltic coast to the Alps, from the Rhine to the Carpathian Mountains and beyond. It is not a museum nor is it yet on the international package tour circuit. Its ancient character is genuine, the fabric of its buildings is still to a great extent untouched by alien features such as have made so many West German cities lose their individuality. There is continuity in its development, which is worth much more than any superimposed conservation could ever achieve. Kings, emperors, armies, merchants have all walked in through the Frauentor, down the Herrenstrasse or the Holzstrasse and past the Marienkirche from whose balcony the statue of Emperor Karl IV still looks down on his loyal subjects. History has made its gradual changes of style but those people would all find their way through the streets still if they returned in some ghostly procession today.
