Mühlhausen has a mystery on its hands, which, as I write in May 2011, is very far from being solved. And because it concerns the City's most important secular building, the Rathaus (City Hall) it has also become a fairly heated controversy.
Roland Lange is the man responsible for the historic leaded windows in my own house, which is how we became acquainted. He was born and bred in Mühlhausen, has spent much of his time since Reunification in 1989 saving historic buildings with his own hands or, if demolition could not be averted, in rescuing as many of the artefacts, windows, doors, carved beams, blocks of travertine stone and a great many other bits and pieces which he has then reused in restoration work on other houses in the city. In fact, Roland Lange was one of the first to recognise the damage that over eager town planners could do in the wave of new construction work just after 1989. He feels very strongly about the need to preserve the ancient buildings in his city and has done a large amount of very detailed research into its mediaeval structure.
The odd thing about the Rathaus (City Hall) is that, unlike most prosperous mediaeval cities in Germany, Mühlhausen does not have a single building that is recognisable as the seat of city government. Instead it has a conglomeration of buildings which have been added to over centuries but no documentary evidence of a purpose-built City Hall before the early 13th century and even then no specific building was mentioned. In fact, the City Hall is quite difficult to find among the narrow streets. It is on neither of the great market places, Obermarkt or Untermarkt, where one might have expected to find the most important building in an Imperial Hanseatic City. The Ratsstrasse leads down from the Obermarkt and one's first glimpse of the City Hall is of an archway at the bottom of the street.
