Driving in the dark on the autobahn in Germany in winter for four hours is no picnic, especially with non-existent street lights, but Steven did it. Thank goodness we've been blessed with ideal traveling weather sans snow for the 13 days we were on the road. Mainz was to be our last stop before home.
We arrived at our airbnb late around 6:45 pm and met our host and got settled. Reason for an apartment instead of a hotel was to do laundry. We put on three loads that night and got it all clean and dry before we left the next day. Nothing worse than coming home and having to lug all those clothes to our basement and bring it all up again. Needless to say it was a late night for some if us because we decided to explore the old city. It was the 12th day of Christmas the day before, so Jan. 6th was Epiphany and everything in Bavaria was closed as it was a state holiday in the Catholic south where we stayed in Nürnberg.
I chose Mainz as our last stop for the number one reason that the Gutenberg Museum was there. As an avid historian, I was keen to see a working printing press, especially like the ones Gutenberg created, and also to see three surviving copies of his printed bibles of which only 49 remain. But more on that later.
Mainz, what's left of the old town is strikingly beautiful. It is situated on the Rhine River and was a hub for trade back in Roman times, and cultivated artists and craftsmen and people who lived there of historical note. Sadly for Mainz, it was heavily bombed during the allied air strikes during WWII. Not much is left of the otiginal half-timbered and baroque houses of the wealthy merchants. You can see the old, mixed with the new, and many buildings have since been lovingly restored, but as you view old photos of the devastation you cannot help but be incredibly sad about the destruction and suffering caused by war and how futile it always is.
We walked along the narrow, dark grey, basalt cobbled streets gazing up at the lit houses and also soft yellow Christmas lights and stars still strung across the narrow streets while peeking into boutique shops selling unique clothing and articles for your home with steep prices to match. The lights above sway gently in the breeze as we walked along searching for dinner. We wanted Italian and found a good one in the old town, but it was completely full, so we made our way to our second choice and were glad we did. Pasta for dinner!
We had to wait to visit St. Stephen's until morning to see the most precious thing in that cathedral...its stained glass. Now, from the outside, this church looks quite ordinary; pale yellow limestone with red sandstone at its corners and rounded spires. It was heavily bombed during the war and all of its medieval and renaissance stained glass was shattered and much of the inside and outer walls were destroyed too. One priest made it his life mission to rebuild this church and it was lovingly restored over the years, but the new windows remained clear. Then something extraordinary happened. The priest wrote to a very famous and very old artist in 1970 whose work he greatly admired, telling him about the church and about the windows. He asked him to come to Mainz for a commission to create new stained glass windows for the entire church. The artist was a Russian Jew, one of the types of people who had been persecuted by the Nazis. But this artist was also a deeply religious and forgiving man and he told the priest that he would love to do it - that artist was Marc Chagall.
Chagall had a vision of what he wanted, and that vision was blue. In the past, the most vibrant blues in the world were derived from a semi-precious stone called lapis lazuli that was ground down to a powder and mixed with linseed oil or egg to create colour pigments for art, most notably for the blue of Mary's cloak. Chagall worked with over 26 different blues to create the effect of peace, harmony and a connection between Christians and Jews. He finished his last window at the advanced age of 98 and died three months later, not seeing the effect of all his work. His assistant who had worked closely with him for 26 years finished the rest of the interior.
Now, walk with me and imagine entering a sea of blue illuminated walls like the vastness of the ocean enveloping you in a feeling of stillness and harmony. The figures on the windows in contrast of flashes of yellow and red and stand out from the blue. And as in all churches with stained glass, the pictures tell a story, and this one is of hope and forgiveness and peace. Sit down in a plain wooden pew and gaze around you, drinking in the blue and feeling the love that the artist pored into his work wash over you and be at peace. Beautiful!
The next stop was St. Martin's Cathedral and it was very old, built upon the ruins of a Roman temple. Outside, the red sandstone was striking against the pale grey blue sky of winter. Inside, massive rectangular columns anchored to the stone floor reached upwards, connected to one another by rounded arches. The windows were small with rounded arches as well signalling that this was a Romanesque church. The altar was unususual in that there were more than a dozen steps to climb, thus elevating the choir area high above the crowds for better viewing. What was also unusual was what appeared to be two altars at both ends of the cathedral.
In one corner to the side was the beautiful hand carved nativity set, life size. The backdrop was a forest of fir trees still giving off a strong evergreen scent. The trees were simply adorned with an assortment of straw braided stars in intricate patterns as all the Christmas trees seem to be in the European churches. Big stone edifices of baroque nobles lined each column with hands folded in prayer, their eyes raised to the heavens asking forgiveness for their sins, while angels above raised a stone curtain to the heavens representing hope, while skeletons leered from below and behind reminding everyone that death is inevitable.
While we were there, an organ concert started and we were graced with music from the old pipes for almost an hour as we gazed around and enjoyed sitting out of the cold, for surprisingly, this cathedral was heated! Yes! It is rare to find a heated cathedral in Europe, and they seem to be the oldest ones built on Roman sites. There were old iron vents along the far walls of the church with warm air rising from the engineered hypocausts below, a Roman engineering marvel. Not that you felt much of the heat from the benches, but it did take the edge off the cold, and we were grateful for it.
Onwards to explore the old market which was quite lively with Saturday shoppers buying fresh fruits, vegetables, breads, cheeses, meats and pastries. A rare Renaissance fountain which miracuously survived the bombs, stood to the side, heavily decorated with lively figures and soft pastel painted guild houses surrounded the square. It was at this market that we found our shop from our childhood, E.Otto Schmidt Lebkuchen from Nürnberg. My sister and I rushed in with anticipation to buy a decorated tin of Nürnberg filled with lebkuchen, stöllen cake! Elise lebkuchen, dominoes and my favourite, spekulatius spiced cookies. Alas, the Christmas visitors to the city had almost completely cleaned out their inventory and not one tin was to be had, along with much of anything. The windows were all decked out with tins and cookies and we asked to buy some from the window displays, but the clerk refused saying she was not allowed! What?!? We had come all this way, only to have our hopes dashed. We settled on a package of Elise lebkuchen and butter crescent cookies and ate one as we left for the Gutenberg Museum.
I was really looking forward to this museum since it's the reason we chose to come to Mainz. Plus, we hadn't been to many museums on our road trip except for the day before in Nürnberg, so I very much wanted to see Johannes Gutenberg's printing press, the original Bibles he produced, and to learn more about him.
We were not disappointed! Now the thing is, I don't like to be hurried when going through a museum, and everyone likes to see different things, so as par for the course, we all split up and went our separate ways, agreeing to meet back at the cafe in a couple of hours.
It was like a treasure trove for me. Old books that were printed using various models of printing presses from Gutenberg's original model. So what did I learn about Gutenberg? First, he came from a wealthy family, but surprisingly, no painted portraits survive of him which is highly unusual as the son of a well to do family back in the first half of the 1400s. Second, he got his idea of a printing press from watching how old wine making presses from Roman times worked. He was not the first person to create a printing press as most people think. Printing presses were already around and the method was to use a block of wood to engrave a series of letters, even pictures on it, ink it and print it. However, the process of making these blocks was very time consuming and expensive and the results were often blurred or imprecise. One block could only print one page. Gutenberg's claim to fame was inventing a better mousetrap as it were.
He created a system of movable type where he could design his own font, create a mold of that letter, pour in lead and voila, a bunch of letters that he could rearrange on a tray to create words and sentences. He would ink them with what looked like fist sized sheep skin puffs in black ink originally, then other sections in the bible that should stand out were in red or blue. Then the whole board was locked together and placed on the board while a piece of vellum or parchment was carefully lowered onto the board. The whole thing was then moved under a giant screw and then a lever was pulled hard twice to press the inked letters to the vellum. The whole thing was then rolled back, the arm with the paper lifted, and the very first page of the bible was printed! The clearness of the letters was as precise and detailed as if it were hand written by monks.
Latin was the written language of the time and Gutenberg decided to originally print 140 copies of the Bible in Latin, but soon raised the number to 180 copies after commissions started pouring in. He sold the Bible as loose leaf sheets, printed on two sides and not bound. The buyer would then take the loose sheets and have them illuminated by their favourite artists with coloured pictures and gilt and each Bible was then bound in a cover of the buyer's choosing and was as ornate as he wished. Thus, all 180 copies of the Bible were actually quite unique because of the illumination. Only 49 original Bibles exist today, and of those 49, three are in the Gutenberg Museum, two full ones and one half one in a bomb proof vault with high security in a darkened room. The Bibles are quite big and heavy and come in two volumes even though each page is double sided. Fun fact, the pope did not get a copy of one of the first printed Bibles!
The importance of the invention of using movable type in a printing press on the world was as astounding, rapid and world changing as the invention of computers in our lifetime. It was also instrumental in spreading the Protestant Reformation in the church later when Martin Luther came on the scene in the next century and made the Bible accessible in the common language of German instead of Latin which only the clergy or educated nobles could read.
The museum also showed how ink was made from different colours using natural materials like semi precious stones, bark, spices, metals and the like and how they were ground down to powders and boiled and mixed with other fixatives to create the ink.
In addition, there were many old printing presses to admire, although the ones from the 1400s no longer exist. Ironically, the press that allowed the Reformation to spread rapidly, was indirectly the cause of the terrible and tragic religious wars between Protestants and Catholics or more commonly known as the Thirty Years War which swept across Europe between 1618 to 1648 on a level of destruction of property and horrific deaths of innocent civilians not seen again until the 20th century. The war was fought almost exclusively in Germany with battles fought over and over again in the same places with the mostly agrarian population suffering the most. This war, originally of religion, quickly became a war of territorial rights as all wars seem to be. Much of Germany was destroyed in those fanatic times and the loss of population and suffering of the people in Europe,and especially Germany, was staggering. The Holy Roman Empire ceased to exist as a ruling entity. Who will ever know what great minds were lost in that war of attrition and what culture was forever destroyed in art, literature, architecture and science.
Later on, I saw a couple of demonstrations of a reproduction of a 15th century press using Gutenberg's movable type and was even inspired to buy one page of a copy of the Bible in the gift shop. The original Bibles are priceless and one single page has been sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Ironically, Gutenberg never profited from his invention of movable type and died penniless.
There were a lot of other things we missed in Mainz like the discovery of a Roman amphitheatre right beside the train station. As usual, new construction in Europe always involves finding something ancient underneath. The amphitheatre has been exposed, but it is still an archeological digging site, so not open to the public. Well worth a return visit one day!
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