Aegidientstrasse 37, Lübeck, Germany

This post is going to be a deep dive into the house where Michelle's mom, Ulla, was born and grew up--at Aegidienstrasse 37 in Lübeck, Germany. Warning: it's a long, detailed post.

Below on the left is the front of the house today. The right image below shows the street, Aegidienstrasse, outside the house today. Lisa and Michelle were taken on a tour of this house by the architect, Thomas, who bought and restored it after Ulla's sister, Hanne, could no longer care for it. Thomas specializes in historical restoration, which means not only that the house has been treated with love but that he is deeply informed about its history. During the restoration, the front door of the house was moved back to its original center location from its previous position on the right side of the house (which made more room for the store that used to occupy the ground floor).

Long history of the house. The house was first built around 1300. We learned from Thomas that the walls between houses were all considered communal property then, which prevented major changes from happening and led to the preservation of much of the medieval city. Because I visited the Hansamuseum in Lübeck while I was there, I learned that the 1300s was when merchants in the town were beginning to get rich as a result of trading goods on ships sailed through the Baltic Sea up to Novgorod, Russia. 

There was little in Lübeck worth trading other than some beer, but goods came up from Italy and southern Europe to Lübeck and these could be exchanged in Russia for high-demand goods that traveled on the Silk Road from Asia (furs, wax, spices, fabrics). So Lübeck was a hub in medieval European global commerce, where ships were built and fortunes made, part of the Hanseatic League that depended on partnerships between merchants and sailors and soldiers to share the risk of trade and travel. There was a carving of a Russian fur trader built into a choir stall in a church in Lübeck, which tells you how integrated these two locations were by around 1400.

That means that when this house was built around 1300, it probably housed a merchant family. The cellar used to extend the entire depth of the house, from the front to the back, but the front section was later closed up. Thomas explained that the cellar was likely inhabited by poor people who during the middle ages were housed below to help heat up the newly-built brick house which needed to dry out before it was inhabited. First image below: the corner of the cellar where heat was probably generated by these cellar-dwellers (trocken-wohnung, he called it: "dry living"). The image below that shows the cellar steps. I remember this cellar being very cold even in the summer, and smelling perpetually of potatoes, which were stored down there.

The wood used for the roof beams in the house came from Baltic firs, and the wood used for the floor in the attic was the same wood used to build the ships that traveled on the Baltic--some pretty fancy sourcing of attic lumber! At some point, however, this house caught fire. It was rebuilt in 1862--tax records show a big jump in its valuation in this year. 

Family history of the house. Michelle's Oma and Opa, Sophie and Franz Ewert, moved into this house in the 1920s after Sophie's father and uncle purchased it for her. The Wolgast family lived in the nearby town of Schönberg. When Germany was divided into East and West after World War II, the border was drawn between Lübeck and Schönberg, which kept these two branches of the family apart from each other through Sophie's entire life. Thomas told us that records show the house was bought using reichsgelt which I didn't understand until my mom explained that her grandfather bought it using gold coins that the bank wasn't sure what to do with. Those gold coins are probably still sitting in that bank.

Current renovated house. The left-hand image below is the current first floor redesigned as a meeting space. When the Ewerts lived there this space was a small grocery store run by Michelle's Oma and Tante Hanne. In my memory, the store sold everything you could possibly imagine despite being the size of a small bedroom. The downstairs bathroom used to be under the staircase but had to be removed due to poor plumbing, and the right-hand image shows the new bathroom put in behind the store. Believe me when I say that this is all very fancy compared to what it used to look like...

The back part of the downstairs was the office where my Tante Hanne worked and kept the store books and where boxes with inventory for the store were stacked. This space is now the architect's office. Below to the left is the wall in his office cut to show the old, 13th-century wall behind the current one. On the right below is the remodeled downstairs kitchen associated with the store. I personally do not remember this kitchen existing, probably because I was never allowed in it :)

Above is the backyard, which includes a new glass-walled extension from the architect's office. The right side is facing the rear of the house from the little backyard. Behind the trash barrels is the entrance to the cellar.

The second floor of the house is being rented out to two different families, so we were unable to see those spaces. But we could see from the third-floor attic a newly-built outdoor patio space built on top of the glass-walled extension below. This patio is a nice feature to the back apartment, which is always where we slept when we visited during the summers. On the left, view of this deck space; on the right, view from one of the attic windows.

The attic has also been remodeled to be a living space for visiting friends. On the left below; a ceiling painting on the first floor discovered during the renovation process. You can see the borders of the painting but not much is left of its interior. On the right below, the renovated attic living space.

In the back part of the attic, above the rooms we used to sleep in, Thomas found a sign hidden up above the rafters while renovating. It's the sign from my grandfather's tailor business. It says "Franz Ewert, Master Tailor, civilian and uniform wear." Thomas gave the sign to me :)

Below are some photos of other buildings and gänge (little tiny entryways between homes into interior courtyards or passageways) in Lübeck. After these, if you still have some stamina, there is a very important licorice update.

Important licorice update. The most important part of my Oma's store was the candy section, which was full and fascinating. The best part of it was the licorice. The best kind of licorice was salmiak pastillen, which you cannot find to save your life in the United States. I assumed this was because no one there would want to eat it. But I have looked for it all over Europe, for months, and found it nowhere, beginning to suspect that it had disappeared for some reason. Some internet sleuthing led me to learn that salmiak licorice contains ammonium chloride, and that in 2012 Europe passed regulations limiting its content in foodstuffs to 0.03%. Salmiak licorice contains upwards of 7%. Not 0.07, but 7. So, I'm assuming, it was pretty much outlawed in its pre-2012 form.

I held out some desperate hope despite this news. And what do I find on Pfaffenstrasse in Lübeck but a candy store owned and operated by a man who calls himself the "licorice dealer." And that, you will all be pleased to know, is where I finally found salmiak pastillen, looking and tasting exactly as I remembered it. (Except sold in bulk, not packaged by any candy company, so who knows where this dude sourced this contraband, and honestly, who cares????) I did give Lisa some to try, and she declared it "just awful." More for me!!