Where possible, ruins have been rebuilt and, in the gaps, new buildings blend harmoniously with the historic: standing in the massive Augustusplatz at the heart of the city, where the Oper Leipzig opera house faces the glass-walled Neues Gewandhaus concert hall, there’s a sense of a new lease of life.
It’s also the starting point for the three-mile Leipzig Music Trail, following in the footsteps of famous musicians — of which the city has many — as one way to explore its long history.
Perfectly placed at the crossroads between east and west, Leipzig has been a trading hub since the 12th century, when it was granted market privileges. Merchants, mainly fur traders, came from Russia and Poland to show and sell their wares. Many were Jewish, appearing in documents as early as the 14th century, although they were not allowed to settle in the city without restrictions until the 19th century
Over the years, elaborate arcades, courtyards and showrooms were constructed for temporary exhibitions and, despite being badly damaged in wartime bombing raids, many still exist.
The most famous of the arcades is the 1914 Mädler Passage, a mix of neo-Renaissance and art nouveau, which incorporated older buildings, notably Auerbach’s Keller.
This restaurant featured in Goethe’s Faust — the writer, who nicknamed the city Little Paris, studied law at the university here from 1765 to 1768, shortly after another of Leipzig’s most famous composers was working in the city.
In 1723, Johann Sebastian Bach was appointed as Cantor to the Thomasschule, where he spent 27 years providing music for four churches in the city including the Thomaskirche and Nikolaikirche. Part of the job was instructing the students in singing; the Thomanerchor, founded in 1212 and made up of young boys drawn from the surrounding area, already had a strong reputation.
In Bach’s time, the choir consisted of about 50 singers, with the best 16 performing his cantatas. Nowadays it numbers 100, including boys aged eight to 18, and you can hear them for free every Saturday and Sunday inside the Thomaskirche.
Opposite sits the Bach museum containing original manuscripts and personal items, including the console of an organ inspected and approved by Bach himself in 1743, a casket containing relics from Bach’s tomb, and a recently discovered travel trunk.
There are plenty of interactive elements, giving you the chance of arranging a Bach chorale or guessing the date of one of the manuscripts. You could also listen to everything he ever wrote at the push of a button, or acquaint yourself with the sound of individual baroque instruments.
Between the museum and the church stands an imposing bronze sculpture of the composer, paid for by Mendelssohn, who was instrumental in reviving interest in his talented predecessor a century later.
Felix Mendelssohn himself was born in Hamburg to a Jewish family but his father renounced his religion and the composer was baptised as a Lutheran at the age of seven, resulting in the addition of Bartholdy to his surname.
He first came to Leipzig in 1835 to become music director of the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra and worked with the opera house, the Thomanerchor and the city’s other choral and musical institutions.
In 1843, he founded the Leipzig Conservatory and the city soon became the music capital of Germany, where another of Leipzig’s best-known sons, Richard Wagner, famously submitted his first symphony to Mendelssohn — who appeared so impressed he promptly lost it, much to Wagner’s disappointment.
Wagner’s own music is still performed in the city today, including the planned Wagner 22 event next summer, with all 13 of his operas in the city staged over three weeks.
An exhibition in the basement of the Thomassschule details his time in the city from his birth in 1813 to 1834, 16 years before the publication of his notorious antisemitic essay, Judaism in Music, which included an attack on Mendelssohn in particular.
Leipzig’s own Jewish population was small compared to other German cities, principally because permission to settle was only granted in the 19th century.
The first Jewish cemetery was opened in 1815 and the Grand Synagogue, seating 1,500, was consecrated in 1855. By 1925, the community numbered over 13,000, making it the sixth largest in Germany.
But the rise of the Nazis saw the removal of the Mendelssohn statue outside the Gewandhaus concert hall in 1936 and the deportation of 1,652 Jews to Poland, before the two main synagogues were burned down, shops were looted, and the funeral hall was demolished on Kristallnacht.
Deportations continued through the war and by 1945 there were only 15 Jews in the city, rising just to 30 by the time the Berlin wall fell in 1989. At the railway station, there’s now a memorial standing above the tracks which carried away so many. On the former site of the Grand Synagogue, the Holocaust memorial has 140 empty bronze chairs, representing the 14,000 Jews who once prayed there, making an outline of the floor plan of the destroyed synagogue.
And around the city, you can see around 500 Stolpersteine, the cobblestones outside houses of some of those who were captured, persecuted, deported and murdered by the Nazis, replaced by stones bearing a simple inscription — name, date of birth and the date and place of death.
The Stolpersteine app, which now covers 245 cities and over 10,000 stones, gives more comprehensive information about each one.
Leipzig’s Brodyer (or Brody) Synagogue still stands; though damaged during Kristallnacht, it avoided being set on fire, and in 1993 both the interior and exterior were restored.
With the city’s Jewish population boosted by immigration from the former Soviet Union, 20 years later the community numbered 1,300 members — one of the most active in eastern Germany.
Mendelssohn has made a comeback too. Although his original statue was never recovered, an exact copy of the one originally built by Werner Stein in 1892 was commissioned to celebrate the composer’s 200th birthday.
The original site, by the Gewandhaus concert hall, was also destroyed in the Second World War, so the recreation now stands outside the Thomaskirche too — fittingly as he did so much to champion the music of Bach.
And every week, music can be heard at the house where he once lived. The perfect finale to my musical journey in Leipzig.
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