The history of the founding quarter and Fischstraße 22

In historical city registers, our property is recorded under changing house numbers: in 1796 as No. 84, in 1812 as No. 10, in 1820 as No. 85 in the Marien Quarter, Block 78. The plot boundaries themselves remained almost unchanged over the centuries — one and the same narrow strip of land, simply with a changing number. The house that stood here before 1942 is recorded in the historical building documentation of the Hanseatic city with the abbreviation “(†)”: destroyed in the bombing raid of the night of 28 to 29 March 1942.

                                     

The plot at Fischstraße 22

1143 – The Beginning

In 1143, Lübeck is founded between the market, St. Mary’s Church and the harbour on the Trave — a city regarded as the “prototype of the modern Western planned city” that served as a model for later city foundations on the Baltic Sea. This very area — south of St. Mary’s Church, sloping down towards the Trave — remains to this day the demonstrably oldest settled part of the city: the founding quarter, traversed by the harbour rib streets Alfstraße, Braunstraße, Fischstraße and Mengstraße.

Medieval Origins

Archaeological finds date the earliest development of the quarter to before 1180: a wooden cellar on the plot at Braunstraße 30 was dated by dendrochronology — that is, by analysis of its tree rings — to 1180–1190. Between the harbour of the time and the market, the first Lübeck merchants built their warehouses: more than 40 wooden cellars in sill-and-post construction, as later uncovered by archaeologists. Shortly afterwards, the city’s first brick houses were also built here — fragments of which came to light during later excavations.

In the Middle Ages the quarter was the centre of the Hanseatic long-distance merchants and patricians, densely built with gabled houses on narrow plots. Fischstraße itself appears for the first time in a document in 1263, as “platea piscium” — fish market. In 1362 it is called “Vischstrate”, in 1413 “Visstrate”; its present name was not officially assigned until 1852. For centuries, Gothic and Renaissance gabled houses defined the roughly 210-metre-long alleyway, which begins at the foot of St. Mary’s Church and runs out towards the Obertrave.

Famous Residents

Between the market and the Trave, long-distance merchants settled in Braunstraße, Fischstraße and Alfstraße from the city’s founding onwards, shaping the life of the Hanseatic city for centuries. For the house at Fischstraße 22 itself — the plot on which The Layhead stands today — two residents can even be identified by name, and they illustrate the kind of people who were typically at home here.

                  Coat of arms of the Bomhover family on the letter chapel of St. Mary’s Church, Lübeck © Katrin Eckloff

The house at Fischstraße 22 belonged to the councillor and fleet commander Berend Bomhover, also known as Bernd Bomhouwer, born in Münster and died in 1526. Traceable as a merchant in Lübeck from 1486, he was elected to the council in 1501 and subsequently stood at the centre of some of the most dramatic episodes in Hanseatic history: in 1503 he travelled to Sweden to secure the release of the imprisoned Queen Christine, in 1509 he commanded the Lübeck fleet during the Danish-Lübeck War, in 1510 he occupied the island of Bornholm, and in 1522/23 he led, together with councillor Hermann Plönnies, the fleet that supported Gustav Vasa in the Swedish War of Liberation and captured Stockholm on 21 June 1523 — the mayors of the defeated city handed Bomhover and Plönnies the city keys in recognition. To this day, his coat of arms on the letter chapel of St. Mary’s Church commemorates him.

Some sixty years later, the merchant and councillor Heinrich Störning, born around 1550 in Rendsburg and died in 1592 in Lübeck, lived on the same plot at Fischstraße 22. Störning, who is also said to have served as a captain on Lübeck warships, was elected to the council in 1580; his son Thomas Störning likewise became a councillor of the city.

              Extract from the Building and Architectural History of Lübeck (BASt), Archive of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck: Residents and owners of Fischstraße 22 with source references

The merchant Thomas Fredenhagen lived for a time in the house at Fischstraße 1, on the corner of Schüsselbuden. His medieval vaulted cellar later became home to the wine bar “Fredenhagens Keller”, which was well known far beyond Lübeck in the first half of the 20th century.

The most famous name on the street: on 17 October 1815, the poet Franz Emanuel Geibel was born at Fischstraße 25, the seventh of eight children of Johannes Geibel, revival preacher of the Reformed congregation, and his wife Elisabeth Louise Ganslandt. In his parental home — the parsonage of the Reformed congregation — he began, as he later wrote in verse, composing poetry as a child on the roof. From the 1840s onwards, Geibel became, alongside Heinrich Heine, the most widely read German lyric poet of his time; his poetry collection “Gedichte” (1840) went through 132 editions by 1915, and composers such as Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy set his texts to music. In 1868 he returned with great honour to Lübeck from Munich, where he had lived at the court of Maximilian II; the city made him an honorary citizen in 1869. When Geibel died in 1884, his coffin was brought to St. Mary’s Church for the memorial service, where his brother-in-law, the senior pastor of St. Peter’s Church, Ludwig Trummer, delivered the eulogy. To this day, a commemorative plaque on his last residence at Königstraße 12 recalls him, as does the Geibel monument at Koberg, unveiled in 1889, which for a time even bore his name.

      Historic postcard: Emanuel von Geibel and his birthplace Fischstraße 25

The semi-detached house at Fischstraße 7–9 changed hands several times over the centuries, telling the history of a Lübeck merchant family almost in fast-forward: in 1646 Hermann Segebade acquired No. 7, and in 1662 No. 9 was added. In 1747 councillor Hermann Brüning sold both houses to the merchant Hermann Wilhelm Behncke, who between 1772 and 1782 had a single prestigious new building erected in their place. After Behncke’s death in 1784, the house passed first to his younger son, then in 1793 to the elder brother: Stephan Hinrich Behncke, who later became mayor of Lübeck. Further owners followed — in 1819 Johann David Reddelin, in 1865 the wine merchant Karl Gustav Bruhns, in 1873 Johann Gottfried Kriete — before the Lübecker Bauhütte, a craftsmen’s guild, made the house its guild hall in 1889.

The councillor Johann Glandorp also owned a residence on Fischstraße. His elaborate portal survived the later loss of the building as one of the few remaining testaments to it, and was relocated to the Schabbelhaus on Mengstraße, where it can still be seen today.

The councillor Johann Glandorp also owned a residence on Fischstraße. His elaborate portal survived the later loss of the building as one of the few remaining testaments to it, and was relocated to the Schabbelhaus on Mengstraße, where it can still be seen today.

            Fischstraße before the bombing raid — undisturbed, with a view of the towers of St. Mary’s Church. © City Image Archive Lübeck

The Bombing Night of Palm Sunday, 28/29 March 1942

In Lübeck, the night is not remembered by its calendar date but as “Palmarum 1942” — Palm Sunday, on which confirmations are traditionally celebrated.

Lübeck was not bombed for reasons of military significance: it had no war-relevant armaments industry and was of no strategic importance. The decision to target Lübeck specifically followed a new and cynical logic of war. An internal RAF investigation report, the Butt Report of August 1941, had revealed that precision attacks on individual industrial facilities were rarely hitting their targets. On 14 February 1942 the British Air Ministry therefore issued the “Area Bombing Directive” — a fundamental reversal of policy: no longer were factories or military installations to be bombed, but the morale of the civilian population was to be broken by the deliberate destruction of residential areas. On 23 February 1942, Air Marshal Arthur Harris took command of RAF Bomber Command. Harris, later known as “Bomber Harris”, was convinced that Germany could be forced into surrender through area bombing alone.

Lübeck presented itself as the first test case for several reasons. The city had only five heavy and four light anti-aircraft batteries and no fighter aircraft protection whatsoever — of the northern German cities that seemed within reach of the RAF, only Kiel and Lübeck had been considered, and the choice fell on the more weakly defended one. The philosopher A. C. Grayling also suggests that the RAF general staff wanted to test the effect of incendiary bombs in a densely built old town with narrow alleyways — the medieval half-timbered and brick buildings of the founding quarter were regarded as an ideal accelerant. Some also saw in this a form of retaliation: the German Luftwaffe had heavily bombed Coventry in November 1940 during Operation “Moonlight Sonata”, and the RAF was now applying the same technique — incendiary bombs in densely built city centres — against German cities. There was also a political calculation: the Western Allies, who were not yet willing to open a second front in Europe, also used the bombing raids as a signal to the Soviet Union, whose head of state Josef Stalin had repeatedly demanded a second front.

          Zeitgenössisches britisches Plakat: „Schwere „Stirling“-Bomber greifen den Nazi-Ostseehafen Lübeck an und hinterlassen die Hafenanlagen in Flammen“. ©Royal Air Force Museum, London

The conditions on the night itself were almost ideal for the attackers — a full moon, clear frosty air, and the reflecting waters of the Trave, Wakenitz and Elbe-Lübeck Canal pointed the way to the old town. In three waves between 23:18 and approximately 02:58, 234 Wellington and Stirling bombers dropped around 400 tonnes of bombs, two thirds of them incendiary. The weak anti-aircraft defences allowed the British approach altitudes of just around 600 metres and correspondingly precise hits.

In the Stolterfoht House at Fischstraße 22, two friends had made themselves comfortable that evening — one of whom was due to be confirmed the following day — when the attack began. As the beds begin to shake, there are crashes and muffled impacts, they too finally flee to the cellar, where many people had already gathered. When the house starts to burn, the people make their way out through openings broken in the walls to escape into the neighbouring house — ever onward, from cellar to cellar as far as Untertrave, the last cellar already partially buried (von der Lippe 1992, 74). And even where the fire did not rage in the cellars themselves, it became unbearably hot inside them, and many people suffocated. The all-clear was not given until 3:35 a.m.

Within just a few hours, the countless individual fires developed into a firestorm that spread from the wide streets into the narrow alleyways. A direct hit on the main water pipe put all the fire hydrants out of action; the Trave and the canal were partly frozen, meaning virtually no water was available for firefighting. Particularly hard hit was a strip roughly 300 metres wide along the western edge of the old town island, from the cathedral to Fischergrube — and right in the middle of it, the old merchant quarter between St. Mary’s Church and the Trave, precisely the quarter in which Fischstraße is located. Almost the entire historic built fabric representing 800 years of the city’s history was lost in that night.

      The ruins of Fischstraße in the founding quarter, then still the merchant quarter, after the attack on Palm Sunday 1942. © City Archive Lübeck

Aerial photograph of St. Mary’s Church and the destroyed city centre after the attack. © Museum of Art and Cultural History Hamburg

In Alfstraße 18, just a few houses away, a cake stood ready on Palm Sunday for the family’s coffee table. The house burned out, and falling debris caused part of the ground floor to collapse into the basement kitchen — burying the cake there, protected from complete destruction. It was not rediscovered until 2021, during excavations: a soot-blackened but still recognisable “cake mummy”. In 2022 it became the centrepiece of the exhibition “Bittersüß! – Der Tortenfund von Lübeck 1942–2022” at the Holstentor Museum.

The success of the attack confirmed Harris in his strategy. Just a few weeks later came Rostock, then the “thousand-bomber raid” on Cologne — and finally the firestorms in Hamburg, Kassel, Darmstadt and Dresden. Lübeck was the beginning.

Eric Warburg: The Man Who Saved Lübeck

Eric M. Warburg (1900–1990) moved to Lübeck in 1926 and became deeply committed to the city; in 1930 he founded the Lübecker Bank, which as a subsidiary of the Hamburg Warburg Bank quickly became an important economic factor in the region. As a Jew, he was forced to emigrate by the National Socialists.

                      Book cover: Jeanette Erazo Heufelder, “Eric Warburg. A Transatlantic Life”

During the Second World War, Warburg served as a liaison officer between the general staffs of the US Army Air Forces and the RAF. In 1944, together with ICRC President Carl Jacob Burckhardt, he arranged for Lübeck to be designated as a Red Cross supply port for Allied prisoners of war — and thereby protected from further bombing raids. On 2 May 1945, British troops marched into the city without a fight. In 1956, the Hanseatic city of Lübeck dedicated the Eric-Warburg-Brücke over the Trave to Eric Warburg — not far from Fischstraße 22.

Post-war period: Vocational schools on historic ground

After the destruction of 1942, the founding quarter initially remained as a field of rubble. After the war, private property was compensated and the land passed into the ownership of the city. As late as the end of 1948, an estimated 100,000 cubic metres of rubble still lay uncleared across the city. The devastated area at the heart of the city centre was then regarded as available building land — and the city was in urgent need of school space. And so in 1954/55, based on a preliminary design by the Göttingen architect Diez Brandi, the Commercial Vocational School was built on Fischstraße. On the opposite block between Fischstraße and Braunstraße, the city’s building authority erected the Domestic Science Vocational School by 1961.

     The vocational school buildings of the Hanse-Schule in the founding quarter, in the background the towers of von St.Marien. ©Frank 1204, Source: Stadtbild-deutschland.org

The two large-volume individual buildings were constructed in deviation from the historic plot and street structure — the evolved medieval urban fabric was thus erased a second time, on this occasion through indifference. 

A Belated Rethinking

When Lübeck was largely declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1987, the awareness grew that the school buildings of the 1950s did not do justice to the historic site. The desire to repair the old town fabric became clear. At the same time, there was an awareness of the high archaeological significance of the area, as only here could the early development of the city still be documented across multiple plots. Initial excavations were carried out from the mid-1980s in the western part of the quarter; even then, the schools were already on the city’s demolition list. The city planners’ wish was to restore the townscape along the lines of the state destroyed in 1942. It was only the high costs of demolishing the school buildings and of the archaeological work that held them back 27 years ago. 

The city digs into its own history (2009–2015)

The investment programme for national World Heritage sites brought momentum and considerable funding to the project in 2009. Just over 10 million euros were made available to demolish the schools in the founding quarter and carry out archaeological excavations. This made it possible to demolish the post-war school buildings and conduct one of the most extensive urban core excavations in Germany. The aim was to document the city’s development, achieve an appropriate partial preservation of archaeological monuments, and use the findings to arrive at a new development that was critically oriented towards the past.

                              Excavations between Alfstraße and Fischstraße, in the background the towers of St. Mary’s Church

The excavations up to 2015 yielded around 400,000 pottery sherds and nearly 50,000 glass fragments — one of the largest find complexes in northern Europe. More than 40 wooden cellars were uncovered; the stratigraphic sequences reach up to five metres in depth and document the city’s development from its founding year of 1143 to the destruction of 1942 almost without a gap. Particularly revealing were the medieval refuse pits, which contained everyday objects from the 12th to the 18th century: a casting mould for jewellery production, a tap, a fragment of a bone comb, ceramics, and fragments of shoes and children’s shoes in leather. In the courtyard areas of Fischstraße, a brick floor was also found whose stones were laid without exception so that the mark of the municipal council brickyard — a stamp bearing a double-headed eagle — faced upwards: a medieval local patriot at work. From autumn 2026, selected original finds from the excavations — including the bone comb, the tap and further objects from Fischstraße — will be on display as a permanent loan from the Archaeological Office of the Hanseatic City of Lübeck at The Layhead B&B: finds from layers directly beneath today’s Fischstraße, literally under the feet of our guests.

               Small archaeological finds from Fischstraße in the archive: wooden box, cloth seals and further objects Found objects © Katrin Eckloff

Reconstruction from 2009 — A unique project across Europe

The reconstruction followed the principle of critical reconstruction: the historic street alignments and the differentiated medieval plot structure were restored, and the new buildings are oriented towards the historic model in terms of gable-end positioning, density and eaves heights — without imitating it. The houses to be built here were, however, to have the same roof covering and pitch as the houses that stood here until 1942. The ground floors were to have a height of approximately 4.50 metres in order to reflect the Lübeck merchant house halls. All facades were required to pass through the city of Lübeck’s design advisory board to ensure that the specifications were implemented. No two houses are alike; each of the 38 plots was built on individually and architecturally designed in its own right — only the facade of the new building at Fischstraße 17 resembles the building that stood here until 1942.

                      © Katrin Eckloff

After 1942 it was also common practice to dismantle portals or entire facades and rebuild them elsewhere. 

                            ©Rudolf Struck 

                ©Katrin Eckloff

The upper part of the facade of Fischstraße 19 was dismantled after 1942 and rebuilt next to the Buddenbrookhaus on Mengstraße. In order to bring it closer in height to the other houses on both sides, the ground floor was reduced by 1.20 metres and converted into a passageway. The facade of today’s Fischstraße 19 is clearly oriented towards the original.

                 ©Katrin Eckloff

                Aerial photograph of the excavation site in the founding quarter, in the background St. Mary’s Church. On the the left side one can already see the first ground slabs marking out the footprint of the future houses in Alfstraße. © Lübeck 2018

To ensure architectural quality, the Hanseatic city of Lübeck launched a European ideas competition for facade design in 2015. Over 130 architectural practices from across Europe submitted designs for three characteristic plot types; the jury awarded eight prizes and six commendations, documented in the brochure “Lübeck gründet auf kreativer Qualität von Europas Architekten” (“Lübeck builds on the creative quality of Europe’s architects”).

Equally pioneering was the social allocation concept: the plots were not sold to the highest bidder, but according to the quality of the submitted usage concepts. Selected plots were specifically reserved for families with children, multi-generational housing projects and building communities. A mix of living and working was expressly encouraged; the ground floor zones were to be enlivened with shops, restaurants and publicly oriented uses. The quarter is also planned to be largely car-free; a shared combined heat and power plant at Fischstraße 25 supplies all buildings via a local district heating network.

The entire planning process was characterised by intensive public participation. In a public “Founding Workshop” in February 2012, Lübeck residents discussed together the forms of housing, social infrastructure, transport and design; the results fed directly into the framework plan that the Lübeck city council adopted as a development plan in September 2015.

In 2016 the last post-war building at Fischstraße 7–9 gave way to the new development, and construction work began in 2017. In July 2018 the house at Alfstraße 27 became the first completed building of the new founding quarter, with further houses in Alfstraße, Braunstraße and Fischstraße following in subsequent years.

            Aerial photograph of the Lübeck old town island with St. Mary’s Church and St. Peter’s Church. The house at Alfstraße 27 is standing. ©Rainer Jensen

Today – Fischstraße 22

The founding quarter is regarded today not only as a unique urban development project within Lübeck’s old town, but as a model attracting attention across Europe for how a war-destroyed medieval urban structure can be rebuilt in the 21st century in a responsible and vibrant manner — without reconstruction in the historicist sense, but also without arbitrariness.

Construction on the plot at Fischstraße 22 began in autumn 2019. On 1 August 2022, The Layhead B&B opened, in the same year that the main construction phase of the project was completed. Where once councillors and fleet commanders lived, merchants stored their goods, and in the night of Palm Sunday 1942 almost everything was lost, we today welcome our guests in a quarter that preserves 800 years of history in its ground plan — and tells it anew in the 21st century.

                 Lübeck around 1910

                  Lübeck 2026 – View from St. Peter’s Church © Katrin Eckloff

Location and Surroundings

Fischstraße is located in the western part of Lübeck’s old town island. Within walking distance are St. Mary’s Church with the memorial bells from the bombing raid of 1942, the Holstentor, the salt storehouses, the European Hanseatic Museum, the Buddenbrookhaus on Mengstraße (the model for Thomas Mann’s novel of 1901, currently closed until 2030 due to renovation) and the Eric-Warburg-Brücke over the Trave. Lübeck’s old town has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1987.

Fischstraße from 1942 to the present day

Chronology