‘City of Music’ Hopes to Restore Former Glory

Johann Sebastian Bach did more than sleep here. During 27 years as cantor at St. Thomas Church, he left cultural footprints all over the city.

So did Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who studied law, wrote songs and roamed the cavernous Auerbach’s Keller, a subterranean inn he was later to immortalize in “Faust.”

At the Cafe Baum coffeehouse, every notable German artist from Robert Schumann to Richard Wagner, who was born in the city, stopped in for coffee and inspiring conversation.

One could say this eastern German city truly has an embarrassment of riches, as its cultural legacy and the huge cost of upholding it reveal once-glorious Leipzig for the impoverished urban has-been it became this century.

But as reunited Germany struggles to balance East with West, funds for restoration of cultural monuments are slowly being shaken from government and private sources, helping this self-styled “City of Music” to recover.

The challenge now, say those saddled with the unfamiliar burden of fund-raising, is to get the refurbishing priorities straight.

“If we wanted to restore and renovate all the cultural institutions and historical monuments of Leipzig, we would need 500 million marks [$300 million] right away,” said Georg Girardet, head of the city’s cultural department. “The former East German state did a lot for the arts in the sense of subsidizing their activities, but they didn’t invest anything in the buildings.”

In the cultural sense, Leipzig grew too big for its britches. As a thriving center of trade and industry, the city’s well-heeled merchants offered patronage for many of the 18th and 19th centuries’ most illustrious composers, writers, thinkers and artists.

Leipzig ceased serving as Germany’s cultural mecca with World War I and never regained its place in the disastrous Weimar and Nazi eras that followed. Pounded into rubble by Allied bombings at the end of World War II, the monuments were mostly left in ruins by the cash-strapped Communist state. The Gewandhaus, home of the city’s famed orchestra, was rebuilt in 1981, but most of the churches, houses and watering holes of famous forebears are only now getting their long-due restoration.

St. Nicholas Church, dating to 1165, is nearly through with its crypt-to-belltower face lift, as is the Gohlis Castle, where Friedrich Schiller lived and wrote under the patronage of a wealthy admirer.

After a seven-year, $7-million investment by the city, Cafe Baum is again bustling. And the creative venues where Robert and Clara Schumann and Felix Mendelssohn worked and lived have been restored as museums.

A Bach museum occupies the composer’s erstwhile quarters, but renovation of St. Thomas Church and support of its renowned Thomaner boys choir are testing Leipzigers’ fund-raising skills. Less than half of the estimated $15 million needed for the project has been collected, and the July 2000 target date for completion is bearing down on those who want the church ready for the 250th anniversary of Bach’s death.

Private fund-raising was forbidden during the Communist era, so Leipzigers have no tradition of public support for the arts. And with the local economy still stumbling badly, as many as a third of the city’s 550,000 population of a decade ago has moved elsewhere to seek work.

“It’s very difficult for a city this size to take care of so much cultural history, but we have to do it,” said Peter Steffen, who leased Cafe Baum from the city after its completion in November. “It’s our responsibility as Leipzigers to invest in the preservation of our identity.”

In that civic spirit, the Bach 2000 association has embarked on the city’s most ambitious private fund-raiser since reunification. At a gift shop on the church’s cobblestone square, leaflets seek donations in half a dozen languages amid Bach T-shirts and coffee cups and gingerbread renditions of the cathedral.

“It’s something new for eastern Germans--the idea that individuals should help pay for cultural monuments. But they are getting used to it,” said Bach 2000 Director Rudolf Ahnert. He concedes, though, that the market for gingerbread cathedrals is unlikely to propel the association over its funding goal.