It was snowing when I woke up this morning, and it hasn’t stopped snowing since. Happily, this town– inded, this entire region– continues to function despite 
the snow. And so, at 12:05 I boarded a train in Hamburg, destined for Lubeck.
I took this photo of the train station before we left. I thought the architecture was beautiful. Snow clings to the upper windows; occasionally a sheet of it would crumple and slide down.
I took the color out of the picture; there wasn’t much color in the image in the first place, and I thought the black and white might show the lines better.
Ta-da! The reason I went to Lubeck: The Buddenbrookhaus. This is where Thomas Mann was born– or, I should say, this is the place on earth where he was born. The house itself was destroyed in Allied bombings during WWII, when Mann himself was in exile.
So they have rebuilt it– all but the basement, which survived. I spent more than an hour here, walking around, looking at pictures of Mann and his family, including his brother Heinrich, who was a famous writer himself. Some of Mann’s children were artists as well. From what I could surmise, their misery increased and their talent decreased in direct proportion: Thomas Mann leaves, so far, the greatest legacy.
But it’s never been easy, I think, to be the offspring of a famous person, especially if depression runs in the family…. 
