With a festive act and numerous prominent guests, the Auerbach’s basement known from Goethe’s “Faust” Leipzig celebrated its 500th anniversary on Tuesday. The traditional restaurant had invited representatives from politics, culture and urban society to the historical vineyards in downtown Leipzig. The figure of the Mephisto opened the anniversary celebration on time at 3:25 p.m. – in allusion to the founding year 1525.
Saxony’s Prime Minister Michael Kretschmer (CDU) named the anniversary in a recorded greeting message “a historical date”. Auerbach’s basement is not just a place for drinking and mining, but “above all a story of people who have worked in this place for so many years, centuries and have been sociable with each other”. Kretschmer emphasized the importance of such places in a time of digital isolation: “Today this destruction and this confusion takes place on the Internet.” He would like places like the Auerbach basement to be therefore more places of the exchange.
500 years through crises and wars
Leipzig’s mayor Burkhard Jung paid tribute to the historical and economic importance of the house. “Business sense, coupled with commitment and responsibility for the whole city, that has remained the trademark of Auerbach’s basement to this day,” said the SPD politician. The fact that a company perspective is “not normal at all – through all crises, through wars and confused, through peoples, through dictatorships, through democracy”.
The event was accompanied musically by students from the University of Music “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy”.
From student wine to world literature
The inn leads its origins to the doctor Heinrich Stromer from Auerbach. According to tradition, this began to serve students in his basement in his basement. Decades later, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe set a literary monument to the place – with a scene in his “Faust”, in which Mephisto and Faust stop in Auerbach’s basement.
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