Readers’ favourite trips in Germany: ‘We wandered every cobbled street and climbed every gothic tower’

From the Baltic to Bavaria, via Berlin, our tipsters enjoy epic scenery and architecture, culture and steins of fabulous German beer

Lübeck – Queen of the Hanseatic League – has a fading charm and vulnerability absent from the likes of Berlin, Munich and Hamburg … and most of Germany. I loved my trip there, wandering the cobbled streets, climbing every brick gothic church tower – generally alone! Thomas Mann wrote the unbearably sad novel Buddenbrooks there, then fled to the US from nazism in 1939. The Tin Drum author Günter Grass lived and worked in Lübeck in later life. Visit their former houses, now museums, the Grass-Haus and the Buddenbrook Haus. A singular German city, full of history and significance.
Martin Charlesworth