The most beautiful cities in Germany

Germany’s most beautiful cities and towns stand among the best places to visit in the European Union. They span almost the full range of European variety.

• There are cities with Roman origins and remains such as Trier, Cologne, Regensburg and Mainz.
• Medieval cities such as Nuremberg, Erfurt, Bamberg and Worms and the half-timbered Harz region towns of Goslar, Quedlinburg and Wernigerode.
• Renaissance showpiece cities such as Lübeck, Augsburg or Bremen.
• Cities with Baroque survivals, including Dresden, Heidelberg or Passau.
• Plenty of German cities have beautiful palaces on their streets or nearby, like Potsdam, Munich, Stuttgart, Würzburg and Weimar.
• The great cathedrals such as Cologne, Regensburg, Bamberg, Mainz, Erfurt, Worms, with countless other churches, sometimes in Romanesque but more commonly in the Gothic style. The münster of Ulm has the tallest spire of them all.
• Museums of culture and art among world’s best, including Deutsches Museum, Deutsches Nationalmuseum, Alte Pinakothek and the Pergamonmuseum.

All these places can be reached by train and bus (Quedlinburg is on a branch line). All offer a range of hotels, hostels, guest houses and other types of accommodation. All are very walkable and, like most German towns and cities, are really best seen on foot. But trams and buses help get people to and from hotels or attractions and for the bigger centres, Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Stuttgart, Düsseldorf and Nuremberg, there are fast regular options in the form of S-bahn and U-bahn trains and light-rail transport.

Books

Most attention to Germany in the written word probably goes to Nazi and World War II themes but for travellers a fuller grasp of Germany is needed for all its past – and its present – to be understood. Much of this seems long-winded but much needs to be said.

General

There can be few books as penetrating as Gordon A. Craig’s The Germans, first released in 1982 but reissued in 1991 after the fall of the Berlin Wall. From politics to literature, it encompasses most aspects of German culture and lays bare the national character with piercing insight. Travellers looking for meaning from only a few pages of German history should read the first chapter, while a superb summing up of Berlin comes late in the book.

German history

Keen readers will not be wanting for overall histories of Germany. Geoffrey Barraclough’s benchmark work The Origins of Modern Germany authoritatively covers the history of social and national institutions from Charlemagne through to the Prussian emergence and World War I – with particular emphasis on the medieval period. But it is decidedly specialist in its focus, which is on constitutional development against the background of the struggle between popes and the Holy Roman empire. First published in 1947, its releases continued into the 1980s.

More appealing to general readers might be Steven Ozment’s A Mighty Fortress: A new history of the German people (2004). This is a journey into the German spirit through ideas, dwelling on Luther, Frederick the Great, Bismarck and Hitler and skipping over institutions such as the Hanseatic League and the details of the imperial-papal struggle. A recent German view is available in translation through the Berlin historian Hagen Schulze and his 2001 work Germany: A new history.

In practical terms Frankish history is the start of German history and the Penguin edition Two Lives of Charlemagne offers a fond biographical view by Einhard from the first emperor’s own time and a more dispassionate summary from a medieval monk. To background Frankish history there is Rosamond McKitterick’s 1983 volume The Frankish Kingdoms under the Carolingians, which is not too long but scholarly.

Standing back somewhat from the German perspective on the disasters of the 17th century is Peter H. Wilson’s  2009 tour de force Europe’s Tragedy: A new history of the Thirty Years War. But it takes commitment at 800-1000 pages, depending on the edition.

Even history buffs will find Christopher Clark’s Iron Kingdom: The rise and downfall of Prussia 1600-1947 a challenge at over 600 pages. It tells the story with plenty of detail, but hits the mark in explaining the forces that unified a fragmented Germany and made Prussia a name to be feared.

For a gritty account of the crucial interwar Weimar politics, look for the journalist Sefton Delmer’s short but incisive 1972 Macdonald softcover work Weimar Germany: Democracy on trial. It is available secondhand on websites.

William L. Shirer’s 1960 book The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich has been much criticised by historians. First published a year later – also controversial but based on rigorous examination of documents – is A.J.P. Taylor’s The Origins of World War II. For recent perspectives on Germany’s destruction, look for Antony Beevor’s Berlin: The downfall 1945. For Hitler, read Joachim Fest’s monumental 1973 volume Hitler or Ian Kershaw’s more recent Hitler: A biography.

The story of the Berlin Wall is told from all sides – east, west, above and below – in Frederick Taylor's The Berlin Wall: A world divided, 1961-1989 published in 2006 and released in paperback two years later.

Peter Watson's 800-page epic The German Genius: Europe's third renaissance, the second scientific revolution and the 20th century (2010) is a thorough study of thinking and knowledge in the German lands since the Enlightenment and does much to explain the German intellect as well as its international contribution, especially to Western higher education.

For an altogether quirkier take on German history and culture, look at Simon Winder’s breezy 2010 travelogue Germania: A personal history of Germans ancient and modern. 

Literature

To get a sense of German literature without reading German is not impossible. Plenty of the great works are in translation and even discussion of contemporary trends is accessible.

It is easy to be controversial but impossible to be truly representative of a culture’s literary output with a short selection. The several titles below introduce some of German literature’s great names, while bearing in mind that Kafka was mostly resident in Prague and Brecht and Mann were forced to spend much of their lives outside Germany.  This list is no literary guide but tries to give a sense of German literature’s periods since the late 18th century, blending novels and plays (which have real poetic qualities in the originals) to offer perspectives on German culture, history and thought.

Faust, parts one and two (plays), and Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

The Wallenstein plays (Wallenstein's Camp, The Piccolomini, Wallenstein's Death) – Friedrich von Schiller

Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann

The Trial – Franz Kafka

Berlin Alexanderplatz: The story of Franz Bieberkopf – Alfred Döblin

Mother Courage and her Children (play) – Bertolt Brecht

The Tin Drum - Günter Grass

The End of a Mission – Heinrich Böll

For medieval flavour the German verse epics are accessible in English prose, though they should be considered works of fancy with historical interest. In the 1970s and 1980s Penguin Classics released paperback editions of The Niebelungenlied, Gottfried von Strassburg’s Tristan and Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival (translated with notes by A.T. Hatto, who supplemented the missing finale of Tristan from the work of Thomas of Britain). A more recent translation is Burton Raffel’s 2006 Das Nibelungenlied: Song of the Nibelungs. Everyman Library released Kudrun (translated with notes by Brian O. Murdoch) in 1987.

German poetry down the years from the ninth century can be tackled with little or no German. The Penguin Book of German Verse was released in successive editions from the late 1950s, offering prose renderings by Leonard Forster of all but the most recent work. Michael Hofmann in 2008 produced an up-to-date paperback collection of translations in Twentieth-Century German Poetry: An anthology, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Both books can be ordered online.

Berlin

In a rambling, anecdotal but fairly compact storyteller’s format, Michael Farr chronicles the city’s personalities and its cultural development in Berlin! Berlin! Its Culture and Times. It can seem disjointed at times but actors, architects and kings all march in his passing parade.

Berlin and Its Culture: A historical portrait by Ronald Taylor is more solid and methodical, extremely good as a cultural survey of all periods, given that the information available for Berlin’s medieval and Renaissance period is limited.

The novel is one of the best ways to experience the colourful and amoral interwar period. The classic in English is Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin, the basis of the Broadway musical and 1972 Bob Fosse movie Cabaret. But Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (see above), from the German, takes the reader straight to the streets.

The giant Taschen volume Berlin: Portrait of a city assembles photographs from Berlin’s rich life in unmatched breadth and variety with backgrounding text. It’s the ideal place to look back into the many lost Berlins since the mid-19th century – the Imperial Prussian, interwar and wartime capitals, the rubble at so-called Stunde Null (the end of World War II) and the divided Cold War metropolis. Precious snapshots plus aerial views and maps show how much, and how often, the city has changed.

The handbook-sized Art & Architecture Berlin, published by H.F. Ullmann in English translation, is a rich and lively background resource for artworks, buildings and places throughout Berlin and Potsdam and the people who built and shaped them. It has wide scope and will be quite informative in the hands of the traveller even if its English expression falls short of the overall standard in some parts. There is also a solid hardback bilingual volume.