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.

Film & video

Much documentary material and drama is available on DVD or television, although it is dominated by work of varying quality about World War II and the Nazi era. Some work of more specialist or historical interest has in recent years been uploaded to YouTube for free viewing. The same is true for some classics of German film, which are mentioned here. For more notes on German cinema, go to the Performing Arts section.

History on screen

For a bleak pacifist, pre-Nazi view of World War I find snippets of the German 1930 film by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Westfront 1918. This is not to be confused with the US film All Quiet on the Western Front, released the same year and based on a German book. The harrowing hospital scene is notable. Scenes on YouTube, and versions including a DVD with English subtitles, are available online.

The Austrian Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and M are considered by many classics of German Expressionism. M, starring Peter Lorre, is regarded as a prime inspiration for later film noir.

Not everyone wants to get the flavour of the Nazi era, but for a taste of its public propaganda sample Olympia, Leni Riefenstahl’s celebration of the 1936 Berlin Olympics. This is only part one and by no means short at almost two hours. Part two is also available.

Riefenstahl’s images in Triumph des Willens (Triumph of the Will), her 1934 essay on the Nuremberg party congress, made her for a time a favourite of Hitler.

The 2004 Oliver Hirschbiegel movie Downfall depicts the drama in Hitler's Berlin bunker in the final days of World War II, based largely on the account of one of his secretaries, Traudl Junge, and biographer Joachim Fest.

The rage of domestic terrorism that hit Germany in the 1970s is examined in the Uli Edel film The Baader-Meinhof Complex, based on a book by Stefan Aust.

A drama of costumed Baroque intrigue that brings together colourful personalities is the six-part TV series Sachsens Glanz und Preußens Gloria, filmed largely on location in East Germany in the 1980s. The action is based on three popular historical novels by the Polish novelist J.I. Kraszewski about Saxony in the age of August the Strong, his mistress Countess Cosel and first minister Heinrich von Brühl and the emergence of Frederick the Great’s Prussia. DVDs are available (check for English subtitles).

The 20th century in documentary

The German filmmaker Guido Knopp’s production of historical documentaries for the ZDF television network covers the 20th century and most have been produced in English or subtitled versions. Several deal with the Third Reich and World War II and, despite attracting critics, are the most prominent and dedicated body of documentary work on the period. For World War II, try the two Germany’s War series, The Liberation and The Apocalypse, although these are not easy to find on DVD.

In the three-part BBC television documentary series The Lost World of Communism, Peter Molloy looks back on the days of the Iron Curtain using personal accounts, home movies and archival footage. Its first part, available on YouTube, deals with the GDR. The DVD of the series is widely available.

Film of the John F. Kennedy 1963 and Ronald Reagan 1987 West Berlin speeches is easily found on YouTube and excerpts have been much used in documentaries.

Art

The BBC series Art of Germany by the British critic Andrew Graham-Dixon is a dispassionate account in three parts of trends through time, bypassing some of the icons in favour of finding markers on the cultural journey.

From the early days of television documentary comes Lord Clark’s masterly 1970s BBC series Civilisation, examining the emergence of western Europe after the fall of Rome. Two episodes, Protest and Communication (covering the Reformation) and The Pursuit of Happiness, (on the Rococo period) put the German contribution into context.

Berlin

The three-part 2009 BBC documentary series Berlin by the German-born international correspondent Matt Frei is as good a portrait as can be found of the capital’s curiously contrasting faces and contradictions – look no further.

To understand the energy of Berlin in the late 1920s, look for Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt, a silent Expressionist documentary on the city’s pace from dawn to midnight made in 1927 by Walther Ruttmann. It can be purchased on DVD under the English title Berlin: Symphony of a great City or watched online.

Robert Siodmak and Edgar Ulmer’s 1930 silent drama Menschen am Sonntag (‘People on Sunday’) is priceless for its glimpses of the Berlin lost after World War II bombing, as well as Berlin’s 1920s and early 1930s lifestyle, leisure and morality. It can be viewed online, subtitled, in reconstructed form (still not quite complete). The film is one of Billy Wilder’s early screenplays. 

For a sense of what West Berlin looked like after 1949, try the scenes of Walt Disney’s 1964 family comedy of Erich Kästner’s 1929 children’s detection novel known in English as Emil and the Detectives. Naturally this innocuous film got Disney treatment, but its fascination is in the location shooting in the still bombed-out 1960s city. The book itself is still widely available, unlike the 1931 German film version (also scripted by Wilder), although fragments of it have been uploaded to YouTube. The most recent German remake was in 2001.

Documentaries about the Berlin Wall are many. A good summary is The Wall: A world divided and After the Wall: A world united, a two-part PBS series that deals with the lives of people behind the wall and the accounts of the political figures responding to tumultuous events. It is available online as part 1  and part 2.

The 2009 German ZDF documentary Busting the Berlin Wall, also in two parts, brings to life the daring schemes of the people who escaped from East to West – and the tales of some of those who tried to stop them.