Hannover (Hanover)
“Is Hannover the most boring city in Germany?” news weekly magazine Der Spiegel once asked. In a word, no, although the capital of Lower Saxony can appear every bit a faceless modern metropolis. When five of the world’s ten largest trade fairs roll into town, up to 800,000 businesspeople wheel, deal, then disappear, the majority probably unaware that they had been in a state capital which, from 1815 to 1866, ruled a kingdom in its own right. Eighty-eight air raids reduced the city from elegant aristocrat to war-torn widow and, with ninety percent of the centre reduced to rubble, the city patched up where possible, but largely wiped clean the slate.
Brief history
It was some past to write off, too. The seventeenth-century dukes of Calenburg revitalized the former Hanseatic League member, and Ernst August ushered in a golden age for his royal capital in the late 1600s. Court academic Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz wowed Europe with his mathematical and philosophical theories and the arts blossomed, as did a Baroque garden seeded by the regent’s wife, Sophia; Hannover’s prize, it ranks among the finest in Europe. More significantly for British history, Sophia’s parentage as granddaughter of James I of England saw her son, plain old Georg Ludwig, metamorphose into George I of Great Britain in 1714 to begin the House of Hannover’s 120-year stint on the British throne.
Hannover today
Even if the city’s EXPO2000 exhibition turned out to be something of a damp squib – it attracted less than half the forty million people hoped for – that it happened at all sums up a vigorous, ambitious city. It’s a place with the bottle to reinvent itself through street art, from the Nanas at Hohen Ufer to the wacky bus- and tramstops commissioned to cheer up drab streets before EXPO. Similarly, there are some vibrant art museums and a bar and nightlife scene that is anything but boring. What it lacks is a landmark. Wartime destruction, then postwar planning, conspired to erase the coherence of Hannover’s core. Instead, the city may be at its best outside the centre: around the Maschsee lake for its art galleries or in the celebrated gardens, to the northwest. And it’s at its most fun in outlying neighbourhoods: in gentrifying restaurant and residential quarter List, seedy bar strip, Steintor, or in multicultural hipsters’ quarter, Linden-Nord. It’s a fair bet Der Spiegel didn’t visit.
Hannover and the British connection
It was 1700 and the English were in a bind: Queen Anne was old and her last child sickly. Parliament had scoffed previously at talk of a link between the Crown and the House of Hannover. But the legitimate claim of exiled Catholic James Edward Stuart, “the Old Pretender”, had concentrated Protestant minds. In 1701 the Act of Settlement declared the crown to “the most excellent princess Sophia, electress and duchess-dowager of Hannover” on the grounds that Electress Sophia von der Pfalz was a granddaughter of King James I, adding a caveat that “the heirs of her body being Protestant”. No matter that her son spoke no English, nor that his slow pedantic manner was spectacularly unsuited to the rough-and-tumble of the contemporary English court. Georg Ludwig, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, elector of Hannover, became George I in 1714 to begin 120 years of joint rule by the House of Hannover.
Of the four Georgian kings of Great Britain, George III was the first to take any interest in his new territory. George I and II were content to appoint a “prime minister” to rule as their representative, accidentally taking the first step towards the modern British political system. Indeed it was only with English-speaking George III that the Hanoverian dynasty got hands-on, but by then it was too late. A now-powerful parliament and fate – social unrest, the loss of the American colonies, not to mention the king’s mental illness – got in the way. Those woes conspired to make him the most abused monarch in British history. Shelley wrote about “an old, mad, blind, despised and dying king”, and liberal historians of the next century competed in their condemnation of him. Yet it was not bad press that did for joint rule. Salic law forbade the accession of women to head the kingdom of Hannover, newly declared at the Congress of Vienna in 1814. So when William IV died in 1837, Ernst August took up the crown in Hannover while his niece, Victoria, settled on to the throne in London.
Hannover festivals
The highlight of the festival year is the largest Schützenfest (Marksmen’s Festival; hannover.de/schuetzenfest) in Germany, held over ten days over the end of June and into July. Similar but more restrained is the Maschsee festival over nineteen days from the last Wednesday in July. Late May to early June brings world-music beano, the Masala Festival (masala-festival.de).
Hildesheim
For centuries HILDESHEIM, 30km southeast of Hannover, starred on the check-list of every cultured Grand Tour of Europe. It was medieval Germany writ large, its two Romanesque churches among the finest on the continent and its Altstadt a half-timbered fairytale. So a night of firebombs on March 22, 1945, which ravaged the centre as the Allies targeted prestige cities to sap German morale during the war’s end-game, struck particularly hard. The town salvaged what it could and erected typically monstrous postwar rebuilds until, in 1984, the council took the unprecedented decision to re-create the former townscape. Uncharitably, then, the architectural highlights of Hildesheim are conscious antiquarianism at best, glorious fakes at worst. Yet UNESCO deemed the efforts worthy of its World Heritage list, an unexpected fillip to a beautification programme that seems likely to continue. Aside from the architecture, Hildesheim is a relaxed university town, pleasant, certainly, but also fairly provincial.
Lüneburg
Few small towns in North Germany are so improbably picturesque as LÜNEBURG. Almost anywhere you go in the Altstadt will be a small-town streetscape of film-set looks. Yet despite the richness of its architecture, the small town is founded on the prosaic. Local salt mines were already being worked by the monks of St Michaelis here in 956 AD, and when Lüneburg’s citizens wrested independence from the Guelphic princes in 1371 and signed up to the mercantile Hanseatic League, exports of its “white gold” via Lübeck catapulted the town into the highest echelons of affluence. In its Renaissance golden era, Lüneburg was Europe’s largest salt producer, only to shrink suddenly into obscurity as its Hanseatic market waned. Salt production ceased in 1980. The flip-side of stagnation is preservation, however. Without funds for building, Lüneburg has had to make do with an Altstadt full of Hanseatic step-gables and brickwork like twisted rope. Indeed, salt continues to shape the town – subsidence of underground deposits causes the Altstadt to lean at decidedly woozy angles. Lüneburg’s Altstadt is ordered around two squares: Am Markt, the civic heartland above its historic port, the Wasserviertel; and elongated Am Sande at its southern end.
Osnabrück
Welcome to the happiest town in Germany. Last decade a nationwide poll found citizens of OSNABRÜCK, the largest city in western Lower Saxony, more content than those anywhere else in Germany, inspiring a marketing campaign in Stern magazine that declared “Ich komm zum Glück aus Osnabrück” (I’m lucky to be from Osnabrück). A friendly small-scale city of modest charm and with a university to prevent it stagnating, it has much to be happy about.
In 1648 after more than four years of negotiations here and in Münster 60km south, Catholic and Protestant signatures dried on the Peace of Westphalia and the political and religious inferno of the Thirty Years’ War was finally doused. Osnabrück has treasured its diplomacy of peace ever since. Her two great sons, Justus Möser and Erich Maria Remarque, dreamed of ennobled, free workers and railed against war’s insanity respectively, and today Osnabrück proudly declares herself “Die Friedenstadt” (Peace City), host of Nobel Peace Prize-winners Henry Kissinger and the Dalai Lama, home of the German Foundation for Peace Research and the national branch of child-relief agency Terre des Hommes. Perhaps it’s no surprise that its finest museum-gallery pays homage to a Jewish artist murdered at Auschwitz.
The poor swordsmiths and the Peace of Westphalia
Protestant factions met in Osnabrück’s Rathaus for over four years to broker their half of the Peace of Westphalia (the Catholics were in Münster) and unpick the knotted conflicts of the Thirty Years’ War that had brought German cities to their knees. Once signed by both, city fathers stood on the Rathaus steps on October 25, 1648, and proclaimed the carnage over, a declaration greeted at first with disbelief by the crowd, then by tears and a spontaneous outburst of hymns. As a contemporary pamphlet relates: “Osnabrück and all the world rejoices, the joyful people sing, Flags fly bravely … I am only sorry for the poor swordsmiths for they have nothing to do.”