Creative capital
North Rhine-Westphalia’s capital punches far above its weight in matters cultural. It has latterly acquired some cutting-edge architecture by big names like Frank Gehry and Will Alsop to match its established reputation for modern art: Joseph Beuys, the enfant terrible of the postwar art scene, was a professor at the esteemed Kunstakademie, and the city’s galleries are impressive. The Kunstakademie also nurtured the influential Düsseldorf school of photography, whose leading lights include Andreas Gursky, celebrated for his vast panoramic images. There’s a strong rock music tradition here, the most famous local musical exports being synthesizer pioneers Kraftwerk and Eighties electropoppers Propaganda. Düsseldorf is Germany’s fashion capital too, and it was in a local nightclub in the 1980s that supermodel Claudia Schiffer was discovered. Its greatest son was, however, neither rock star nor fashion plate, but the Romantic poet Heinrich Heine, who is commemorated by a museum.
Düsseldorf festivals
In February, the city celebrates the climax of carnival with as much fervour as Cologne; in July the Grösste Kirmes am Rhein – an odd blend of folk festival and shooting fair – fills the river banks with old-fashioned funfair rides; and in September the Altstadtherbst brings dance, music and drama to various Altstadt venues, with a theatre tent on Burgplatz.
Heinrich Heine
The author of some of the loveliest verse ever written in the German language, Heine was the son of prosperous, assimilated Jewish parents, and his Judaism was a theme not only during his lifetime – he converted to Christianity in 1825, declaring his act a “ticket of admission to European culture” – but also long after his death. Heine’s books were among those burned by the Nazis in 1933 as they began to fulfil his prophecy that “There, where one burns books, one also burns people in the end.” But not even they could ban his most popular work, the Loreley, which was tolerated – in poem form and in the musical setting by Friedrich Silcher – as a “folk song”. Heine was deeply influenced by the spirit of the French Revolution, which he imbibed during the years of the French occupation of Düsseldorf. A radical and a trenchant critic of German feudalism, he spent much of his life in exile in Paris, and died there in 1856.