Bonn

• 1. Introduction

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  Bonn sits on the banks of the Rhine, a city that once held one of the most consequential addresses in the world. From 1949 to 1990, it served as the capital of West Germany, and then for nearly another decade after reunification, it remained the seat of government for a newly unified nation. Then Berlin reclaimed its role, and Bonn had to find a different way to matter.

  How does a city built for power reinvent itself after losing it? And what does it mean that, even today, roughly one-third of all German ministerial jobs remain in Bonn? This documentary follows a city that has been burned by Vikings, occupied by Napoleon, and rebuilt after wartime bombing, a city whose most famous son composed music that the world still plays two centuries later.

• 2. Older Than Rome

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  A 14,000-year-old double burial found at Oberkassel tells you something important: people wanted to live here long before any city existed. Trenches and wooden palisades on the Venusberg push evidence of human settlement back to around 4080 BCE.

  Roman presence in the settlement called Bonna began modestly, but the Roman defeat in the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest in 9 CE changed that. A legion moved in and built the Legionary Fortress Bonn in what is now the northern part of the city. Traders and craftsmen gathered around the camp, settling along what is now Adenauerallee.

  The Roman order eventually gave way, and during the Viking raids of the Rhineland, Bonn was burned twice in 882. The rebuilt town was attacked again in 883 by the Normans. From those ashes a different kind of center emerged: by the 9th and 10th centuries, a religious settlement had grown around the Bonn Minster, and a market square had taken shape nearby. Full city rights came in 1243.

  The Battle of Worringen in 1288 set the city on its next course. The Cologne prince-electors made Bonn one of their residences, and the magnificent baroque palaces they commissioned in the 17th and 18th centuries gave the city much of the grandeur that visitors still recognize.

• 3. Napoleon and Prussia

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  French troops occupied Bonn on the 8th of October 1794, ending the era of the prince-electors and beginning nearly two decades of Napoleonic rule. Taxes extracted in the form of food, clothing, and accommodation drained the population, and the number of inhabitants fell by around 20%. The French introduced a civil code and a new municipal constitution, but they also pursued a thorough secularization: the electoral buildings passed into state ownership.

  By the Treaty of Lunéville on the 9th of February 1801, the Rhine near Bonn was designated as the French eastern border, and Bonn became the seat of a sub-prefecture in the newly formed Rhin-et-Moselle department. French forces did not leave until January 1814, following the Russian campaign of 1812 and the Battle of Leipzig.

  The Congress of Vienna brought Bonn into Prussia in 1815, and with it came the founding of a new university on the 18th of October 1818 by King Frederick William III of Prussia. A university had existed in Bonn at the end of the 18th century but was closed during the French occupation. The Prussian institution was not a continuation of that earlier school; it was part of a program that also included the University of Berlin and the University of Breslau. The old electoral palace and Poppelsdorf Palace served as its first buildings. Over the following century, the university attracted so many Hohenzollern princes that it earned the nickname the Princes' University.

• 4. Beethoven's City

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  Ludwig van Beethoven was born in Bonn in 1770, in a house on Bonngasse near the market square. He was baptized at St. Remigius church, which still stands in the city today. The Beethoven Monument on the Münsterplatz commemorates him near one of Germany's oldest churches, the Bonn Minster.

  The house on Bonngasse is now the Beethoven House museum, one of several museums that give the city a cultural weight well beyond its size. The Kunstmuseum Bonn, founded in 1947, holds one of the largest collections of work by Expressionist painter August Macke, who lived in the city from 1911 to 1914. The Bundeskunsthalle, the Art and Exhibition Hall of the Federal Republic of Germany, has attracted more than 17 million visitors to date.

  Careful on the grounds of the Museum Koenig: it was on that site that the Parlamentarischer Rat first met, the body that drafted Germany's current constitution, the Basic Law, which was born in Bonn. The museum is also affiliated with the University of Bonn and houses the Leibniz-Institut für Biodiversität der Tiere.

  Bonn also claims the Rhenish carnival as a defining cultural tradition, and the Bönnsch Platt dialect of the Ripuarian language is spoken by all generations, especially during carnival season.

• 5. Capital of a Republic

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  On the 29th of November 1949, Bonn became the provisional capital of the new Federal Republic of Germany, chosen over Frankfurt am Main. The city the new republic inherited was damaged: when American troops entered Bonn on the 9th of March 1945-30% of the buildings had been destroyed. More than 4,000 residents had died in bombings during the war. More than 1,000 Bonn residents, mostly of Jewish descent, had been murdered during the Nazi era, and around 8,000 people had been forced to leave, arrested, or imprisoned in concentration camps.

  The decision to make Bonn a capital set off a rapid reconstruction and expansion. The period is known among historians as the Bonn Republic. It lasted until German reunification in 1990, and the seat of government moved to Berlin in 1999 following a Bundestag resolution of the 20th of June 1991.

  The political compromise that followed is called the Berlin-Bonn Act. It kept substantial government functions in Bonn: as of 2019, about one-third of all ministerial jobs remained there. Bonn holds the primary seats of six federal ministries and twenty federal authorities. The secondary seats of the president, the chancellor, and the Bundesrat are all in Bonn, giving the city the informal status of Germany's secondary capital.

  On the 30th of October 2014, Chancellor Angela Merkel attended and actively participated in the planting of the Unity Tree Monument for German Unity in Bonn.

• 6. A City After Government

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  Deutsche Post DHL and Deutsche Telekom, both listed on the DAX index, have their global headquarters in Bonn. Haribo, the largest confectionery manufacturer in Europe, was founded in Bonn in 1920, and a production site remains in the city even though the company's head office moved to Grafschaft in April 2018.

  Bonn also hosts 20 United Nations institutions, the highest number in all of Germany. Among them are the headquarters of the Secretariat of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Secretariat of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, and the UN Volunteers programme. The Langer Eugen, which originally housed offices for members of the Bundestag, has been the centre of the United Nations campus in Bonn since 2006.

  The University of Bonn is one of the largest in Germany. The International Paralympic Committee has been headquartered in Bonn since 1999. Cologne Bonn Airport, named after the first post-war Chancellor of West Germany Konrad Adenauer, handled around 10.3 million passengers in 2015 and ranked as the seventh-largest passenger airport in Germany and the third-largest for cargo operations.

  With a population exceeding 300,000 and predicted to surpass Wuppertal and Bochum before 2030, Bonn remains one of Germany's fastest-growing cities, carrying its political past into an international future shaped by diplomacy, science, and trade.