Bremen

• 1. Introduction

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  Bremen sits on a dune above the River Weser, and at the heart of its main square stands a stone knight who has been watching over the city since 1404. That figure is Roland, the city's protector, and he bears a sword called Durendart along with a shield decorated with an imperial eagle. Behind him rises the Town Hall, its Gothic bones dating to 1405-1410 and its Renaissance facade added two centuries later. Together, the Town Hall and Roland were added to the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites in July 2004. They are not mere monuments. They are a shorthand for everything Bremen has spent over a thousand years becoming: a city that fought for its independence, traded its way to prominence, and refused to be absorbed. How did a settlement on a river dune become a port city of around 586,000 people, the second-largest city in Northern Germany after Hamburg? And what happens when a city that once stood at the centre of European trade finds that the world has changed around it?

• 2. A Free City's Long Fight

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  Bremen became the seat of a bishopric in 787, which means its written history stretches back more than twelve centuries. For most of that span, the city existed in a particular legal condition: independent within the confederal structure of the Holy Roman Empire. That independence was not simply given. Bremen's governing merchants and guilds used their position at the centre of the Hanseatic League to push for the monopolisation of North Sea and Baltic Sea trade. Joining the league in the 13th century gave the city commercial links across Northern Europe and the leverage to demand recognition of its autonomy. The contests to preserve that autonomy were constant. Until the Reformation, the city had to hold off the temporal power of the Church. After the Thirty Years' War, the threat came from Sweden, which controlled the surrounding Duchy of Bremen-Verden. George I Louis, who became King of Great Britain and Ireland in 1714, acquired Bremen-Verden in 1715 and formally recognised Bremen as a free city in 1720. The relief was brief. Napoleon's forces captured the city in 1806 and France annexed it outright in 1810, before independence was restored in 1815. Then, late in the nineteenth century, Prussia drew Bremen into the German Empire. After the First World War, the city experienced a brief turn as a Soviet republic before losing its autonomy under the Hitler regime. It was a pattern repeated across centuries: Bremen winning, losing, and reclaiming its status. After World War II destroyed almost two-thirds of the city's fabric, that autonomy was restored once more. Bremen became one of the founding states of the Federal Republic of West Germany.

• 3. The Port and Its World

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  The Norddeutscher Lloyd shipping company was founded in Bremen in 1857 and grew into one of the world's leading shipping operations. That fact captures something essential about how Bremen positioned itself in the modern era. With new sea anchorage and wharves constructed at Bremerhaven, the city became the principal port of embarkation for German and central European emigrants heading to the Americas. It also served as an entrepôt for Germany's colonial trade as that trade developed late in the nineteenth century. Bremen lies about 60 km upstream from the North Sea along the River Weser, the longest river flowing entirely within Germany. From the port district, the river was made navigable to ocean-going vessels. The port of Bremen together with the port of Bremerhaven at the mouth of the Weser forms the second-largest port complex in Germany, after only Hamburg. The city never relied on a single commodity. Beck's beer and St Pauli Girl beer are both brewed in Bremen. Kraft Foods, Kellogg's, and Anheuser-Busch InBev all maintain German or European headquarters in the city. The chocolatier Hachez and the banana importer Atlanta AG, which handles Chiquita, are also based there. Centuries earlier, when Bremen's port was described as the "key to Europe", the city supported a large number of wine importers, and quality wines were reportedly produced locally about 800 years ago. Today, that wine trade has dwindled to a few firms, though the historic wine cellar beneath the Town Hall, the Ratskeller, still operates in its original decor with its gigantic barrels.

• 4. Industry and Aerospace

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  More than 3,100 people are employed at the Airbus site in Bremen, making it the second-largest Airbus location in Germany. The work done there is specialised and consequential: Bremen is responsible for equipping the wing units of all widebody Airbus aircraft and for manufacturing small sheet metal parts. Structural assembly, including the manufacture of metal landing flaps, is a core activity. Within the Airbus A380 programme, the assembly of the landing flaps, also called high-lift systems, was carried out in Bremen. The pre-final assembly of the fuselage section of the A400M military transport aircraft also takes place in Bremen before the component is delivered to Spain. Bremen also hosts a plant of EADS Astrium and the headquarters of OHB-System, which are respectively the first and third space companies by size in the European Union. A Mercedes-Benz factory in the city produces the C, CLK, SL, SLK, and GLK series. According to OECD data from 2013, Bremen had a GDP per capita of $53,379, a figure that exceeded the German national average of $46,268 reported by the World Bank in the same year. That economic weight exists alongside a political tradition shaped by the port's history. The shipyards and related industries sustained a large and unionised working class for generations, which translated into strong support for the Social Democrats. When the port was mechanised and the city's leading shipbuilder closed in the 1980s, the SPD's traditional voter base was shaken. The party had polled 51 percent as recently as 1987; after that employment crisis, coalition government became the norm.

• 5. Streets, Stones, and Stories

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  The Böttcherstraße is only 110 metres long, but it took eight years to transform. Between 1923 and 1931, the coffee magnate Ludwig Roselius commissioned local artists to convert what had been, in medieval times, the street of the barrel makers into a mix of Gothic and Art Nouveau. The Nazis later classified it as "entartete Kunst" - degenerate art. Today it draws visitors to the Glockenspiel House at number 4, whose carillon is made of Meissen porcelain bells. Nearby, in the Schnoor quarter, fishermen's and shipper's houses from the 17th and 18th centuries still stand in crooked lanes now occupied by cafes and art galleries. The Martinikirche, a Gothic brick church built in 1229, stands at the end of Böttcherstraße by the Weser bank; it was destroyed in World War II and rebuilt by 1960. The Liebfrauenkirche, the oldest church in the city, dates to the 11th century and holds murals in its crypt from the 14th century. The Bismarck Monument outside St Peter's Cathedral is the only monument in Germany to show Otto von Bismarck in an equestrian format. Less obvious is the small community at the Convent of Saint Birgitta, founded in 2002 and made up of just seven nuns who offer guest accommodation. The Brothers Grimm never set their tale "Town Musicians of Bremen" inside the city itself - the four animals, a donkey, dog, cat and rooster, never actually reach Bremen in the story. Yet a bronze sculpture by Gerhard Marcks depicting them was installed near the entrance to the Ratskeller in 1953, and the story has become one of the city's most recognisable associations worldwide.

• 6. Science, Learning, and Climate

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  With 18,000 students, the University of Bremen is the largest university in the city. It houses the international Goethe-Institut and the Fallturm Bremen, a drop tower used for microgravity research. The private Jacobs University Bremen was founded in 2001. Research in Bremen has a particular concentration in marine sciences. The Max Planck Society operates the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology in the city. The Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Scientific Community maintains the Center for Tropical Marine Ecology there. The Alfred-Wegener-Institute, based in Bremerhaven, cooperates closely with these institutions through MARUM, a centre for marine environmental sciences affiliated with the University of Bremen. Bremen's climate reflects its position near the North Sea. The record high temperature on record was 37.6 degrees Celsius on the 9th of August 1992, while the official record low was -23.6 degrees Celsius on the 13th of February 1940. However, the astronomer Heinrich Wilhelm Matthias Olbers reported a measurement of -27.3 degrees Celsius on the 23rd of January 1823. Average temperatures have been rising: the mean annual temperature increased by 0.6 degrees Celsius between the reference periods of 1961-90 and 1981-2010. The year 2014 was the warmest on record, averaging 11.1 degrees Celsius and making Bremen part of the second-warmest German state after Berlin. Sunshine hours have also increased significantly, with the decade of 2011-2020 averaging 1,680 hours of sunshine annually, nearly 200 hours more than in the 1961-90 reference period. The Freie Waldorfschule in Bremen-Sebaldsbrück became Germany's first school built to the Passivhaus low-energy building standard, a marker of how the city's institutions have engaged with that changing environment.

• 7. Performances and Peculiarities

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  Michael Jackson performed at the Weserstadion on the 8th of August 1992 as part of his Dangerous World Tour, one of three shows he gave in Bremen. On his final world tour, the HIStory World Tour, he chose Bremen as the opening city. The Rolling Stones recorded a live album titled "Bridges to Bremen" in 1998 in the city. On the 12th of March 1999, Kiss played a show in Bremen after being told by the fire marshal not to use fireworks. They complied throughout the concert, then set off all their fireworks simultaneously at the very end. They are now banned from performing in Bremen. The Freimarkt, held in the last two weeks of October, has run continuously since 1036, making it one of the world's oldest fairground festivals. In December 1949, the philosopher Martin Heidegger gave a lecture cycle titled "Einblick in das, was ist" in Bremen, introducing his concept of a "fourfold" of earth, sky, gods, and mortals. It was also his first public-speaking engagement after being removed from his professorship in Freiburg by the Denazification authorities. The 1922 film Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens used Bremen as its primary setting. Bremen hosted the 50th International Mathematical Olympiad from the 10th to the 22nd of July 2009, as well as the 2006 RoboCup competition. The city's football club, Werder Bremen, won the German Football Championship and the German Football Cup in the same year, 2004, making them only the fourth club in German football history to achieve the double in a single season.