High above Würzburg on the west side of the Main River is the Festung Marienberg, a fortress that was built starting around the year 1200 on the site of a much older fortified retreat of the “Hallstatt” period (about 1000 BC). There are two well-marked paths leading up to the Read More …
Münster was one of two cities — the other being nearby Osnabrück — where the peace treaties were negotiated and signed to bring an end to the Thirty Years’ War that had ravaged Germany, or what is now Germany, from 1618 to 1648. The Hall of Peace in the Münster Read More …
Scheinfeld is a happy town in the Steiger Forest in Franconia, northern Bavaria. You can tell it’s a happy town because some internet-savvy person has written “:D” with a felt-tipped marker in the upper left-hand corner of the sign. Up on a hill overlooking the town there is a castle Read More …
The second Prague defenestration took place here in the Old Royal Palace in the year 1618, when a group of angry Protestants bribed their way into the castle and threw two high Catholic officials and their secretary out of a third-story window. This bizarre incident had far-reaching consequences, since it Read More …
The Weikersheim Planetary Trail begins on the Tauber Valley Cycling Route at the northern edge of the city of Weikersheim. A yellow sphere, about one and a half meters in diameter, represents the sun at a scale of 1:1,000,000,000. From there you start walking or cycling slightly uphill towards the Read More …
The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) had already begun when Hans Jakob Christoffel von Grimmelshausen was born in this house around 1621 or 1622. At that time the house was already some 450 years old, since it already existed in the twelfth century when Emperor Friedrich I Barbarossa founded Gelnhausen and Read More …
The Thirty Years’ War, one of the longest and most devastating wars in European history, was finally ended in 1648 by the Peace of Westphalia, which was negotiated and signed in the German cities of Münster and Osnabrück. This is one of several reasons why Osnabrück describes itself as the Friedensstadt, Read More …
Renchen is a quiet town of 4,472 people located in the Rhine Valley not far from the Black Forest. The nearest large city is Strasbourg, across the river on the French side of the border. Renchen’s main (in fact I would say only) claim to fame is that the great Read More …