Tag: Göttingen

The Bismarckhäuschen sits quietly along the green stretch of the Wallanlagen in Göttingen, a modest yet charming structure nestled among leafy paths that trace the line of the city’s old fortifications. The building itself is small and picturesque, with its simple timbered design and sloping roof giving it an almost hut-like appearance, though its historical significance far outweighs its size. It blends harmoniously with the tranquillity of the surrounding park, frequented by walkers, students, and visitors seeking a moment of calm in the heart of the university town.

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The Internationaler Sozialistischer Kampfbund, usually shortened to ISK, emerged in the mid‑1920s as a small but remarkably disciplined socialist cadre group centred on the Göttingen philosopher Leonard Nelson and his circle. It broke away from the broader workers’ parties of the Weimarer Republik and aimed to educate and train future leaders for a new, ethically grounded socialist society rather than chase mass membership. Politically, the ISK rejected both Marxist orthodoxy and clerical influence, placing a strong emphasis on individual responsibility and moral steadfastness, which gave its members a very distinct profile in the crowded left‑wing milieu of the time. Göttingen played a key role in this, because the university and Nelson’s teaching there served as a magnet for young people willing to combine philosophy, pedagogy and political engagement. From this provincial academic town, ideas were carried into wider networks of the labour movement across Germany.

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The Planetenweg in Göttingen is a fascinating blend of science, art, and landscape – a miniature model of our solar system mapped onto the real world. Stretching roughly 2.5 kilometres through the city centre to the outskirts, it’s built to a scale of one to two billion. That means every metre you walk represents about two million kilometres in space. The trail starts near the Göttingen railway station, where the Sun is depicted. From there, you can follow the path through the city up the hill, tracing the order of the planets as you move farther from the railway station.

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Lou Andreas-Salomé was born in 1861 in St. Petersburg and died in 1937 in Göttingen, where she had spent the last decades of her life and intellectual work. She moved within the great intellectual currents of late nineteenth- and early twentieth‑century Europe, shifting from theology and philosophy to literature and, finally, to psychoanalysis. Her life feels like a continuous journey between cities and languages, but it comes to rest, symbolically and quite literally, in Göttingen, where her grave still draws visitors who know her name more through others – Nietzsche, Rilke, Freud – than through her own books.

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The Kartoffelstein near Herberhausen is a commemorative stone that was erected in 1852 by the Herberhausen parish. The occasion was the end of a severe famine caused by several successive potato crop failures, especially in 1846. After a finally successful potato harvest, the community set up this stone as a sign of gratitude. The original stone, an old gravestone from the Roringen cemetery, was damaged several times by lightning and was reworked in 1937 and replaced in 1966 by a weatherproof version made of shell limestone.

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As in every German city, right-hand traffic is the rule of the road at Göttingen and therefore also bus stops are always on the right-hand side. But there is one bus stop that is on the left hand-side: the one for city tours with a classic London bus behind the old town hall. The bus company of the city (Göttinger Verkehrsbetriebe, GöVB) has acquired an old iconic red bus built in the United Kingdom in 1960. It is named ‘Miss Marple‘ after Agatha Christie’s fictional character and it is the gem of their fleet; something they really need to care about as spare parts aren’t available anymore for this classic.

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No time to visit the Louvre, the British Museum, the Prado and the Musei Vaticani? Fortunately the university of Göttingen has the oldest collection of replicas of statues of the classical era – and still today it is one of the largest collections in the world. The 2,000 plaster casts stored by the archaeological institute show works exhibited in 150 museums around the globe. 1,000 of them are permanently on display, including the Venus de Milo, the Winged Victory of Samothrace and Laocoön and His Sons. The collection of mostly Roman and Greek statues was started by professor Christian Gottlob Heyne in the year 1767 for his own lectures.

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