Memories and hints of a travelling IT professional.
The university of Göttingen has a wide range of scientific collections. Most of them are open to the public, but they’re distributed throughout the city and only accessible in very limited time frames. Therefore most inhabitants don’t know the treasures stored in the city. This changes with the Forum Wissen which was opened in 2022. It serves as a portal to these collections and presents important items at a central and well-accessible place.
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Is it a clever idea to put a charcoal-fired grill into the stairway of your home and to sell grilled sausages from there? Well, in 1920 someone in Göttingen thought so and the fire is still burning! The Bratwurst Glöckle is easy to overlook if you don’t know where you have to search for it. Keep your eyes wide open at the intersection of Kornmarkt and Groner Straße/Lange-Geismar-Straße, not far away from the Gänseliesel fountain.
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It is one of the most representative buildings of Göttingen, Germany: The Deutsches Theater (DT). After the old theatre building at the Wilhelmsplatz burned down in 1887 this new house was built in Italian Renaissance style and opened in 1890. On the roof a winged Thalia (as the goddess of poetry and comedy) takes care of the theatre.
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In the year 1380 duke Otto the Evil gave the right to create ditches around the city of Göttingen to protect its borders and the people within. In addition to this protective system called Landwehr in German it was allowed to erect free-standing towers (Bergfriede) on mountains and fortifications (Warten) next to roads to control who is entering or leaving the city.
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If you’re living in Göttingen it is impossible to not know what the musa is. The biggest sociocultural center of the region has a history already dating back to the year 1977 and it is located since 1990 in the former military bakery at the Hagenweg, west of river Leine. This part of Göttingen is not the most popular one to live at, but the musa was always a good reason to cross the river and enjoy concerts there.
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Is it possible to see the Harz mountains from Göttingen? Not always, but sometimes. The Brocken is 60 kilometers afar, but from the Harzblick tower you’ve got a fair chance. The 35 meters high tower is located near the Mackenröder Spitze in the forest of the city. It was first built in 1897 and had to be rebuilt more than once. In 2021 it was refurbished again and from its top you can see the Seeburger See and the Gleichen – and on good days also the Harz mountains.
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Göttingen didn’t have many museums and art exhibition halls in the past. That started to change in 2008 when publisher Gerhard Steidl and mayor Wolfgang Meyer presented the idea of the Kunstquartier (art quarter, KuQua) with an art exhibition place at its heart: the Kunsthaus. In 2021 this place for exhibiting works on paper, photography and new media was finally opened and now attracts national and international visitors.
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Göttingen and Kassel are cities that are only 50 km apart and could form a nice region – if they wouldn’t have been part of different kingdoms in the past and now different federal states (Lower Saxony and Hesse). I firmly believe that they will be connected more in the future and first tendencies towards this can already be seen.
Continue reading “Kassel & Göttingen: a roundtrip by bike”
The owls’ tower (or ‘Eulenturm‘) is a viewing platform on the Hainberg mountain of Göttingen, Germany. It can serve as a good target destination for a walk through Göttingen and it is special as most of the inhabitants of the city have been pretty close to it but haven’t seen it. When you’re at the upper end of the Schillerwiesen (a large recreational area in the East of the city) you just need to cross a road, pass the Kleiner Reinsbrunnen well and climb up the hill between two valleys (the ‘Lange Nacht‘ and the ‘Molkengrund‘) and you’ll immediately see the short tower.
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When I was living in Göttingen, Germany, I didn’t visit the forest belonging to the city – the Stadtwald – very often. It is a large forest in the East of the urban areas and it includes many nice places like the Bismarckturm or the Kehr with wild boars and deer. The reason not to go there was mostly that you have to climb steadily up the hill – but during the last decades the city grew steadily up the hill and the forest can now also easily be reached by bus.
Continue reading “Kerstlingeröder Feld”