German cities, found on the map

Every one on the map

Every place listed below can be asked in this game. Places you find in a passed round drop out of your remaining pool. Grouped into 4 learning regions, matching the rounds on the Germany guide. Regions with no places in this map’s selection are omitted.

What the map tells you about each one

The paragraph the game shows when you find a place, for all 17 of the ones written by hand. Reading them first is not cheating.

Berlin

Berlin has about 3.7 million people and is nine times the area of Paris, so it is a city of gaps: allotments, lakes, forest and the empty ground the Wall left. It has been the capital of five different German states and was not the capital at all between 1949 and 1990.

Hamburg

The port handles around 8 million containers a year and reaches 100 kilometers inland, which is what a tidal river gets you. Its warehouse district, the Speicherstadt, is the largest complex of its kind in the world and stands on oak piles driven into the marsh in the 1880s.

Munich

Munich sits at about 520 meters with the Alps 50 kilometers away and visible from it on a clear day. Oktoberfest began in 1810 as a horse race for a royal wedding and now takes about six million people a fortnight. The Olympic Games held here in 1972 ended with eleven Israeli athletes and coaches murdered.

Cologne

The Romans founded it in AD 50 and named it after Agrippina, who was born there; the name is simply the word colony. Its cathedral was begun in 1248, abandoned for three hundred years with a crane on the unfinished tower, and completed in 1880 to the original plan, at which point it was the tallest building in the world.

Frankfurt

Frankfurt is where German banking is and where the European Central Bank sits, and it is the one German skyline with towers in it. The emperors of the Holy Roman Empire were elected here from 1356 and crowned here from 1562, and the first attempt at a German parliament met in its Paulskirche in 1848.

Stuttgart

Stuttgart is built in a basin with vineyards on the slopes inside the city limits, which is unusual for a place that also builds most of the country’s cars. The name comes from a stud farm. Both Mercedes-Benz and Porsche are headquartered here, a few kilometers apart.

Düsseldorf

Düsseldorf is the capital of the most populous state and the one city in the Ruhr region that stayed white collar: advertising, fashion and Japanese business, with the largest Japanese community in Germany. Kraftwerk built their studio here in 1970 and more or less invented electronic pop in it.

Essen

Essen was the Krupp works, which at its height employed tens of thousands and armed Germany in both wars. Its Zollverein colliery, closed in 1986, was called the most beautiful coal mine in the world and is now a UNESCO site, which is roughly the story of the whole district in one address.

Dresden

Dresden was the baroque capital of Saxony and was burned out by bombing on the nights of 13 and 14 February 1945, with a death toll now put at around 25,000. The Frauenkirche was left as a heap of rubble for fifty years as a memorial and was rebuilt between 1994 and 2005 using the original stones where they could be identified.

Leipzig

Bach was cantor at the Thomaskirche here for twenty-seven years and is buried in it. The city has held a trade fair since 1190 and printed books since the fifteenth century. The Monday demonstrations that began at its Nikolaikirche in 1989 are the reason it is called Heldenstadt, the city of heroes.

Bremen

Bremen has been trading since the eighth century and its market square holds a Roland statue from 1404, the tallest of the medieval figures that marked a town’s right to run itself. The Brothers Grimm story about the four animals who set out for Bremen never actually gets them there.

Hanover

The elector of Hanover became George I of Great Britain in 1714, and the two crowns stayed on the same head until 1837, when Victoria took the British one and Hanover’s law would not allow a woman to have the other. The city runs a trade fair on the largest exhibition ground in the world.

Nuremberg

Nuremberg was the unofficial capital of the Holy Roman Empire and kept the imperial regalia for nearly four hundred years, which is why the Nazis staged their rallies there and why the trials were held there in 1945. The pocket watch was invented in the city around 1510 and the first German railway ran from it in 1835.

Kiel

Kiel sits at the Baltic end of the canal across the peninsula and was the main base of the German fleet. The sailors’ mutiny that began in its harbor on 3 November 1918 spread across the country in a week and ended the monarchy. The city hosts the largest sailing regatta in the world each June.

Rostock

Rostock has the oldest university on the Baltic, founded in 1419, and was East Germany’s main seaport, which is why a town of 200,000 has a container terminal. Its seaside district, Warnemünde, is where cruise ships come in, and it holds a sailing week that draws more visitors than the city has residents.

Freiburg

Freiburg is the sunniest and warmest city in Germany, at the western edge of the Black Forest above the Rhine plain. It has narrow water channels called Bächle running along its streets, fed from the river since the Middle Ages, and it has been run on a green ticket for longer than almost anywhere else in Europe.

Koblenz

Koblenz is where the Moselle meets the Rhine, and the spit of land between them is called the Deutsches Eck, the German corner. The Romans put a fort here for the same reason, and the name is a worn-down version of their word for a confluence.

How this one works

The other maps of Germany

Sweden has the same map in Swedish cities. Denmark has the same map in Danish cities. India has the same map in Indian cities. Mexico has the same map in Mexican cities. United States has the same map in American cities. China has the same map in Chinese cities. Turkey has the same map in Turkish cities. France has the same map in French cities. Japan has the same map in Japanese cities. Spain has the same map in Spanish cities. Brazil has the same map in Brazilian cities. United Kingdom has the same map in British cities. Italy has the same map in Italian cities. South Korea has the same map in Korean cities. All three together on the Germany atlas page, the country itself on the Germany guide, and the other two hundred on the world map.