Germany Guide
Lower Saxony
Osnabrück
Welcome to the happiest town in Germany. A poll found citizens of OSNABRÜCK, the largest city in western Lower Saxony, more content than those anywhere else in the nation, inspiring a marketing campaign in Stern magazine in 2006 that declared "Ich komm zum Glück aus Osnabrück" (I'm lucky to be from Osnabrück). A friendly small-scale city of modest good looks, kept alive by its university, it has much to be happy about despite a notoriously damp climate. In 1648 after more than four years of negotiations here and in Münster 60km south, Catholic and Protestant signatures dried on the Peace of Westphalia and the political and religious inferno of the Thirty Years' War was finally doused. Osnabrück has treasured its diplomacy of peace ever since. Her two great sons, Justus Möser and Erich Maria Remarque, dreamed of ennobled, free workers and railed against war's insanity respectively, and today Osnabrück proudly declares herself "Die Friedenstadt" (Peace City), host of Nobel Peace Prize winners Henry Kissinger and the Dalai Lama and home of the Federal Fund for Peace Research and international child-relief agency Terre des Hommes. Perhaps it's no surprise that its finest museum-gallery pays homage to a Jewish artist murdered at Auschwitz.
Maps reveal the city's origins as an episcopal town gathered around a Dom founded by Frankish king Charlemagne, and the Neustadt huddled around the church of St Johann. When the two merged in the thirteenth century, Osnabrück blossomed as a staging post on a trade crossroads, its clout shored up by membership of the North Sea-based Hanseatic League. Wartime damage has claimed much of that history, and unlike its rival Münster, Osnabrück scorned a complete rebuild. Old-world charm among the bland pedestrianized centre is focused around the renovated Markt and Dom areas.
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