Cities Worth Seeing : Germany

Cities worth seeing. Situated in a picturesque basin, the state capital Stuttgart (586,000 inhabitants) enjoys an enviable location. From the “Liederhalle” concert hall to the Wilhelma Botanical and Zoological Gardens, from the airport to the folk festival “Cannstatter Wasen", from the trade fair complex atop the Killesberg to the postmodern New State Gallery, the city offers all the attributes of a modern metropolis.

The distinctive architectural feature of Mannheim (311,000 inhabitants) is the geometrical layout of the city center: At the behest of the Palatine Elector Frederick IV, it was laid out in the year 1607 as a “city of squares", a grid of blocks in which houses are identified only by letters and numbers instead of by street names. Together with its twin city of Ludwigshafen on the left bank of the Rhine in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, Mannheim is an important industrial center, yet with its art collections in the Fine Arts Museum and the Reiss Museum as well as its longstanding National Theater it is also a city with a remarkable cultural flair.

Karlsruhe (276,000 inhabitants), seat of the highest German courts - the Federal Constitutional Court and the Federal Court of Justice - has a layout which is just as distinctive as that of Mannheim: 32 streets of theformer Baroque Grand-Ducal capital radiate in the shape of a fan from the palace dating from 1715. Favorably situated along major traffic routes, this industrial city has a busy Rhine port.

Freiburg im Breisgau (199,000 inhabitants) with its university dating from 1457, old city gates and Gothic Minster with a delicately articulated spire lies in a picturesque setting between the southern slope of the Black Forest and the Rhine Plain. Heidelberg (139,000 inhabitants) is a tourist magnet famed for its historic city center with the Late Gothic Church of the Holy Ghost, the Old Bridge with the Neckar Gate, the castle :nd quaint old student pubs. The landmark of the city Ulm (116,000 inhabitants) on the Danube River is s Minster with the highest church tower in Germany;at the Gothic Town Hall a famous astronomical clock tells the time. Other important cities in Baden-Wurttemberg are Heilbronn (122,000 inhabitants), Pforzheim (119,000 inhabitants), Reutlingen (109,000 inhabitants) and Tubingen (82,000 inhabitants).