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What’s on in Germany: July 2016

Beer, beaches and the BMX - here's what's coming up in Germany this month.

Published: 1 July 2016 17:55 CEST
What's on in Germany: July 2016
Berlin Pride celebrations. Photo: DPA

Culture

Berlin Pride / Christopher Street Day (July 23rd)

A group of friends who are “all different” at Berlin Pride. Photo: DPA

The event is also called Christopher Street Day, or CSD, named after the first major LGBT demonstrations on Christopher Street, New York City in 1969.

It's an event celebrated in cities all over Germany throughout July, for example in Dortmund, Düsseldorf, Cologne, Munich and Stuttgart.

CSD Berlin has taken place every year since 1979, and the capital city estimates that up to half a million people celebrate each year.

The day consists of two parts – the March and the Finale.

The March begins at midday in Berlin's Charlottenburg district and travels all the way to the Brandenburg Gate, with people allowed to join at any point on the way.

The Finale is a half-mile-long Pride Village at the Brandenburg Gate, with DJs and bands entertaining the crowd on two stages along with speeches from prominent LGBT speakers.

Indian Film Festival Stuttgart (Stuttgart, July 20th-24th)

Indian actress Manisha Koirala at Indian Film Festival Stuttgart. Photo: DPA

This is the 13th annual festival in Stuttgart celebrating Bollywood and Indian film. Features, documentaries and short films are shown, and you can also meet and greet the stars on the red carpet and after showings.

If Indian musicals make you want to get up and dance, you can! The festival also offers dance workshops so you can be the next Shah Rukh Khan. 

500 Years of Bavarian Beer Purity Law (Munich, July 22nd-24th)

Beer barrels at a brewery in Munich. Photo: DPA

This free-entry event is a 500th anniversary celebration of the Bavarian law regulating the ingredients allowed in the manufacture of beer. This rule was pushed nationally after the unification of Germany in 1871, and with some minor changes and exceptions it still stands to this day.

The event incorporates traditional Bavarian food and music, and visitors pay for various beers with Thaler, which was the currency for centuries across the former German states. Pay like a Bavarian, drink like a Bavarian.

Festival Essen Karibisch (Essen, July 21st-31st)

A boy playing volleyball in Essen. Photo: DPA

Apparently you don't have to fly outside Germany to find your own “Caribbean holiday paradise,” as this festival describes itself. If you're looking for a taste of the sun this July, head down to the centre of Essen and find streets full of giant palm trees and white beaches.

This year the annual festival features exciting beach volleyball and limbo tournaments as well as a treasure hunt for kids.

It's a given that there'll also be authentic Caribbean food and sunny cocktails.

Music

Klassik Open Air (Nuremberg, July 24th)

The stage at Klassik Open Air. Photo: Franconia/Wikimedia Commons.

The first instalment of this famous classical music concert takes place on July 24th in Nuremberg's Luitpoldhain park, attracting a varied audience of non-typical listeners.

The outdoor concert is free, and according to the website, nearly a third of the visitors tend to be 19 to 25 years old. 

It's far from a typical classical concert, and there is an “informal picnic atmosphere”, so if you've never seen a Grammy Award-winning orchestra, this is the perfect place to start!

Melt! Festival (Ferropolis, July 15th-17th)

Kylie Minogue performing at Melt! Festival in 2015. Photo: DPA

About a one-hour drive from Leipzig, and a two-hour drive from Berlin, this annual music festival takes over the former mining site of Ferropolis (the Iron City), and it attracts huge acts from all over the world. The focus of the festival is “breaking the boundaries between quiet and loud, electro, hip hop and indie, mainstream and subculture”.

Notable acts from previous years include Kylie Minogue, Portishead, Oasis, Björk, La Roux and Scissor Sisters.

Get packing, because this year's Melt! line-up features indie legends Disclosure, Tame Impala and Chvrches along with underground British acts Skepta and Jamie xx.

Sport

snipes BMX Cologne (July 2nd-3rd)

A BMXer soaring through the air at the Cologne tournament. Photo: DPA

Another free event, this two-day tournament is one of the world's landmark BMX tournaments.

Competitors range from amateurs wanting to get their names out in the world to seasoned BMX veterans.

The motto, 'Celebrating BMX', is based on providing entertainment to all sorts of people, and not necessarily just hardcore extreme sports fans.

The reason that the event is free is “so that everyone – hardcore fans, beginners, interested on-lookers and families – can have the possibility of celebrating BMX sport together with us,“ explains Stephan Prantl, German BMX champion and organiser of the event, in a statement.

Euro 2016

A Public Viewing at the Brandenburg Gate, Berlin. Photo: DPA

With the tournament in full flow, make sure you head to a Public Viewing of any match to soak in the electric atmosphere, the camaraderie and the beer. Maybe you'll even appear on TV when Germany wins the final!

These locations were hot-spots two years ago for World Cup football-watching, and are all hosting Euro events this year. Go Deutschland!

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DISCOVER GERMANY

Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

With thousands of years of history in Germany to explore, you’re never going to run out of museums to scratch the itch to learn about and fully experience the world of the past.

Published: 5 April 2024 10:46 CEST
Eight amazing German museums to explore this spring

Here are eight of our favourite museums across Germany’s 16 states for you to discover for yourself. 

Arche Nebra

Nebra, Saxony-Anhalt

One day, around 1600 BCE, local Bronze Age peoples buried one of their most precious objects – the Nebra Sky Disk, a copper, gold, and bronze disk that acted as a calendar to help them plant crops. This was a matter of life and death at the time. 

Over three thousand years later, in 1999, it was uncovered by black market treasure hunters, becoming Germany’s most significant archaeological find. 

While the Sky Disk itself is kept in the (really very good)  State Museum of Pre- and Early History in nearby Halle, the site of the discovery is marked by the Arche Nebra, a museum explaining prehistoric astronomy and the cultural practices of the people who made it. 

Kids will love the planetarium, explaining how the disk was used. 

Atomkeller Museum

Halgerloch, Baden-Württemberg

From the distant to the very recent past – in this case, the Nazi atomic weapons programme. Even as defeat loomed, Nazi scientists such as Werner Heisenberg were trying to develop a nuclear bomb. 

While this mainly took place in Berlin, an old beer cellar under the town of Halgerloch, south of Stuttgart, was commandeered as the site of a prototype fission reactor. 

A squad of American soldiers captured and dismantled the reactor as the war ended. Still, the site was later turned into a museum documenting German efforts to create a working reactor – one that they could use to develop a bomb.

It’s important to note that you don’t need to be a physicist to understand what they were trying to do here, as the explanatory materials describe the scientist’s efforts in a manner that is easy to understand. 

German National Museum

Nuremberg, Bavaria

Remember that scene at the end of ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, where an unnamed government official wheels the Ark of the Covenant into an anonymous government warehouse? This could possibly be the German equivalent – albeit far better presented. 

The German National Museum was created in 1852 as a repository for the cultural history of the German nation – even before the country’s founding. In the intervening 170 years, it’s grown to swallow an entire city block of Nuremberg, covering 60,000 years of history and hundreds of thousands of objects. 

If it relates to the history of Germany since prehistoric times, you’re likely to find it here.

Highlights include several original paintings and etchings by Albrecht Dürer, the mysterious Bronze Age ‘Gold Hats’, one of Europe’s most significant collections of costuming and musical instruments, and a vast display of weapons, armour and firearms. 

European Hansemuseum

Lübeck, Schleswig-Holstein

In the late Middle Ages, the political and economic centre of the world was focused on the North Sea and the Baltic German coasts. 

This was the domain of the Hanseatic League, one of the most powerful trading alliances in human history. Centuries before the Dutch and British East India Companies, they made in-roads to far-flung corners.

The European Hansemuseum in the former Hanseatic city of Lübeck tells the story of the league’s rise and eventual fall, its day-to-day operations, and its enduring legacy.

This museum is fascinating for adults and kids. It uses original artefacts and high-tech interactive elements to tell tales of maritime adventure. Younger visitors will also be enchanted by the museum’s augmented reality phone app that asks them to help solve mysteries. 

Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum

Augsburg, Germany

The Hanseatic League was not the only economic power in the late Middle Ages. The Fugger and Welser families of Augsburg may have been the richest in the world until the 20th century.

From humble beginnings, both families grew to become incredibly powerful moneylenders, funding many of the wars of the 16th century and the conquest of the New World.

The Fugger & Welser Adventure Museum not only explains the rise of both patrician families but also the practices that led to their inconceivable wealth—including, sadly, the start of the Transatlantic slave trade. 

The museum also documents the short-lived Welser colony in Venezuela, which, if it had survived, could have resulted in a very different world history.

This museum has many high tech displays, making it a very exciting experience for moguls of any age.

Teutoburg Forest Museum

Kalkriese, Lower Saxony

Every German child learns this story at some point: One day at the end of summer 9 AD, three legions of the Roman army marched into the Teutoburg forest… and never came out. 

Soldiers sent after the vanished legions discovered that they had been slaughtered to a man.

Arminius, a German who had been raised as a Roman commander, had betrayed the three legions to local Germanic tribes, who ambushed them while marching through the forest. 

Today, the probable site of the battle – we can’t entirely be sure – is marked by a museum called the Varusschlacht Museum (Literally ‘Varus Battle Museum’, named after the loyal Roman commander). 

The highlights here are the finds – made all the more eerie by the knowledge that they were looted and discarded from the legionaries in the hours following the ambush. 

German Romanticism Museum

Frankfurt, Hesse

The Romantic era of art, music and literature is one of Germany’s greatest cultural gifts to the world, encompassing the work of poets such as Goethe and Schiller, composers like Beethoven and artists in the vein of Caspar David Friedrich.

Established in 2021 next to the house where Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, the German Romanticism Museum is the world’s largest collection of objects related to the Romantic movement. 

In addition to artefacts from some of the greatest names in German romanticism, in 2024, you’ll find a major exhibition exploring Goethe’s controversial 1774 novel, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, and another on the forest as depicted as dark and dramatic in the art of the period. 

Gutenberg Castle

Haßmersheim, Baden-Württemberg

Sometimes being a smaller castle is a good thing. The relatively small size and location of Guttenburg Castle, above the River Neckar near Heilbronn, protected it from war and damage over eight hundred years – it’s now the best preserved Staufer-era castle in the country.

While the castle is still occupied by the Barons of Gemmingen-Guttenberg, the castle now also contains a museum, that uses the remarkably well-preserved castle interiors to explore centuries of its history – and the individuals that passed through it.

After you’ve explored the museum—and the current exhibition that uses Lego to document life in the Middle Ages —it’s also possible to eat at the castle’s tavern and stay overnight!

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