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CULTURE

Eight wonderful ways to celebrate spring in Germany

With warm weather having already descended upon Germany, here's a list of eight ways to relish the spring season.

Published: 12 April 2017 11:47 CEST
Updated: 16 April 2018 11:37 CEST
Eight wonderful ways to celebrate spring in Germany
Springtime in Bielefeld, North Rhine-Westphalia. Photo: DPA

1. Burn a witch

Photo: DPA

Many Germans like to celebrate the night of April 30th by lighting a bonfire, or Maifeuer, and jumping over it. The general idea is that it is supposed to ward off any witches that might be lurking, but in some areas they like to do it just for fun!

Other regions like Brandenburg like to make stick wooden figures of witches and burn them in the flames to ward off any evil-doers. It promises plenty of fun, if hot fires and witches are your thing!

2. Scoff some Spargel

A Spargel Queen. Photo: DPA

Germans love their weißen Spargel (white asparagus). They go completely crazy for it. So much so that every year some areas even crown a “Spargel Queen”. But their obsession is for a good reason: it's delicious! Unlike their green cousins, the white asparagus only sprouts for a shirt period between April and June, so stock up your supplies while you can, and enjoy the sweet taste of this most lecker of German traditions.

3. Get holy wasted on Ascension Day

Photo: DPA

For many Christians, Ascension Day, the 40th day of Easter, is a very important day of prayer. But for Germans, it's a day for heavy drinking, and outdoor celebrating. Many people load a wagon with beer and take to parks and gardens to enjoy their day off work, unless you're in Bavaria, where things are far more serious.

It falls on Fathers' Day, so while others around the world are giving their fathers ties and mugs, the Germans honour their dads with a booze-up. So, whatever your reasoning, crack open a beer and enjoy your day off.

4. Steal a very tall tree

Photo: DPA

The German Maibaum (May tree) is either erected on May 1st, a day of celebration across the country, or the day before. Residents in Bavaria, East Frisia in Lower Saxony, Baden-Württemberg and elsewhere celebrate this originally pagan ritual each year within their local communities.

The excitement comes when the towns try and raid their neighbours' villages to steal their tree and take it back as a prize! But of course it wouldn't be a proper German tradition without lots of beer and sausages, so there's plenty of that as well!

5. Wear fantastically bright clothing

Photo: DPA

Try and dress for the season you're looking forward to. It may still sometimes be chilly and there might be the occasional cold gust of wind, but get out those floaty summer dresses and floral prints, and guys, time for shorts. The gods might see sense and speed up summer's arrival sooner rather than later.

6. Chat to strangers
 

Photo: DPA

This might seem quite nerve-wracking to begin with, but everyone's happier when spring has just begun, so you're much more likely to have a really fulfilling conversation (in German!) at this time of year than at any other. Try starting with the bakery lady, and then perhaps strike up a chat with that person you always found pretty on your morning commute to work – spring works in mysterious ways.

7. Open up at an open-air music festival

Photo: DPA

It's spring, so that means the DJs emerge from their hibernation and come into the open to start the open-air season. All across Germany outdoor events will pop up, so crack out the sunnies, sip on some beer, and get ready to enjoy the techno-sunshine mix.

8. Let loose in a theme park

Photo: DPA

Having been laying dormant all winter, Germany's theme parks, from Heide Park in Lower Saxony to Europa-Park in Baden-Württemberg, will be starting to creak and splutter to life again. Let your hair down, and get the adrenaline rushing on one of many rollercoasters across the country.

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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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