Apparently, Osnabruck was founded in 780 by Charlemagne, king of the Franks. (it is THAT old?!)
I’ve changed my usual travel habit and we went to Osnabruck without prior preparation, reading about the place, finding out what to see…I can’t remember why we’ve done it, but I do remember the fun of an experiment. We just arrived to the station and blindly walk towards what we decided has to be a town centre. We didn’t know what to expect there, but intuitively set up towards a target – tall tower of cathedral that we’ve noticed behind the roofs of the houses…
I found the city neither too provincial nor too pretentious. Cosy middle-sized German city…It has a fairly sized cathedral in late Romanesque style. While nothing is left of the original cathedral from the city's foundation, they say the building was on this place as early as the 10th century.
Once we wandered into the old town area, there were few gems awaiting us there. I will just show you the pictures of them, as I have no story to tell about any of them apart from this one:
Apparently, this is Ledenhof – the oldest example of a type of building known as “Steinwerk”. It was originally store-house with integrated living quarters, then a wealthy von Leden family occupied it…the tower of the building has the old spiral staircase from around 14 century. From my view it is a pretty house, painted in bright colourful stripes, looking more like stage decoration, rather then a place for human living.
The Market Square is definitely a pretty view! And I would say – a classical one too:
While wandering around the old city, we saw houses that looked like a piece of art:
And streets that looked like from a children’s book illustration
By the time we’ve finally found a tourists information office and they gave us a city map, we’ve already seen most of Osnabruck’s attractions. (I did mention it before – it is a middle-sized city). The only thing, that I didn’t knew until I’ve read their tourist guide – that Osnabruck was a birth town of the writer Erich Maria Remarque and also – of a Jewish painter Felix Nussbaum.
I do like Remarque, I used to have all his books in my library. He wrote sad, but in a way romantic novels about the WWII. My favourite is The Black Obelisk.
I didn’t know who Nussbaum was, until I’ve looked it up on the net afterwards. We didn’t managed to get into the museum dedicated entirely to him, but I don’t think, it’s an art that I would understand, judging on what I saw on the web. Some sort of motif of dead end in his works – doesn’t work for me, although I do appreciate he might be a famous artist of the World.
Anyway, that was Osnabruck for us – fairly modern, fairly historical, very much friendly.