Zum Spinnrad

Christmas Market

by Colzy

From approximately the onset of advent you will find Christmas markets emerge in many German towns and cities and Braunschweig is no different. You will find locals, kids and adults alike, assembling at this festivity for the food, drink and gift stores. It is very unique and lots of fun. You will find glüwein (mulled red wine), eirlikör (a kind of German egg nog) and even warm beer! It is here you can also sample 1/2 metre bratwursts - what a culinary delight!

In Braunschweig you will find the 'weihnachtsmarkt' in the historical Burgplatz - just follow the people and the kids smelling all the sweets :)

Dom St Blasii - the so-called Cathedral

by Kathrin_E

Braunschweig's main church is named "Dom", cathedral, although it is not and has never been the church of a bishop. Duke Heinrich der Löwe / Henry the Lion began the new church after his return from the Holy Land in 1173. In 1227 it was consecrated. In the 14th and 15th century the outer side naves were added.

The 'Dom' used to be the church of the castle and the Dukes, not a parish church of the city. It belongs to the castle area round Burgplatz. The facades and steeples show 12th/13th century Romanesque style with gothic additions.

Dom: The Rose

by Kathrin_E

The Rose on the southern side of the steeples commemorates 825 years of links between Braunschweig's Dom church and England. It was planted on "English Day", June 4, 2000 by the Rector of Bath Abbey, Braunschweig's Mayor and the Dean of the Dom.
The history of this link between the Dom and England takes us back to the times of Duke Henry the Lion, the founder, whose wife was the English princess Mathilde.

St. Magni Church

by sabsi

St. Magni was destroyed in WWII but has been rebuild afterwards. The old church here was part of old Braunschweig (~1300).

There's a square at the church with outdoor seating of a restaurant next door. A lovely place for a drink in the sunshine!

Opera and cycling in Braunschweig

by Nemorino

Braunschweig, which in English is also known as Brunswick, has a population of over 240,000, which makes it the second largest city in Lower Saxony (after Hannover).

When I first visited Braunschweig ten years ago I found the city somewhat off-putting because of its bloated infrastructure for automobile traffic, but I have since done some cycling there and found that they have also made ample provision for bicycles. In fact cycling is a very good option in Braunschweig, both in the city and in the surrounding countryside.

My immediate reason for visiting Braunschweig in 2007 was to see Kerstin Maria Pöhler's staging of the opera La traviata by Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901). This is now one of the world's most popular operas, but when it first came out in 1853 it shocked opera goers (and the original cast of singers!) because of its highly controversial contemporary topic. It wasn't about Greek gods or Roman emperors, as everyone expected, but about a French courtesan (sort of an up-market prostitute) who had really lived and in fact had just died six years earlier of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-three.

Since Verdi's intention in his own day was to create daring contemporary musical drama, I'm sure he would have approved of the efforts of 20th and 21st century stage directors to bring it up to date and relate it to the concerns of modern audiences.

For Axel Corti, whose 1991 Frankfurt staging has been revived repeatedly in the past sixteen years, the heroine of La traviata was a Jewish actress and singer who had an affair with a German general in Nazi-occupied Paris in the 1940s, a century later than the original story. For Kerstin Maria Pöhler, the Artistic Director of the State Theater Braunschweig, this same heroine was a worshiped but abused entertainment star resembling Marilyn Monroe or Maria Callas.

I was fortunate enough to see these two very different productions within forty-eight hours of each other and was highly impressed with the poignant and logically consistent interpretations by these two very different stage directors.

On previous visits to Braunschweig I saw the four-act Italian version of Verdi's Don Carlo and the original 1869 version of Boris Godunow by Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881).