I lived in Leipzig for three years during my physics studies, and I really enjoyed the city. It's there that I really learned to love long walks. I've walked through and around that city more time than I can count. My favorite time to stroll through the city center is when they have the (Christmas) market set up, it has a very welcoming feel to it. It's a city with a lot of culture and usually always something going on, but much more laid back than Berlin. Summertime there is especially nice, I always enjoyed walking or biking to the lakes in the south on a bright summer day.
Nice to see my hometown on HN! It is also one of the most affordable cities in Germany in terms of housing, and probably the best in terms of quality of life / cost of living ratio...
If you plan to visit: be sure to check out the Museum der bildenden Künste and a boat-tour through Plagwitz / Karl-Heine Kanal (esp. nice in spring at night).
In Saxony yes, but not in Leipzig. About 50% of my colleagues are foreigners and they all love the city -- it's very international and you can come by with English in most places.
Little caveat obviously: there are also quarters where it's not that simple and you are looked at sideways if you have the "wrong" skin tone -- Grünau, Gohlis-Nord etc. But these are the parts of the city tourists usually don't visit...
I had a much harder time trying to get by as a white anglophone in Leipzig for about a month in 2018 than I had in Berlin, but much of that was admittedly my own anxiety around asking people for help in the wrong way, and travel-green-ness.
For example, I definitely can't pronounce entschuldigung correctly! As in well enough for people to know what I said. I then often perceived a palpable disdain or exasperation after not having been able to ask for simple things in German or understand simple German responses, compared to other places I've been where people seemed more excited to try to help someone who seemed lost than annoyed at the disturbance. I frankly shared the feeling, though: I found it very frustrating that my long duolingo practices had yielded almost no ability to ask for or understand things in the language of the country I was visiting.
I also found the in-town train terminal UIs to be incomprehensible as a foreigner: long lists of abbreviated names of places, with sub-menus holding more abbreviated names! A name like "Strasse Something Name" could end up "S. Sth. N." and without fluency it was very tough to pick apart. I ended up with a ticket to the wrong place once and the fare inspector, who I had to communicate with via Google translate, was very skeptical of my innocence (and absolutely incredulous that someone would not be able to grok the menus) but ultimately let me just pay the difference and go on, after initially threatening to levy a fine.
I still loved the city! It's beautiful and has very nice walks and libraries, but I personally often felt uncomfortable and out of place while visiting.
"I also found the in-town train terminal UIs to be incomprehensible as a foreigner: long lists of abbreviated names of places, with sub-menus holding more abbreviated names!"
They are allmost incomprehensible for natives, too. They could be a textbook example of bad UX design.
People in Berlin are always threatening to leave for Leipzig as Berlin becomes less and less affordable, I guess a lot do, especially now that remote working make it actually feasible. I even had a colleague years ago who commuted a few days a week to an office in Berlin.
"But, yeah, when you leave the city there is nothing much. "
Well, there are lots of nice lakes around. (left from open coal mining and renaturated). And if you drive a bit, you can reach quite nice mountains, for example, or other cultural interesting places, like Weimar or Dresden.
And the average village around is indeed quite right leaning, but more and more nice projects are growing as well.
When I visited the streets were fairly dark at night. Albeit beautifully renovated houses. My cousin who lived there said that everyone rented Appartments that would not face the street because there were much more appartments available than renters, the apartments facing the street were mostly vacant and thus dark in the evening.
Tram, bike, you name it. But specially in the beginning of the Autumn, with 2 days of rain, you see few bikes in the street. I'm biker myself. Right now I'm seating in the tram 16. In the traffic jam, because of a construction site.
The steam was produced by dedicated factories near the city, and the main energy to produce this steam was lignite (brown coal) excavated near the city at Bergbaurevier Südraum Leipzig.
There was gigantic and very impressive bucket-wheel excavators south of the city (some of the biggest of the world at the time) :
But the pipes where in bad state, so you could see steam escape from every tubes at every street. At the time it was estimated than 50% of the energy produced by the factories was lost during transport...
2) The houses where all greys and dusty because of said lignite factories around the city. There was steam from the pipes, but also smoke from the factories... That said you coul still imagine the former glory of the houses
under the grey.
3) There was still many "bomb holes" here and here along the streets since World War Two. The GDR did try to patch the city centre with impressive (and ugly) buildings and but i did see plenty of missing houses in the main streets.
District heating was quite common across the former Eastern Bloc and Russia. In the winter, you could see bands of melted snow on the sidewalk where the pipes ran. I hear the ones still in use have been better insulated since then.
> i did see plenty of missing houses in the main streets.
Yeah, this I've also been told. Compare that with the impressive rate at which Polish cities were rebuilt (aside from the beautiful historic centers, we can debate about the desirability of the modernist architecture that was built in places where it was decided that the historical building was not to be rebuilt; some of them are actually quite interesting, to be sure, but certainly not all of them). Not sure why the GDR took so long, or how they fared next to West Germany.
I was in Leipzig for a few days for my brother-in-law's first wedding in the early 2000s. Driving around we saw quite a few abandoned villas with pockmarks from bullets from WW2. We also saw one street with apartments that were still occupied by some hard-core communists that the government seemed to leave alone as they were contained.
It kind of felt like time had slowed in Leipzig after the war. It reminded me of a quote I heard from a guide when we toured a home near the harbor (now government owned) in Gloucester, MA that a family had lived in for generations and never updated: "Nothing preserves like poverty".
Go visit the Völkerschlachtdenkmal at the outskirts of Leipzig to get a visceral understanding of the dark undercurrent of Teutonic culture that led to militarism. This is a war memorial that celebrates war and military sacrifice, no pacifist message there at all. It was inaugurated less than a year prior to the outbreak of the Great War.
Teutonic culture didn't spawn the militarism. That's just the angle that was exploited by the propaganda campaign.
It's how you turn an innocent population into a unified fighting force (or whatever). You exacerbate and channel existing tensions and/or exploit a crisis. You frame your story in terms of popular narratives.
Well, I specified it as "dark undercurrent". Every culture has its own dark undercurrents. This specific undercurrent worshipped German-ness a lot. As a Slav you definitely feel as an alien visitor there :)
I'm German and I felt very alien as well when I visited. It is an historical monument. People don't go there to commemorate the Völkerschlacht (the small museum nearby is better suited for that), but to see how they commemorated the Völkerschlacht 100 years ago.
Leipzig has a nice zoo, and it’s one of the rare zoos that has Bonobos. They are amazing to watch: mothers happily walking upright holding their baby, lots of playing, just generally enjoying themselves. To me they seem much more human than chimpanzees do (they are equally distant in evolutionary terms).
I traveled in East Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, as well as Western Europe, in the 1980s. Visited Leipzig in 1986. Also visited Beijing in 2015 on the worst air-quality week of that year. Leipzig was by far the most polluted place I have ever been. It's wonderful to see its transformation. I hope to see it in person again some day. (Pittsburgh and Bethlehem, in my native Pennsylvania, as well as major cities like Philadelphia and NYC, are all far cleaner and nicer today than in the 1980s. NYC is dramatically cleaner than it was as recently as 1999.)
The best thing is IMHO that we have the Grüner GÜrtel ("green belt") which is a pretty large area of real primeval forest right crossing through the town and suround the city core.
In future outer leipzig will be surrounded by seas (7 Seen gebiet) which emerged from old mining holes and are all connected with each other.
And the Mare [ma:rə], round crater lakes (near Bonn), and a few lakes called Meer like Steinhuder Meer (which looks like Steinhude Sea but really means Steinhude Lake), das Kaspische Meer, das Tote Meer. Then you have das Eismeer, die Weltmeere, die Ozeane, die Sieben Seen (Sieben Meere) (ambiguous as mentioned, the first could refer to seven lakes or all of the world's oceans). And the fact that the sea to the top left of Germany is the Nordsee but the one to the top right is the Ostsee is puzzling. Fun fact: the moniker 'North Sea' has only in the 20th c become commonplace among all the languages surrounding it; on old Dutch maps, back when the IJsselmeer was called the Zuiderzee, it's more commonly marked up as De West Zee (also occ. Nord Zee, Duitse Zee / Oceanus Germanicus).
When I studied there in 2004-2007 (Art History and Archeology of all things) Leipzig was just amazing. It was raw, chaotic and dirt cheap. I lived in the very center of the city in Hainstrasse, right next to the market and the street with all the bars. I had a beautiful 70 square meter apartment as a student that I paid 320 Euro a month for. Down in Suedvorstadt things got even crazier. We went to underground bars with 1 Euro beers and cockroach races. We went to death metal clubs and Absinth bars. We dressed in top hats and steam punk goggles for Wave/Gothic meeting in spring. We spent a lot of time in nature in Leipzigs Auenwald (a permanently flooded forest) and countless lakes. It was awesome!
Today, when I come back to Leipzig, things feel very different. More refined - true. But also much more bland and faceless. Leipzig's countless little quirky shops have largely made way for the same cookie cutter shopping malls you find everywhere - with your Zara's, H&Ms and G-Star stores. Lot's of places are empty, such as Karstadt and Petersbogen, owing to an over-supply of department stores for what's still a fairly small city. Larger industries have attracted more settled workers - and the crazy punks and metalheads of 2004 have grown into eco-conscious citizens with pension plans and immigration concerns.
Maybe (certainly) I'm just getting old - but god, I miss the raw and wild nature of the post-reunification days...
> the crazy punks and metalheads of 2004 have grown into eco-conscious citizens
Isn't some of that just generational change? In the US, kids seem a lot more tame these days than kids of the previous few decades. They have a different set of pressures, and social media has grown in power quite a bit over a decade.
I think the last few generations have ruined rebelliousness by yelling a lot on the internet.
Can you imagine watching your parents flame war over politics and social issues on fucking Facebook? I feel like the only way to rebel would be to act like an adult.
TL;DR: Most activities we used to do as kids have now moved on-line. Socializing, playing, fighting, loitering, dating, shopping, going to the cinema, etc. is now on Instagram, Snapchat, Tinder, Discord, Twitter, Amazon, PSN, Xbox-Live, Netflix, etc.
Why are people surprised about this? This is all old news.
I lived in Halle (Saale) between 2008 and 2012. We used to go to Leipzig quite often to hear the philarmonic, shopping and just around town. I remember it as an amazing little city with plenty of culture. I hope I can visit it again in the future.
When I went over to Germany for my Oma's 80th birthday in 2001 or so my girlfriend (now wife) and I made a trip out of it and were going from the party (which was in Bavaria, though my grandparents are from Mainz) to Berlin afterwards to visit friends and check out the city. When I was telling my Opa and his friend about our plans, his Bavarian friend remarked something like "Ah, yes, Berlin, it's not very nice now, it's pretty ugly and dirty, but we're working hard to fix it. It will be much better in 10 years."
We then went to Berlin and had a wonderful time similar to what you're describing. It was still a pretty chaotic and interesting city, with lots of art squats and cool parties. Probably not as cool as it was a few years earlier, but still pretty neat.
I understand in the intervening years Berlin has started to become a sea of condos and boring glass buildings and inflated real estate like every other western city. Or so I hear. So yeah, they "fixed" it.
That same trip we passed through Leipzig and it seemed pretty run down but kind of interesting bit obviously not as "active" as Berlin. My techno friend had good things to say about it, though.
A great look with a lense at what is going in Berlin is the documentary "Punks vs. Billionaires" by Vice. [0] The bar in question was truly like the guys in the video were describing it: A living room for people who didn't have one at home. And it isn't the only one, so many of the essential spaces for working class people in my neighborhood died in the last few years. Rents exploded and people get pushed out of the districts they've lived in for decades. It really sucks, and it is an ongoing process slowly changing the whole city.
>A great look with a lense at what is going in Berlin is the documentary "Punks vs. Billionaires" by Vice. [0]
Don't know why, but I stopped being shocked by the things I saw in that documentary a while ago.
"Super rich corporate entity buying properties in soon-to-be hotspots while avoiding taxes through complex foreign based shell structures, with the working class squeezed to death by higher rents and taxes, all while our elected officials look the other way since they've been well greased, wined and dined and their privately schooled kids are offered top positions in said corporate entities", has become such a common M.O. behind the façade of free market capitalism, that I'm not even surprised at this point.
I just wonder when we'll have the next violent revolution or civil war and radical regime change as inequality can't continue to rise like this forever and still have a stable and peaceful, functioning society.
so crazy to see this story, I lived on Patrick Henry Army Base in Heidelberg for several years and there was a great skatepark in Leipzig I basically lived at. good times...
52 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 110 ms ] threadIf you plan to visit: be sure to check out the Museum der bildenden Künste and a boat-tour through Plagwitz / Karl-Heine Kanal (esp. nice in spring at night).
Little caveat obviously: there are also quarters where it's not that simple and you are looked at sideways if you have the "wrong" skin tone -- Grünau, Gohlis-Nord etc. But these are the parts of the city tourists usually don't visit...
I had a much harder time trying to get by as a white anglophone in Leipzig for about a month in 2018 than I had in Berlin, but much of that was admittedly my own anxiety around asking people for help in the wrong way, and travel-green-ness.
For example, I definitely can't pronounce entschuldigung correctly! As in well enough for people to know what I said. I then often perceived a palpable disdain or exasperation after not having been able to ask for simple things in German or understand simple German responses, compared to other places I've been where people seemed more excited to try to help someone who seemed lost than annoyed at the disturbance. I frankly shared the feeling, though: I found it very frustrating that my long duolingo practices had yielded almost no ability to ask for or understand things in the language of the country I was visiting.
I also found the in-town train terminal UIs to be incomprehensible as a foreigner: long lists of abbreviated names of places, with sub-menus holding more abbreviated names! A name like "Strasse Something Name" could end up "S. Sth. N." and without fluency it was very tough to pick apart. I ended up with a ticket to the wrong place once and the fare inspector, who I had to communicate with via Google translate, was very skeptical of my innocence (and absolutely incredulous that someone would not be able to grok the menus) but ultimately let me just pay the difference and go on, after initially threatening to levy a fine.
I still loved the city! It's beautiful and has very nice walks and libraries, but I personally often felt uncomfortable and out of place while visiting.
They are allmost incomprehensible for natives, too. They could be a textbook example of bad UX design.
Edit: And Bach, of course.
Today it's the new hip location to live at, like Berlin. People are gentrifying it in swarms.
It's a pretty nice place and compared to the rest of east Germany pretty leftist. But, yeah, when you leave the city there is nothing much.
Well, there are lots of nice lakes around. (left from open coal mining and renaturated). And if you drive a bit, you can reach quite nice mountains, for example, or other cultural interesting places, like Weimar or Dresden.
And the average village around is indeed quite right leaning, but more and more nice projects are growing as well.
Oh, come on, don't be such a tease.
1) The city was 100% Steampunk !
There where steam heat pipes everywhere along and over the streets. Those pipes where the main source of heating for the city houses and facilities.
Things like this one, but everywhere in the city : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Haltepunkt_Leipzig_A...
The steam was produced by dedicated factories near the city, and the main energy to produce this steam was lignite (brown coal) excavated near the city at Bergbaurevier Südraum Leipzig.
There was gigantic and very impressive bucket-wheel excavators south of the city (some of the biggest of the world at the time) :
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Bucket-wheel_exc...
But the pipes where in bad state, so you could see steam escape from every tubes at every street. At the time it was estimated than 50% of the energy produced by the factories was lost during transport...
2) The houses where all greys and dusty because of said lignite factories around the city. There was steam from the pipes, but also smoke from the factories... That said you coul still imagine the former glory of the houses under the grey.
3) There was still many "bomb holes" here and here along the streets since World War Two. The GDR did try to patch the city centre with impressive (and ugly) buildings and but i did see plenty of missing houses in the main streets.
District heating was quite common across the former Eastern Bloc and Russia. In the winter, you could see bands of melted snow on the sidewalk where the pipes ran. I hear the ones still in use have been better insulated since then.
> i did see plenty of missing houses in the main streets.
Yeah, this I've also been told. Compare that with the impressive rate at which Polish cities were rebuilt (aside from the beautiful historic centers, we can debate about the desirability of the modernist architecture that was built in places where it was decided that the historical building was not to be rebuilt; some of them are actually quite interesting, to be sure, but certainly not all of them). Not sure why the GDR took so long, or how they fared next to West Germany.
It kind of felt like time had slowed in Leipzig after the war. It reminded me of a quote I heard from a guide when we toured a home near the harbor (now government owned) in Gloucester, MA that a family had lived in for generations and never updated: "Nothing preserves like poverty".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monument_to_the_Battle_of_the_...
The feeling you get inside under the unyielding gaze of the granite "Watchers of the Dead" is absolutely creepy.
It's how you turn an innocent population into a unified fighting force (or whatever). You exacerbate and channel existing tensions and/or exploit a crisis. You frame your story in terms of popular narratives.
They teach this stuff in Dictatorship 101
September 2020 on a Sunday - https://youtu.be/yriaEFxLblQ
February 2019 evening - https://youtu.be/udrqN2QArHo
edit: formatting
The best thing is IMHO that we have the Grüner GÜrtel ("green belt") which is a pretty large area of real primeval forest right crossing through the town and suround the city core.
In future outer leipzig will be surrounded by seas (7 Seen gebiet) which emerged from old mining holes and are all connected with each other.
Today, when I come back to Leipzig, things feel very different. More refined - true. But also much more bland and faceless. Leipzig's countless little quirky shops have largely made way for the same cookie cutter shopping malls you find everywhere - with your Zara's, H&Ms and G-Star stores. Lot's of places are empty, such as Karstadt and Petersbogen, owing to an over-supply of department stores for what's still a fairly small city. Larger industries have attracted more settled workers - and the crazy punks and metalheads of 2004 have grown into eco-conscious citizens with pension plans and immigration concerns.
Maybe (certainly) I'm just getting old - but god, I miss the raw and wild nature of the post-reunification days...
Isn't some of that just generational change? In the US, kids seem a lot more tame these days than kids of the previous few decades. They have a different set of pressures, and social media has grown in power quite a bit over a decade.
Can you imagine watching your parents flame war over politics and social issues on fucking Facebook? I feel like the only way to rebel would be to act like an adult.
Why are people surprised about this? This is all old news.
Did you accidentally hit reply under the wrong comment?
We then went to Berlin and had a wonderful time similar to what you're describing. It was still a pretty chaotic and interesting city, with lots of art squats and cool parties. Probably not as cool as it was a few years earlier, but still pretty neat.
I understand in the intervening years Berlin has started to become a sea of condos and boring glass buildings and inflated real estate like every other western city. Or so I hear. So yeah, they "fixed" it.
That same trip we passed through Leipzig and it seemed pretty run down but kind of interesting bit obviously not as "active" as Berlin. My techno friend had good things to say about it, though.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X7sb-AziEn4
Don't know why, but I stopped being shocked by the things I saw in that documentary a while ago.
"Super rich corporate entity buying properties in soon-to-be hotspots while avoiding taxes through complex foreign based shell structures, with the working class squeezed to death by higher rents and taxes, all while our elected officials look the other way since they've been well greased, wined and dined and their privately schooled kids are offered top positions in said corporate entities", has become such a common M.O. behind the façade of free market capitalism, that I'm not even surprised at this point.
I just wonder when we'll have the next violent revolution or civil war and radical regime change as inequality can't continue to rise like this forever and still have a stable and peaceful, functioning society.
Didn’t communism have its chance in Leipzig?