Discover places worth seeing — from historic sites to mountain trails.
Museums
Weimar
Goethe's House in Weimar (Goethes Wohnhaus) is Germany's most famous writer's home. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the towering figure of German literature, lived here on the Frauenplan square for most of five decades, worked on "Faust" in it…
Museums
Kassel
Most people know the Brothers Grimm as collectors of fairy tales. In Kassel you also meet them as linguists who launched a vast project, the German Dictionary. Grimmwelt Kassel tells both stories in a playful way: the exhibition is divided…
Museums
Mainz
The Gutenberg Museum in Mainz is one of the oldest printing museums in the world, dedicated to Johannes Gutenberg, the Mainz-born inventor of printing with movable metal type. While a new museum is being built on its historic site, the col…
Museums
Berlin
The Hamburger Bahnhof is Berlin's national museum of contemporary art, set inside a grand 1840s railway terminus just a few minutes' walk from Berlin Central Station. Part of the Nationalgalerie, it shows Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol along…
Museums
Bonn
The Haus der Geschichte (House of History) in Bonn is Germany's national museum of contemporary history, telling the story of the country from the end of World War II to today. Located in the former government quarter of the West German ca…
Museums
München
Few museum buildings in Germany carry their origins as heavily as the Haus der Kunst on Prinzregentenstraße. Hitler had it built from 1933 to 1937 as the "House of German Art", a temple for the art the regime approved of. Today, without a…
Museums
Weimar
The Duchess Anna Amalia Library in Weimar is home to one of the most beautiful library halls in the world: the oval, three-story Rococo Hall, lined with books, portraits, and marble busts. Goethe ran the library for more than three decades…
Museums
Peenemünde
The Peenemünde Historical Technical Museum on the island of Usedom tells one of the most consequential and troubling stories of the 20th century. Here, at Germany's secret weapons research site, engineers developed the world's first cruise…
Museums
Regensburg
If you want to understand why Regensburg is a UNESCO World Heritage city, the Historical Museum on Dachauplatz tells the backstory. Housed in a former 13th-century Minorite friary, the city museum covers the history of Regensburg and easte…
Museums
Glauburg
He carries a sword, a shield and a neck ring, and on his head sits a strange cap that looks like two large leaves. The Celtic Prince of the Glauberg is an almost complete stone figure from the 5th century BC and is considered the most impo…
Museums
Bremerhaven
The Klimahaus Bremerhaven is a climate science center on the harbor front of Bremerhaven, in northern Germany, where you travel around the world in a single afternoon. Following one line of longitude, you walk through desert heat, tropical…
Museums
Köln
Kolumba is the art museum of the Archdiocese of Cologne, built by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor on top of the ruins of a late Gothic church in the heart of Cologne's old town. If you are visiting Cologne and want something quieter than the…
Museums
Bremen
The Kunsthalle Bremen is the city's leading art museum, set on the green ramparts park at the edge of Bremen's Old Town. Its collection spans six centuries, from Old Masters to French Impressionism, the pioneering painter Paula Modersohn-B…
Museums
Düsseldorf
The Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf is one of Germany's leading museums of 20th- and 21st-century art, spread across two buildings: K20 on Grabbeplatz in the Old Town, home to modern classics from Paul Klee to Jackson Pollo…
Museums
Halle (Saale)
A bronze disc with gold inlays, around 3,600 years old: the Nebra sky disc shows the oldest known concrete depiction of astronomical phenomena. The original is kept in Halle, at the State Museum of Prehistory. Around the disc, the museum t…
Museums
Aalen
Where a residential area now borders Aalen's civic hall, the stables and barracks of a Roman cavalry regiment stood some 1,800 years ago. Covering about 6 hectares, Aalen Fort was the largest cavalry fort north of the Alps and home to the…
Museums
Eisenach
The Luther House in Eisenach (Lutherhaus Eisenach) is one of the oldest surviving half-timbered houses in Thuringia and one of Europe's most important Reformation sites. According to tradition, young Martin Luther lived here as a schoolboy…
Museums
Detmold
On the edge of Detmold stands a whole village that never existed in this form: half-timbered houses, a church, a school and a fire station from the Paderborn region, taken down piece by piece and rebuilt here. The LWL-Museum Hellerlecht, k…
Museums
Berlin
From 1961 to 1989 the Berlin Wall ran right in front of its main entrance, and visitors had to go in through the back. Today the Martin-Gropius-Bau, or Gropius Bau for short, is one of Berlin's most important exhibition venues. The Renaiss…
Museums
Stralsund
The Meeresmuseum (Sea Museum) in Stralsund is the original home of the German Oceanographic Museum foundation and a favorite stop on Germany's Baltic coast. It sits in the heart of Stralsund's UNESCO-listed old town inside a former medieva…
Museums
Dresden
The Bundeswehr Military History Museum in Dresden is one of Germany's major history museums and a striking piece of architecture. Star architect Daniel Libeskind drove a giant wedge of steel and glass straight through a 19th-century Saxon…
Museums
Koblenz
It all began with a priest who loved paintings: Joseph Gregor Lang collected over 200 pictures in his small parsonage in Neuendorf and left them to his home town in 1834. They became the Mittelrhein Museum, one of Germany's oldest civic mu…
Museums
Potsdam
You don't have to go to Paris to see Monet: Museum Barberini on Potsdam's Alter Markt holds 38 paintings by Claude Monet, more than any other museum outside the French capital. Add Renoir, Caillebotte, Signac, Sisley, Morisot and Pissarro,…
Museums
München
The Museum Brandhorst in Munich's Maxvorstadt district is a contemporary art museum in one of the most eye-catching buildings in Germany. Its facade of thousands of colorful ceramic rods, designed by Sauerbruch Hutton, makes it easy to rec…