Braunschweig, the lion city where Faust first reached the stage
A bronze lion put up by Henry the Lion in the twelfth century still stands in front of Dankwarderode Castle and serves as Braunschweig's emblem. The Lower Saxony city, once a Hanseatic trading power, later hosted the premieres of Goethe's Faust and Lessing's Emilia Galotti and opened northern Germany's first railway.
Nobody knows exactly when the town began. Legend credits a Saxon count named Bruno with a settlement by a ford on the Oker in 861, and the name may join his name to an old word for a merchants' resting place; the first written mention, as Brunesguik, dates from 1031. In 1142 Henry the Lion of the Welf family became duke of Saxony and made it his capital, building the Cathedral of St. Blasius. His refusal to send troops to Emperor Frederick Barbarossa led to exile in England in 1182, yet his son Otto, later crowned Holy Roman Emperor, kept investing in the city.
Merchants and guilds grew so powerful that the princes moved their residence to nearby Wolfenbüttel in 1432. As a Hanseatic member from the 13th to the 17th century, Braunschweig was by 1600 the seventh largest city in Germany. In 1745 Duke Charles I founded the Collegium Carolinum, forerunner of today's technical university, and drew writers such as Lessing to his court. Napoleon's troops arrived in 1806; the exiled duke raised the volunteer Black Brunswickers to fight back. In 1830 an angry crowd burned the ducal palace, and on 1 December 1838 a line to Wolfenbüttel opened as northern Germany's first railway.
The twentieth century was darker. The duke abdicated in 1918, and in 1930 the state became only the second in Germany to bring the Nazis into government; on 25 February 1932 it granted Hitler the citizenship he needed to run for president. The region then became a centre of arms production.
About 255,500 people lived there in 2025, making it Lower Saxony's second largest city and a major research hub. Only around 48 square kilometres is truly urban, while 144 are parks and forests, so housing is packed tightly into dense inner quarters.
Source: Braunschweig
