Leipzig, the city of linden trees where Schiller wrote Ode to Joy
Bach worked here, Mendelssohn and Wagner too, and a boys' choir has sung in Leipzig since 1212. Schiller wrote his Ode to Joy in what is now a suburb. In 1989 the city added another claim to fame: its Monday demonstrations helped bring down East Germany's regime.
Leipzig is Saxony's largest city, with 633,592 residents at the end of 2025, and the eighth-biggest in Germany. It sits about 150 kilometres southwest of Berlin on the flat southern edge of the North German Plain, where the Pleiße and Parthe flow into the White Elster, forming a marshy inland knot of rivers and riverside woodland. Its name probably comes from lipa, the Slavic word for linden, which explains the poetic nickname City of Lindens, though recent research on the oldest spellings has questioned that origin. In Bucharest, the Lipscani district is named after the city's old Romanian name.
Trade built it. Two major medieval routes, the Via Regia and Via Imperii, crossed here, and its trade fair dates to 1190. From 1764 to 1945 it was a publishing capital, earning it the label Athens on the Pleiße, and Goethe's Faust, partly set in the Auerbachs Keller restaurant, gave it another: Little Paris. The Nazis branded it the Reich Trade Fair City in 1937.
Music runs deepest. Alongside the St. Thomas Choir, the city has the Gewandhaus Orchestra, founded in 1743 and among the world's oldest symphony orchestras, an opera company dating from 1693 and a music academy named after Mendelssohn, founded in 1843. It also has a modern reputation for dark wave. The university is one of Europe's oldest, and both the German Music Archive and the principal home of the national library are based here.
After 1989, when protests from St. Nicholas Church earned it the informal title Hero City, Leipzig went through deep renewal. Die Zeit dubbed it Hypezig in 2013 for its creative energy and startups. Its central station is Europe's largest by floor area, a city tunnel opened in 2013 anchors Germany's biggest S-Bahn network, some 12,500 Gründerzeit buildings survive from the late 19th century, and in 2018 its zoo ranked first in Germany.
Source: Leipzig
