I was sitting on the train from Berlin to Leipzig on Thursday, marvelling at how fast we were going. Admittedly, it wasn’t high-speed-fast, like the connection between Frankfurt and Cologne, where trains can go 200 mph. But the 100-mile journey still only took a good hour. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised that there was a comfortable, fast train journey to be had between the German capital and a booming city of 600,000 inhabitants in Saxony. But as someone who lives in Britain, where my train into London used to travel at precisely half the speed of the Berlin-Leipzig connection, I found the experience a complete joy.
It also compared favourably to previous journeys to Leipzig which I had undertaken by car. The second-largest video game convention in the world used to take place there before it was stolen by Cologne. So my most vivid memory of travelling to Leipzig was teenage me driving an underpowered hatchback down there from Brandenburg with four noisy friends cramped in, all giving helpful driving advice.
By contrast, my journey on Thursday was serene, even if a father in the four-seater next to me spent the entire hour explaining the feeding habits of sharks to his son who seemed to have an endless supply of questions like ‘what would happen if a hammerhead ate a swordfish?’.
So I arrived in Leipzig in the afternoon in a rather good mood. It was sunny and so warm that it could have been a summer day. Trying to work out where I was going, I had a look around the station area, which wasn’t in a state of social deprivation comparable to Hamburg or Frankfurt, but still pretty dire with plenty of homeless people outside the beautiful building (which won the Best Station in Europe award in 2021, ahead of Vienna and London St Pancras).
The population was also significantly more diverse than I remembered it. Bucking the trend of population decline in eastern Germany, Leipzig is attracting plenty of young people, from elsewhere in Germany and from outside. It’s the fastest-growing city in the whole country, having expanded by 16% over the last decade. Frankfurt was the only other city with a two-digit growth rate of 10%.
Once I’d worked out where I needed to go, I put my sunglasses on and hopped on a tram. It was extremely busy but had arrived exactly when it said it would. In the seat opposite mine sat a young Polish woman who, in heavily accented German, was explaining to two elderly ladies with Saxon dialects, that construction works were underway on this line and that they’d have to get off earlier and change lines to get to their destination. On the ten-minute journey, I heard a wide array of languages as well as different German accents. There in that tram carriage was the new Leipzig in a nutshell.
In the evening, I was due to have dinner with a filmmaker who divides his time between Berlin and Leipzig, and we agreed to meet at a restaurant right in the town centre. My head was buzzing from an article I had been writing on all day while traveling, and with it being such a beautiful day, I decided to walk the 30-minute journey.
This involved strolling down Leipzig’s famous Karl-Liebknecht-Straße, affectionately called ‘Karli’ by the locals. The street has a long and illustrious history. A strech of it was once part of the Via Imperii, an ancient trade route of the Holy Roman Empire that ran all the way from the Baltic Sea to Italy.
As the section in Leipzig ran south, away from the city centre, it was later called Südstraße. During the Nazi era, it was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Straße and under Soviet rule, it was renamed again, this time after the German communist Karl Liebknecht who was born in Leipzig and became a martyr figure for the German left following his murder in 1919.
If you lived in Leipzig between 1930 and 1945 you would have seen Karli change its name twice from neutral, to nazi and then communist. It’s said that the locals jokingly referred to it as ‘Adolf-Südknecht-Straße’, merging all three names. It was supposed to change again after the fall of the Berlin Wall to ‘Straße des 17. Juni’, referring to the mass uprising of East Germans on 17 June 1953, but by then Leipzigers were fed up with all the name changes and opposed the suggestion.
Today, Karli is a brilliant place to be. It’s full of bars, cafes and restaurants with chairs out on the pavement for people to sit and enjoy a warm spring evening just like the one on Thursday. I walked past university students, groups of bfriends on their way to somewhere with beer bottles in their hands, men in suits and families out for a meal.
The architecture framing the street is an eclectic mix of styles from art déco and neoclassicism to art nouveau and socialist-era buildings. As strange as that sounds, it works brilliantly.
Leipzig was heavily bombed during the Second World War due to the industry based there. It had been one of the largest cities of the Third Reich and produced plane parts as well as munition, engines and other important equipment for the Nazis’ armaments industry. British plans to bomb the city had existed since 1940 under the code name ‘Haddock’ – Robert Saundby, Senior Air Staff Officer, HQ Bomber Command, and a keen fly fisher, had given each of the German towns he’d earmarked for carpet bombing ‘fish codes’.
From 1943, improved technology allowed British and American bombers to reach Saxony, where Leipzig was a target alongside other cities like Zwickau, Chemnitz and Dresden. By 1945, the raids had killed around 6,000 Leipzigers and damaged or destroyed around 60% of buildings.
Conscious of the fact that as an ancient trade city, Leipzig would remain a place for international visitors in the socialist era, the GDR authorities took more care here in rebuilding than they did elsewhere where the permanent shortage of building materials dictated a more utilitarian approach. The result today is that the socialist-era buildings have a certain beauty to them that works well in conjunction with the restored architecture of previous eras. In contrast to Berlin and Dresden, Leipzig doesn’t feel like a place that’s ultra-conscious of the way it looks. It’s a beautiful city that seems happy to display the whole array of its checkered past from ancient trade to the Peaceful Revolution of 1989, in which it played a huge part.
Over the next couple of days, I chatted to an array of Leipzigers, from those who were born there to relatively new arrivals. What they all had in common was that they loved living there. There was none of the usual ‘it ain’t what it used to be’ or ‘I don’t feel at home in my own city anymore’ that you hear elsewhere, particularly in Berlin.
The filmmaker I was meeting for dinner had just bought a little allotment with a small summer house in Leipzig, commuting to Berlin on the fast train when needed. A lady who scheduled the day for me during a couple of TV interviews on Friday had moved back recently from Chemnitz (about an hour to the south). Leipzig was young, fresh and upbeat, she said, while Chemnitz tried hard to rejuvenate but struggled with an ageing population and economic decline. She also highlighted that the surrounding countryside with its many lakes was a huge bonus. Another member of the TV crew thought Leipzig was safe and a great place for creatives to work.
I’m not sure when I last heard so much optimism about a city as a place to live. Sure people grumbled about prices going up, particularly for rent, while wages remained comparatively low. People in Leipzig earn only 41.556 euros annually on average, one of the lowest rates in cities across the country and well below the national average of 48.538 euros. The woman who moved from Chemnitz said that her flat in Leipzig cost 280 euros more than her old one while she earned roughly the same. But she said it was worth it for the ‘nice buzz’. Staying in the city even just for a few days, I saw what she meant.
Berlin likes to say of itself that it is ‘poor but sexy’ – but that seems to apply to Leipzig even more.
I wonder if the Irish pub (or maybe bar) is in Karl-Liebknecht-Straße. I spent a good portion of my non-working time there between 1995 and 97; mostly in the company of building workers and English teachers. One day a professor from the University turned up recruiting native-English speaking volunteers to take part in a performance of a medieval mystery play. Oddly, more builders than teachers were keen.
It went surprisingly well; the prof was delighted to point out the similarity between the Middle English of the play and the regional dialects some of us possessed. For some strange reason, the prof cast me as God. Not so many lines, but I did get to despatch everyone to Hell at the end.
PS: there was a definite edge to Leipzig in those day; something between Andy Warhol and Grahame Greene.
The madle passage, zeitgeschichtliches Forum Museum and st nicholai Kirche are 3 of the „ sightseeing „ musts in my opinion, loved Leipzig, add Dresden to this too , it makes it a wonderful experience,