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You are here: Home Leisure Arts & Culture Quedlinburg rises above its history

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29/07/2003Quedlinburg rises above its history

 
Quedlinburg for many years was Germany's forgotten town, the city that time forgot. That is changing fast. The 200th anniversary of the death of German poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock is being marked in 2003 in Quedlinburg. Klopstock was born in the city in 1724 and died in Hamburg in 1803. Quedlinburg plans a number of events to commemorate the occasion. The house where Klopstock lived, at the foot of St Servatius church - Quedlinburg's most visible landmark - is now a museum with a selection of 18th century literature. The old town was in 1994 placed on Unesco's World Cultural Heritage list as an outstanding example of a city of medieval origin. It is the most significant collection of romanesque and timber- framed buildings in Germany. Its Standerbau museum is an example of private house architecture from the late Middle Ages and is thought to be unique in Germany. Quedlinburg became a prosperous trading centre in the tenth century and was the centre of the Ottonian empire for most of the 10th and the first half of the 11th centuries. It was a thriving market town which was linked to the major trade routes. In the modern age, Quedlinburg in time became isolated, mainly because it was not on major communication routes - principally railway routes. This meant that little property development took place. Its old town buildings remained much as they had been. In 1936 the Nazis claimed King Heinrich I as the founder of the Reich of Thousand Years. In 1938, the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, claimed to be descended from Heinrich I in an atrocious piece of historical nonsense. The SS took over the church and changed it into a Nazi shrine. After the war, the city became part of the communist state of East Germany and was only rediscovered after East Germany collapsed together with the Soviet empire at the end of the 1980s. There was something else that put Quedlinburg back on the map: its treasures. During the war, many of the city's most valuable artefacts were taken out of the museums and churches and placed in a cave just outside the town for safe keeping. Quedlinburg was not a target for allied bombers but the risk was stray bombs. As the war was drawing to a close in 1945, the United States Army arrived. It pulled back a few weeks later and the Soviet Red Army took its place. The artefacts were removed from the cave and several valubale items were found to be missing. The theft was not solved until the 1990s when their whereabiouts were traced to a small town in Texas. A GI lieutenant had taken the missing pieces after the war under circumstances which remain unclear. They were returned to Quedlinburg in 1992 and are now on display in St Servatius. December 2002 DPA
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