Why you should visit this German city packed with Cold War curiosities and oddball festivals

Independent

20-02-2025

In Chemnitz, you need to squint to find conventional beauty.
Ambling toward my hotel on a frigid January night, I turn right at Brückenstraße and pass a strange sight that also happens to be the city's most well-known attraction - a gigantic 40-tonne bust of Karl Marx's head. His furrowed brow is arresting, while behind is an enormous stone frieze pronouncing 'Workers of the world, Unite!' in several languages.
At the top of the street, my hulking 26-floor hotel – absurdly large for a city of under 300,000 people – looms ominously in the dark and resembles Biff Tannen's dystopian hotel-casino from Back to the Future Part II (but without the kitschy neon).
Unconventional? Yes. But this curious city in Saxony – the 2025 European Capital of Culture, shared with the border-straddling Nova Gorica in Slovenia – is well aware of its unorthodox charm. 'An Eastern European city in a Western European country' is how it's frequently described to me. And with 223 projects and over 1000 events in the books for this year, there's plenty to look forward to.
The third-largest city in Saxony behind Dresden and Leipzig and a busy industrial hub during the 19th and early 20th century, Chemnitz's smoking chimneys were flanked to the south by the Ore Mountains – one of the world's oldest mining regions. Invariably, it became one of Germany 's wealthiest cities.
All of that changed, however, at the tail end of the Second World War, when Allied bombs rained down on the city, destroying 80 per cent of the city centre (the same percentage as the infamous firebombing of nearby Dresden). Seven years later in 1952, the East German government (GDR) decided to change Chemnitz 's name to Karl-Marx-Stadt (Karl-Marx-City), despite Marx himself having never stepped foot in the city. Two decades after that – in a show of thunderous Cold War hubris – the quixotic government decided what the locals needed was a colossal stone head of the Das Kapital author.
Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and German reunification, 76 per cent of the city's inhabitants voted to revert to the old name of Chemnitz.
In 2025, the city is an intriguing hodgepodge of architectural styles, from the blocky and functional Eastern Modernism ('Ostmoderne') so favoured by the GDR's socialist urban planning model, to the ornate and ostentatious Art Nouveau townhouses lining the well-heeled Kaßberg neighbourhood that somehow evaded the Allies' bombs.
'It is a very interesting style of architecture here,' says Lydia Tannenhauer-Schnabl, consultant in the Chemnitz Department of Urban Development. 'We don't have a beautiful old town, the only really old building left is the red tower, which is part of the old Medieval city wall. The rest of the infrastructure and architecture is fractured. Some people say it's ugly, others just say it's Chemnitz's style.'
I rather like how the city's Cold War relics have become oddball attractions, and one of the most prominent is the 300m-high power plant chimney known locally as the Lulatsch, meaning 'beanpole'. Completed in 1984, it was given colourful rings of paint by French artist Daniel Buren (and might well be the world's tallest work of art).
Speaking of art, there are several superb museums in Chemnitz, with the handsome Museum Gunzenhauser housing over 380 works by German New Objectivity artist Otto Dix and the restored Art Nouveau Villa Esche – once briefly a Stasi base – acting as an elaborate homage to the Belgian artist and architect Henry Van de Velde. More wide-ranging is the Purple Path, an art and sculpture trail that links all 38 municipalities in the Chemnitz region (yes, it's not just the city that gets a bite of the Capital of Culture apple).
A cursory glance at Chemnitz's 2025 cultural calendar reveals a playful side, too, with some bizarre festivals lined up for the summer. Hutfestival in late May sees locals donning all manner of peculiar hats; Slackfest in August is a showcase for slackliners (similar to tightrope walking); and Chemnitz's fifth Steampunk Festival brings a dose of retrofuturism to the city in June.
On this lively January weekend, I'm invited to the opening celebrations inside the sublime Opera House where various dignitaries speak in platitudes and pristine theatrical performances draw much applause.
'For a long time Chemnitz was a city in the shadows,' says Mayor Sven Schulze. 'A city with open wounds that people consciously ignored. But it is also a city of reinvention. Allow yourself to be surprised by our creativity.'
On a bone-chilling evening outside, the Karl Marx monument is engulfed by a brightly-lit stage as various German music acts perform to 80,000 people with that mesmerising stone face providing a ghostly backdrop. I hop from one foot to another in a futile effort to stay warm, while lasers crisscross and the crowd basks in an unlikely spotlight. The soothing embrace of a local Saxon pilsner doesn't help stave off the chill but the evening is a success.
Things warm up at the labyrinth-like Weltecho, an ornate club, cinema and courtyard on the fringes of the city centre. A jazz band's groove gets a crowd dancing downstairs while upstairs a permed MC bounces around onstage with his curls popping out beneath a blue baseball cap. This is much more my scene. And such is the male Gen Z penchant in 2025 for moustaches, mullets and loose-fitting clothes, that it feels as if I've had a window into the old GDR days of the 1980s here without ever having to enter a museum.
It's a rousing night. As Chemnitz thaws, expect things to become even livelier.