Leipzig's Battle of the Nations monument. Photo / 123RF
Despite its dark past, this visitor-friendly city in former East Germany takes its history very seriously, as Mathew Dearnaley finds out.
Just off the beaten tourist track in Leipzig, Eastern Germany, is a street mural depicting Europe in upheaval.
Nothing ornate, it shows a map of battles during 15 years of French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte's rampages through Europe.
But at its centre is where the bloodiest battle of them all was fought in 1813 - here, on the outskirts of Leipzig.
Across the road - above a row of trees sheltering a crematorium - towers Europe's largest monument, a 91-metre memorial to the Battle of the Nations where Prussia, Russia, Austria and Sweden ganged up to defeat Bonaparte at a cost of more than 90,000 lives.
I have ridden Tram 15 from Leipzig's central railway station, and missed the main entrance where the tour buses go so I'm somewhat lost, but the mural helps me get my historical bearings before I clamber up a hill to the granite colossus.
I eventually join throngs of German pilgrims bent on climbing 364 steps to the top. (Before joining them, I had to explain to a guard why I had arrived from an obscure direction without a ticket.)
I am not madly keen on monuments, even on this scale of teutonic grandiosity, but the crypt inside containing giant stone warriors is as breath-taking as the climb - although my ultimate reward is a panoramic view of Leipzig in its verdant setting at the southern end of the North German plain.
I am told many Germans have mixed feelings about the triumphalism represented by the monument, completed just a year before World War I and later used as a backdrop for Nazi rallies.
But Leipzig, an exceedingly visitor-friendly city of 535,000 people, takes its history most seriously, even as it parties into a second millennium to commemorate its first mention in 1015 in a bishop's chronicle.
Spread over the intersection of two medieval pan-European merchant routes, it has always been a major publishing and trade fair centre, a legacy of which is its extensive and sometimes disorienting system of interior shopping passages.
Johann Sebastian Bach worked for 27 years from Leipzig's church of St Thomas until his death in 1750, and other musical masters among more than 500 composers reputed to have lived there include Felix Mendelssohn, Robert Schumann and Richard Wagner.
The poet Johann Wolfgang Goethe was 16 when he arrived in 1765 in his "little Paris" to study law but spent more time carousing at pubs such as Auerbachs Keller, which still trades on its role in his epic drama Faust.
Other students of the 600-year-old University of Leipzig have included philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
The father of Protestantism, Martin Luther, rang in the Reformation in 1539 at St Thomas, where Bach now lies buried.
Belying the grimness of the battle monument, today's Leipzig is one of Europe's funkiest tourist magnets, rivalling Berlin (an hour north by train) and teeming with students, musicians and artists.
That suits Berlin artist Yadegar Asisi, who - inside a disused gasworks a few blocks from the monument - has turned the aftermath of the battle into the ultimate multimedia extravaganza: the world's largest panoramic 360-degree painting.
After climbing a 15m tower within Asisi's "panometer" building, spectators have their senses assaulted by a stunning light show, accompanied by a crescendo of Bach's music recorded by the 800-year-old St Thomas choir he once led.
The tower looks over a French army in rout through old Leipzig, and we are challenged to find Napoleon fleeing on his horse in a historical take on "Where's Wally".
As well as being awash with classical and jazz music festivals, Leipzig hosts the world's largest annual gathering of the "goth" subculture, and what was once Europe's largest cotton mill has been transformed into a warren of art studios and galleries of the New Leipzig School of Painting called the Spinnerei.
That all means accommodation can get tight at weekends, as visitors from throughout Germany cram into four kilometres of central city pedestrian zones to blend cultural tourism with shopping, al fresco dining and nightlife.
It is a far cry from 25 years ago, before tens of thousands of Leipzig's citizens - sick of being oppressed under the Soviet bloc state of East Germany - stared down armed forces while carrying candles from weekly prayer meetings at the ancient (circa 1165) Church of St Nicholas around a ring road where medieval city walls once stood.
Their protests built to a head in October 1989, earning Leipzig the title "City of Heroes" and setting the stage for the fall of the Berlin Wall a month later.
But their relief at escaping a sequel to China's Tiananmen Square massacre, which had rocked the world that year, came with a hangover from living in a soot-filled city crumbling with neglect and riddled with buildings damaged by bombs from World War II. East Germany's rulers lacked either the resources or will to repair them.
"Leipzig was left looking like a cheese with lots of holes," says guide Birgit Scheffel, a veteran of the peaceful uprising, who says she was unable to find work as a Christian under the former regime.
The city had escaped the level of destruction that flattened much of Dresden to the east in World War II after many Leipzigers defied orders and left their underground bunkers to douse flames from fire bombs raining on their homes.
But low-grade lignite coal later burned from vast opencast mines, which laid waste to forests south of the city, made it one of the most polluted pockets of Europe.
Environmentalists who exposed the resulting shortened life expectancy were persecuted by the Stasi security service, until protesters occupied its Leipzig headquarters.
Now, the lignite pits are being transformed into a lush aquatic wonderland of 19 lakes, and thousands of Communist-era tenement buildings have been demolished, while many of the city's imposing rows of attractive late 19th century "Grunderzeit" apartments have been restored.
East Germany's trademark Trabant car, which ran on a foul two-stroke mixture of petrol and oil, has become a museum piece as BMW assembles up to 100 electric vehicles daily at an architecturally award-winning plant outside Leipzig.
Although 5500 workers make it Leipzig's largest employer, other big investors - filling a vacuum left by the loss of about 80,000 smoke-stack jobs since 1989 - include Porsche, Siemens, Amazon and DHL.
Only vehicles compliant with the latest European emission standards are allowed into central Leipzig, which is served by Germany's second largest tram network and where city transport planning head Torben Heinemann says pollution is 95 per cent less than in 1989.
The city has more than 400km of cycling paths and strong civic and state spending on public transport - including a $1.55 billion underground rail link which opened in late 2013 to connect Leipzig's two former terminal stations - is also stimulating private investment.
But one building left largely untouched is the former Stasi base, now a museum looming over a street corner which many citizens once dreaded to approach.
The stench from countless paper files - shredded in panic by Stasi officers but being pieced painstakingly back together for perusal by their former surveillance subjects - pervades the building. Its detention cells and spying paraphernalia, including disguises and human smell samples, remain chilling reminders of the ultimate Cold War surveillance state.
The building also houses a federal archives commission which takes hundreds of applications each month from people wondering if their daily lives were pried into by extensive networks of informers posing as friends or colleagues.
Education officer Franziska Scheffler was too young to remember much of life under the Stasi, and her father found only a modest file about his activities as a church worker.
Even so, she believes it important to remind Germans of their past as they enjoy life in "a different country where there's quite a feeling of freedom on the streets".
That freedom will continue to be celebrated this year.
Millennium events include a Mendelssohn concert in which a 1000-voice choir will lift the roof off the city's main football stadium in support of its world-famous Gewandhaus Orchestra.
But to some in the city now known through Germany as Hypezig, it has become ironic that a giant "escape to freedom" wall mural by local artist Michael Fischer - far more colourful than the battlefield map - occupies an entire side of a multinational hotel chain's multi-storey building.
CHECKLIST
Getting there: Air New Zealand flies daily from Auckland to London via Los Angeles. From there, budget carriers connect to Leipzig.
Further information: See leipzig.travel/en.
The writer travelled to Germany as guest of the International Transport Forum and his stay there was assisted by Leipzig Tourism and Marketing.
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