The site consists of several components. At its center stands a stone cube, 5 meters by 5 meters (about 16 feet by 16 feet), built from remnants of buildings in the Judengasse, the old Jewish Ghetto. A steel band outlines part of the footprint of the Börneplatz Synagogue, which was destroyed on Kristallnacht (November 9, 1938). A plaque on the wall describes this destruction in German and English.

Along Rechneigrabenstrasse, on the southern edge, stand five street signs commemorating the names by which the area was known: Judenmarkt (16th Century–1885); Börneplatz (1885–1935); Dominkanerplatz (1935–1978); Börneplatz again (1978–1987) and Neuer Börneplatz (since 1996).

At the northern rim of the memorial stands a wall that surrounds the site of the old Jewish cemetery along Battonnstrasse. On this wall are mounted 11,908 steel blocks, each bearing a name and (if known) dates of birth and death of Frankfurt Jews murdered during the Shoah. Among them are the diarist Anne Frank, her sister Margot, and her mother, Edith Holländer Frank.

Next door, the Museum Judengasse — which is built over remnants of the original Judengasse — explores the experiences of Frankfurt’s Jewish community, from its origins in the Middle Ages through the present day. Permanent exhibitions detail Jewish art, culture, and the destruction of the community by the Nazis.

In December 1048, Bishop Bruno von Egisheim-Dagsburg received his papal nomination in Worms and traveled to Rome to become Pope Leo IX. He became a major player in the Great Schism of 1054, which divided the Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Churches.

In 1122, the Concordat of Worms was signed by Pope Callixtus II and Holy Roman Emperor Henry V, establishing that bishops would receive their spiritual authority from the church while remaining loyal to local monarchs.

The Diet of Worms of 1521 — where Emperor Charles V called on Martin Luther to recant his teachings — took place in the Bishops’ Court Palace, which stood next to the cathedral until its destruction in 1689. When Luther refused to recant, Charles declared him a heretic and forbade his writings.

The cathedral, which measures 110 meters by 27 meters (about 360 feet by 90 feet) was mostly finished in 1181, though additional parts have been added or renovated since. It was damaged in the Thirty Years’ War and the French Revolution, and has undergone several restorations. The cathedral was set on fire, though not destroyed, by the Allied bombing raids that leveled much of Worms on February 21 and March 18, 1945.

Visitors can step into “Luther’s Big Shoes,” a bronze monument in the Cathedral courtyard, which was placed by the local Rotary Club in 2017. A more substantial Luther Memorial — featuring the man, fellow reformers, and personified cities that accepted the Reformation — stands one block to the northeast.

Inside, the Baroque high altar was designed by the renowned 18th-century architect Balthasar Neumann. Medieval stone carvings of famous Biblical scenes line the walls along the nave. In the cathedral crypt, visitors will find the resting places of five generations of Salian dukes.

The rivers’ personalities are apparent from both the ground and from the surrounding hills. The inky Ilz, “the black pearl of the Bavarian Forest,” slinks slowly through the peat and spruce forests of the Bavarian Forest. The blue (sometimes brown) Danube, which begins six hundred kilometers west in Donaueschingen in the Black Forest, ambles without haste. The grayish-green Inn, which rises in the Swiss Alps, rushes with urgency through Austria and Bavaria before plowing into the Danube from the south. From above, particularly in summer when snowmelt is highest, the Inn appears to swallow both rivers whole. After the Dreiflüsseeck, the Danube’s color more resembles the Inn than it had before Passau.

The Dreiflüsseeck is also an excellent tourist attraction in its own right. Kids can play on the playground or follow the 1:1 billion-scale “Planetenweg” -- a 1:1 billion scale solar system model which begins at the Ortsspitze and stretches 4.8 kilometers down the Inn. History buffs can also look to the south across the Inn toward see Mariahilf Abbey (where Mozart once worshipped or where Austrian Kaiser Leopold absconded to pray for victory over the Turks in 1683) or the north to Veste Oberhaus, once the stronghold of Passau’s ruling prince bishops. At the tip of the Ortsspitze’s tongue lies an anchor, a monument to the victims of the Danube, which was placed in 1971. At the back of the park stand remnants of Passau’s medieval city wall, which began construction in 1250. The visible portion is from the sixteenth century.

As seen on Atlas Obscura.

Along the grand avenue of Unter den Linden in Berlin stands a stout neoclassical memorial. Set a few meters back from the street, and catty-cornered from the State Opera and the expanse of Bebelplatz (the site of Berlin’s May 1933 book burning), the memorial can be easy to miss. Yet, a visit not only resonates but also enables visitors to trace the evolution of Germany’s culture of remembrance, or Erinnerungskultur. The monument is called the Neue Wache. New Watch House.

The Wache was built between 1816 and 1818 by Prussian Surveyor General Karl Friedrich Schinkel to house the king’s soldiers while commemorating Prussian heroes from the Napoleonic Wars. The Doric columns and frieze centered on Nike, the goddess of victory, while statues of Prussian military heroes Gerhard von Scharnhorst and Friedrich Wilhelm von Bülow stood sentinel outside.

In 1931, the Wache was repurposed by architect Heinrich Tessenow—a mentor of Hitler’s eventual city planner, Albert Speer—who gutted the interior, opened an oculus to the sky, and placed a black granite block with a German oak wreath to honor German soldiers from the Great War. During Nazi rule, a cross was added to the wall, symbolizing the regime’s exclusion of Jewish servicemen.

After the monument and a third of Berlin were destroyed during World War II, the Socialist Unity Party of Germany—which governed the German Democratic Republic—restored the memorial in the 1960s and later rededicated it to the victims of fascism and militarism. A glass prism housing an eternal flame was placed at its center, while an unknown soldier and nameless concentration camp victim were buried inside the monument, surrounded by soil from Second World War battlefields and concentration camps.

In 1993, three years after Germany reunified, President Richard von Weizsäcker re-christened the Neue Wache as a National Memorial to Victims of War and Dictatorship. For its centerpiece, Chancellor Helmut Kohl selected a scaled-up version of “Pietà” by German artist Käthe Kollwitz, whose son Peter fell in World War I. The grieving mother symbolizes the personal pain and suffering of wartime loss, while a simple inscription, “Den Opfern von Krieg und Gewaltherrschaft”, or “To the victims of war and tyranny”, invites visitors to grieve their own. The simplicity reminds visitors of grief’s depth.

As seen on Atlas Obscura.