Osnabrück audiotours

The Peace of Westphalia in 1648 is one of the foundational moments in European history, and it was negotiated simultaneously in two cities: Munster and Osnabruck. The Westphalian Treaty ended the Thirty Years' War and introduced the principle of state sovereignty that still shapes international law today. Osnabruck's town hall, the Rathaus on the Marktplatz, was where the Protestant delegations gathered, and you can stand in the same room where that treaty was finalized. History very rarely feels this proximate.

Erich Maria Remarque was born in Osnabruck in 1898, and his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, published in 1929, sold 2.

5 million copies in its first year alone. The city expelled him and burned his books in 1933. A museum in his birthplace on Johannisstrasse documents both the life and the treatment, and the contrast between the universalist humanism in his writing and what his hometown did to him is instructive. The city has since tried to make amends through the annual Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize.