Magdeburg Audio Tours

In 1654, Magdeburg's mayor Otto von Guericke demonstrated the existence of a vacuum by bolting two bronze hemispheres together, pumping out the air, and challenging thirty horses to pull them apart. They could not. That experiment, which helped launch the scientific revolution, was thoroughly Magdeburian in spirit: empirical, stubborn, and performed in public for maximum effect. The hemispheres are now in the Deutsches Museum in Munich, but Magdeburg has not quite recovered from lending them out.

The city was sacked in 1631 during the Thirty Years War, and twenty-five thousand non-combatants were killed in what became the defining atrocity of that conflict.

It was rebuilt. It was bombed in January 1945, and a large part of it was destroyed again. It was rebuilt again, this time in East German functional style, which is why the city centre has a surreal quality: medieval cathedral, socialist housing, and then the Gruene Zitadelle, the Green Citadel, designed by Friedensreich Hundertwasser in his signature style of curved lines, roof gardens, and gold-tipped turrets, completed in 2005.