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In 1994, a German student named Achim Held posted a satirical message on the internet claiming that Bielefeld did not actually exist, that it was a fabrication maintained by a shadowy organisation called the SIE. The joke spread across the nascent German internet, and for the next three decades the city has had to insist, repeatedly and with mild exasperation, that it is in fact there. The joke became so embedded that in 2019 the city offered a one-million-euro reward to anyone who could prove Bielefeld did not exist. No valid proof was submitted.

Bielefeld sits in a pass through the Teutoburger Wald, the forested ridge where in 9 AD a Germanic coalition defeated three Roman legions in a battle that effectively ended Roman expansion into northern Europe.

The Sparrenburg Castle, a 13th-century fortress on the hill above the city with a distinctive star-shaped bastion added in the 16th century, offers views across the Teutoburg Forest and the Ravensberger Land below. The city developed as a centre of linen weaving, and the first mechanised spinning mills in Germany were established here in 1851.