Emden

Emden is East Frisia's port and its sense of humour. The city's most famous son, the comedian Otto Waalkes, is honoured with the "Dat Otto Huus" on the harbour and with Ottifant figures surfacing all over town — a fitting patron for a seafaring city that has always preferred understatement and tea. Tea, indeed, is a civic institution: East Frisians drink more of it per head than anyone on earth, with cream clouds and rock sugar in a ceremony the region has had inscribed as intangible cultural heritage.

The city's serious surprise is art. The Kunsthalle Emden, founded in 1986 by Henri Nannen — Emden-born founder of Stern magazine — holds one of northern Germany's finest collections of Expressionism and modern art, a world-class gallery beside a provincial harbour basin. History is present with equal honesty: flattened in 1944, Emden rebuilt itself plainly around its Ratsdelft, where museum ships now moor before the reconstructed town hall, and the Bunkermuseum inside a surviving air-raid tower tells the war without varnish.

The harbour still works — one of Germany's principal car-shipping ports, Volkswagens rolling from the vast local plant onto ocean carriers — while the Dollart bay and the flat green polders stretch towards the Dutch border. Canals thread the town, Matjes stalls scent the quay, and the light is the wide silver of the North Sea coast: a city of few words, good jokes, strong tea and serious pictures.