Mönchengladbach

Mönchengladbach grew from an abbey and an industry: the monks ("Mönche") of the tenth-century Gladbach monastery gave the city its name and its hilltop minster — whose crypt and treasury reward the climb — while cotton gave it everything else. By the nineteenth century the looms of Gladbach and Rheydt clothed half a continent, earning the title "Manchester of the Rhineland"; the textile machinery built here still weaves worldwide, and a textile technology campus keeps the thread unbroken.

The city's modern fame wears football boots: Borussia Mönchengladbach's young "Foals" of the 1970s played the most romantic football Germany has known, duelling Bayern for the decade's titles from the mythical Bökelberg; the Borussia-Park stadium now carries a devotion that approaches the liturgical. Two native sons conquered other fields entirely: Hugo Junkers, aviation pioneer, born in Rheydt — and Joseph Pilates, born here in 1883, whose exercise method now stretches on mats from Tokyo to Buenos Aires.

Architecture gave Mönchengladbach a landmark of European rank: the Museum Abteiberg, Hans Hollein's postmodern masterpiece cascading down the abbey hill, a building that rethought what a museum could be and won its architect the Pritzker Prize — inside, a first-class collection from Beuys to the present. With its theatre shared with Krefeld and the Niederrhein's oldest concert traditions, the monks' city keeps faith with both loom and muse.