Neubrandenburg

Neubrandenburg answers the question of what to do with a great Gothic church that war has gutted: make it sing. The Konzertkirche St. Marien — the vast brick-Gothic Marienkirche, burned out in 1945 — was reborn in 2001 as a concert hall of striking beauty, a modern glass-and-steel auditorium by the Finnish architect Pekka Salminen inserted within the medieval walls; the Neubrandenburg Philharmonic performs beneath the ancient vaults, and the pairing of ruin and resonance has become the city's signature.

The medieval city's other treasure encircles it completely: the town wall of the fourteenth century survives in its full two-and-a-half-kilometre ring, pierced by four brick-Gothic gates — the finest such ensemble in northern Germany, their filigree show-façades facing outward like crowns — and studded with the half-timbered Wiek houses of the wall-watchers, now galleries and taverns. "The city of four gates" earned its epithet honestly; the novelist Fritz Reuter, imprisoned here in demagogue-hunting times, added a rueful literary chapter the town commemorates.

At the city's edge begins the Tollensesee, four lakes' worth of glacial water with beaches, boats and the Brodaer woods — the gateway landscape of the Mecklenburg Lake District. Between gates, lake and singing church, Neubrandenburg composes the north's late-won lesson: what history breaks, culture can re-tune.