Osnabrück

Osnabrück shares custody of modern Europe's birth certificate: the Peace of Westphalia was negotiated in tandem here and in Münster, and on 25 October 1648 the treaty was proclaimed from the steps of Osnabrück's town hall — whose Friedenssaal, ringed by portraits of the negotiating envoys, preserves the room where the Thirty Years' War ended. The city has claimed the title "Friedensstadt", city of peace, ever since, and awards it substance through remembrance and prizes.

Its two great modern sons deepened that vocation through its opposite: Erich Maria Remarque, born here in 1898, wrote All Quiet on the Western Front — the century's defining novel of war's reality — and the Remarque Peace Centre documents his exile and legacy; the painter Felix Nussbaum, murdered in Auschwitz, left a self-witnessing oeuvre now housed in the Felix Nussbaum Haus, Daniel Libeskind's first completed building — an architecture of severed axes and dead ends that enacts the biography it shelters. Together, town hall, novelist and painter make Osnabrück Germany's most coherent city-length meditation on war and peace.

Around the memory stands a lively Westphalian-Lower Saxon capital: the late-Romanesque cathedral, the Heger Tor's neoclassical arch, a big university, the Theater Osnabrück with full opera, and the Morgenland Festival, which has made the city an internationally noted meeting place for the musics of the Middle East. Peace, examined daily.