Remagen

Remagen entered history in a single afternoon. On 7 March 1945 American troops found the Ludendorff railway bridge still standing and crossed the Rhine — the first Allied crossing, hastening the war's end by weeks; the bridge, wounded by demolition charges and overuse, collapsed ten days later. Its surviving black basalt towers on the Remagen bank now house the Peace Museum, telling the story of the "Bridge at Remagen" with the sobriety it deserves, a place of pilgrimage for veterans' families and historians alike.

The town's older pilgrims climb the Apollinarisberg, where the neo-Gothic Apollinariskirche rises above the river, its interior entirely painted by the Nazarene school — one of the completest fresco cycles of German Romanticism — around the relics of the town's patron; the July Apollinaris pilgrimage has drawn the faithful for centuries, and the spring below gave its name to a rather famous mineral water.

Music owns the northern edge. At Rolandseck, the arcaded classicist railway station — long a haunt of artists and chamber musicians — grew into the Arp Museum, Richard Meier's white galleries rising behind it, concerts continuing in the festival hall where the Rhine glitters past the windows. Opposite lies the island of Nonnenwerth with its convent, where Franz Liszt spent three summer idylls in the 1840s; above it the Rolandsbogen arch frames the view that made Rhine Romanticism a movement. A bridge, a blessing, and a window on the river: Remagen in three arches.