Villingen-Schwenningen

Villingen-Schwenningen is one city with two histories — and for most of them, two countries. Villingen was Austrian and Catholic, a walled Black Forest town whose medieval ring survives with three of its gates and whose Münster anchors lanes of Alemannic dignity; Schwenningen was Württemberg and Protestant, a village that industrialised into what was once the world's largest centre of clockmaking, its factories timing the planet's mornings. The state border ran between them until Baden-Württemberg's creation; the towns themselves merged only in 1972, and cultivate their double identity with humour and two of everything.

Each half claims a superlative. Schwenningen holds the source of the Neckar, rising in its city park to begin the Swabian river's journey, and honours its horological past in the Uhrenindustriemuseum's living workshops. Villingen commands the deeper past: the Magdalenenberg just outside town is the largest Hallstatt-era burial mound in Central Europe, a Celtic prince's tumulus excavated to spectacular finds now shown in the Franziskanermuseum.

Villingen's louder glory is seasonal: the Swabian-Alemannic Fasnet, one of its historic strongholds, when the ancient guilds' carved masks, foxtails and rag costumes take the streets in rites far older than Rhineland carnival — Germany's pagan winter theatre at full strength. The Theater am Ring and the Franciscan concert hall carry the quieter seasons. (This entry merges the duplicate records "Villingen" and "Villingen-Schwenningen".)