Wetzlar

Wetzlar changed how humanity sees, twice — once through a broken heart, once through a lens. In the summer of 1772 the young Goethe, interning at the Imperial Chamber Court that made this small city the Holy Roman Empire's supreme judicial seat, fell hopelessly in love with Charlotte Buff, betrothed to another; from the wound came The Sorrows of Young Werther, the novel that ignited European Romanticism and made Wetzlar a literary pilgrimage overnight. The Lottehaus, Charlotte's family home, preserves the rooms and relics of the affair; the Jerusalemhaus, where the real suicide that shaped the plot occurred, completes the shrine.

A century and a half later, in the Leitz optical works above the Lahn, Oskar Barnack built a small camera for 35mm cine film — the Leica, released in 1925, which liberated photography into the street and the moment; every photojournalist since owes Wetzlar a debt, and the Leitz-Park campus with its museum, together with the city's continuing optics industry, keeps the "city of optics" title in sharp focus.

Between the two revolutions stands the old town itself: the great unfinished cathedral — Romanesque and Gothic fused mid-thought, one tower forever short — timber-framed courts, and the stone bridge over the Lahn. Werther's tears and the decisive moment: Wetzlar's exports, still developing.