A city filled with Cold War curiosities and odd festivals

A 2025 European capital of culture, Chemnitz in Germany is finally getting the attention it deserves.

- By James March

In Chemnitz, you need to squint to find conventional beauty.

Ambling toward my hotel on a frigid January night, I turn right at Brückenstrasse and pass a strange sight that also happens to be the city’s most well-known attraction – a 40-tonne sculpture of Karl Marx’s head. His furrowed brow is arresting, while behind is an enormous stone frieze pronouncing “Workers of the world, Unite!” in several languages.

At the top of the street, my hulking 26-floor hotel – absurdly large for a city of under 300,000 people – looms ominously in the dark and resembles Biff Tannen’s dystopian hotel-casino from Back to the Future Part II (but without the kitschy neon).

Unconventional? Yes. But this curious city in Saxony – the 2025 European capital of culture, shared with the border-straddling Nova Gorica in Slovenia – is well aware of its unorthodox charm. “An Eastern European city in a Western European country” is how it’s frequently described to me. And with 223 projects and over 1,000 events in the books for this year, there’s plenty to look forward to.

The third-largest city in Saxony, behind Dresden in second and Leipzig in first, and a busy industrial hub during the 19th and early 20th century, Chemnitz’s smoking chimneys were flanked to the south by the Ore mountains – one of the world’s oldest mining regions. Invariably, it became one of Germany’s wealthiest cities.