Germany Guide
Saxony
Chemnitz
CHEMNITZ (pronounced "kemnitz") is a curio after Leipzig. When the GDR regime wanted to create its own outpost of Stalinist Russia to celebrate Karl Marx's seventieth birthday in 1953, it turned to Saxony's third-largest city, probably inspired by an industrial heritage that had earned it the nickname of a "Saxon Manchester". In places, a city known for four decades as Karl-Marx-Stadt is a Soviet-style throwback that's as bizarre as it is controversial. The town's iconic relic of communism is the Karl-Marx-Monument at the junction of Brückenstrasse, a 7m statue cast by a Russian sculptor, Lew Kerbel. The god-sized bust fixes an unswerving glare at the city centre above the Communist Manifesto exhortation for "Working men of all countries, unite!" After reunification the town council mooted removing it, after over three-quarters of the population voted to revert from the city's communist moniker, Karl-Marx-Stadt, to the original Chemnitz. Even reunification brought its own problems in the form of depopulation, although award-winning recent investment has reversed the trend and revived the city centre. The restoration of the Markt, pedestrianized heart of the Altstadt, won Chemnitz a 2006 European award for urban renewal – its Galerie Kaufhof is a cathedral to capitalism unthinkable in the 1970s. From a tourist's point of view this makes Chemnitz a glimpse at a Soviet past that's all but absent from Leipzig, to add to the appeal of its galleries and a day-trip east to Schloss Augustusburg