Arnstadt — My Beautiful, Complicated Hometown

This is my hometown: Arnstadt in Thuringia, Germany.

At first glance, it is an easy place to love. Cobblestone streets, old houses, church towers, quiet squares, and that particular Thuringian light that can make even familiar corners look almost new again. Arnstadt is not a big city, but it carries itself with the confidence of a place that has seen more than enough history for one lifetime — or even for many lifetimes.

I was born here and lived here for the first twenty years of my life. I left Arnstadt in 1989, only two days before the Berlin Wall fell. That timing still feels unreal to me. I had grown up in the former GDR, in a country that called itself a workers’ and peasants’ state, but in reality kept its own people locked inside. We were not prisoners behind bars in the usual sense, but we were prisoners behind borders. For most citizens, those borders were uncrossable. And those who tried to cross them illegally risked imprisonment — or even death.

Their crime was simple: they wanted to be free.

I did not leave Arnstadt because of the city itself. I left because of the political system that surrounded it, controlled it, and reached into the lives of everyone who lived there. My final break came after another personal clash with that dictatorial regime, after my trip to Poland. I tell that part in my account of leaving East Germany in 1989.

A Childhood Between Good and Bad Memories

When you grow older, something strange happens to memory. The bad things do not disappear, but sometimes the good memories begin to shine more strongly again. Perhaps because we understand later how fragile they were. Perhaps because we miss the people more than the place.

For me, the good memories of Arnstadt belong to the time when the family was still complete. Those are the memories of childhood before everything changed. The bad memories began when that completeness ended. I was only eight years old.

At that age, a child does not fully understand loss, but he feels it. The familiar world breaks apart, and even the streets outside seem different afterwards. A hometown is not only made of houses and churches. It is made of voices, footsteps, dinners, arguments, celebrations, and the feeling that certain people will always be there. When they are gone, the city remains — but it is no longer quite the same city.

One of the Oldest Towns in Thuringia

Arnstadt is often called one of the oldest towns in Thuringia. The town’s own account of its landmarks dates its first written mention to 704. That means Arnstadt is not just old in the romantic tourist-brochure sense. It has stood here for more than thirteen centuries, through empires, wars, religious changes, dictatorships, reunification, and the slow, uneven movement of everyday life.

Located south of Erfurt and not far from the Thuringian Forest, Arnstadt has always had a special position. It was close enough to important trade routes and political centres to matter, but small enough to keep its own character. Over the centuries it belonged to various noble houses, especially the Counts and later Princes of Schwarzburg. Their presence shaped the town’s architecture and cultural life.

The ruins of Neideck Castle still remind visitors of that aristocratic past. The castle was once an important residence of the Schwarzburg rulers. Today, the remaining tower rises above the town as a quiet witness to centuries that are otherwise difficult to imagine.

Arnstadt also has some remarkable churches. The Liebfrauenkirche, one of the most important medieval churches in Thuringia, shows the town’s religious and architectural significance. The Bach Church, formerly the New Church, is connected to one of the greatest names in music history: Johann Sebastian Bach.

Bach, Bratwurst, and More Than Tourist Slogans

Arnstadt is proud of its connection to Johann Sebastian Bach, and rightly so. Bach worked here from 1703 to 1707 as organist at the New Church, now the Bachkirche; those dates are documented in Arnstadt’s history. It was one of his first important professional positions. He was still young, talented, stubborn, and probably not always easy for the local authorities to handle.

There are stories about conflicts between Bach and the church council — about his musical style, his long absence when he walked to Lübeck to hear the famous organist Dieterich Buxtehude, and even about a fight with a student. These stories make him feel less like a marble statue and more like a real young man finding his way. In Arnstadt, Bach was not yet the untouchable genius of later centuries. He was a brilliant but difficult local organist with enormous potential.

Then there is the Bratwurst. On this subject, my hometown loyalty remains entirely unreasonable and completely intact.

Arnstadt is often associated with the oldest known written reference to the Thuringian Bratwurst. Arnstadt’s tourism office points to convent records from 1404 for the first written reference to Thuringian Rostbratwurst. Whether one wants to call it the birthplace of the Bratwurst or not, the connection is old and real enough to be part of the town’s identity.

But Arnstadt is more than Bach and Bratwurst. It has the Schlossmuseum with the famous “Mon plaisir,” a remarkable miniature baroque town made of dolls and detailed scenes from court and everyday life. It has old streets, half-timbered houses, city gates, towers, and quiet corners where history does not shout but waits patiently.

For another taste of Thuringia, there is also my Rostbrätel recipe with pepper, onions and sourdough bread.

The Darker Layers of History

But no honest look at a German town can stop at pretty facades.

Arnstadt’s history, like the history of so many places in Germany, also has bloody and shameful chapters. During the Nazi regime, Jewish citizens were persecuted, deported, and murdered. Others who did not fit into the ideology of the regime also became victims — political opponents, people considered “undesirable,” forced labourers, and many more.

These were not abstract events that happened only in Berlin, Auschwitz, or faraway places. They reached into towns like Arnstadt. They happened in streets where people had once greeted each other. They happened with the help of authorities, silence, fear, opportunism, and hatred. Families disappeared. Businesses were taken. Lives were destroyed.

And after the war, the suffering did not simply end for everyone.

The Soviet occupation brought its own injustices. People suspected of collaboration, opposition, or sometimes merely being inconvenient were arrested. Some civilians were sent to former concentration camp sites that the Soviet NKVD used as special camps after 1945. Many never returned; hunger and disease claimed numerous lives in those camps.

This happened to my great-grandfather.

That sentence alone contains a family tragedy that is hard to measure. He vanished into a system that once again treated human beings as disposable. One dictatorship had ended, but another form of oppression took its place.

My family history carries another wound as well. My grandfather was taken from Czechoslovakia and forced into slave labour for the Nazis. One day he escaped. Nobody knows if he survived that escape.

Growing Up in the GDR

My own youth in Arnstadt unfolded under the grey ceiling of the GDR.

For outsiders, it can sometimes be hard to understand what that meant in daily life. It was not always dramatic. People went to school, worked, celebrated birthdays, fell in love, listened to music, complained about shortages, watched television, repaired things, stood in lines, laughed, and tried to live normal lives.

But the abnormal was always there.

The state decided where you could travel, what you could say, which books and ideas were dangerous, and how far your dreams were allowed to go. The border was not only a line on a map. It was a wall inside the mind. You learned what not to say. You learned who might be listening. You learned that freedom was not guaranteed, and that wanting too much of it could make you suspicious.

For me, that feeling became unbearable.

I wanted to see the world and breathe without asking permission. By then, I had reached the limit of what I could accept.

When I left in November 1989, I could not know that only two days later the Wall would fall. History sometimes has a cruel sense of timing. For years people had risked everything to escape, and suddenly the impossible became reality almost overnight.

But those two days matter to me. They remind me that my decision was made before the door opened. I left because I had reached my own limit.

Returning Without the Same Burden

Today, when I walk through Arnstadt, I do not feel only the old heaviness. I see the town differently now. Maybe distance helps. Maybe age softens some things. Maybe after living abroad and seeing so many countries, I can finally look at my hometown not only as the place I needed to escape from, but also as the place that shaped me.

Maybe that is why returning feels different now. I no longer need the city to be only good or only bad. I can accept that it is complicated — just as my own memories are complicated.

This is my hometown.

It gave me childhood, family, pain, longing, and the desire to leave. It also gave me roots. And even though I left Arnstadt, a part of me will always walk these old streets, somewhere between memory and history, between what was lost and what remains.

For another Thuringian town where the history goes well beyond the pretty streets, there is also my visit to Mühlhausen.