Centre for culture and lifestyle
Year for year, around 40 million day visitors and 1.3 million overnight guests come to experience the Hanseatic City of Bremen. Reasons include the Town Hall and the Roland statue, now on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage List, or the sheer amount of cultural and leisure opportunities on offer. Another reason is that Bremen is ‘the city with the short pathways’ connecting all these tourist attractions, venues, theme parks and knowledge centres.
The Bremen Art Museum – the Kunsthalle – is one of the most important museums run by a private foundation, the Neues Museum Weserburg is Germany’s biggest museum for contemporary art, and the Übersee-Museum Bremen, or ‘Overseas Museum’, is one of the world’s leading museums for natural history, ethnology and history of commerce.
Bremen has plenty to offer on the stage, too – the Theater am Goetheplatz, for example, which over the years has established a strong reputation at national level with its unconventional theatre productions in ‘Bremen style’. True to its maritime roots, Bremen also has a floating Theaterschiff, and recent years have seen Bremen becoming a rising star as a place for musicals.
The foremost venue is definitely the Bremen Musical Theater. Behind the glass facade you’ll find one of the most modern musical theatres in Germany. Of the 1400 seats in the auditorium, none is less than 24 metres from the edge of the stage. The technical equipment is state-of-the-art and meets the highest standards. Major national and international productions such as ‘Cats’ or ‘Aida’, or world premieres like ‘Marie Antoinette’ have played to captivated audiences and great acclaim.
For friends of classical music, the Glocke is the centre of musical life in Bremen. Herbert von Karajan considered this concert hall, inaugurated in 1928, to be one of the three best in Europe. Internationally acclaimed artists, such as Anne-Sophie Mutter, Thomas Quasthoff, Cecilia Bartoli, Lang Lang and Waltraud Meier, return again and again to perform in the ‘Glocke’.
The venue for international rock and pop music stars is the ÖVB-Arena on the Bürgerweide, where stars like Anastacia, AC/DC, Pink and Depeche Mode play to audiences of up to 14,000. Sports events of all kinds – especially basketball, tennis, table tennis, handball, formation dancing, cycling and equestrian sports – attract large audiences to the hall, as do big TV shows broadcast to national and international audiences from the ÖVB Arena.
Messe Bremen, the Bremen Fair organisation, offers a total exhibition area of 40,000 sqm in the Bürgerweide complex, comprising the ÖVB Arena, the Bremen Congress Centre and the adjoining, state-of-the-art halls, for trade fairs, conferences, large-scale presentations and for conferences of political parties and federations.
A walk in the nearby Bürgerpark, Bremen’s green lung, is an ideal way to relax from all these events. Or enjoy the colourful hustle and bustle alongside the River Weser on the Schlachte boulevard, otherwise known as the ‘longest beer garden in the North’, to name just one of many highlights in the pub and restaurant scene.
