Aurich has been a capital for one regime after another since 1539. The roster reads like a textbook chapter on European political instability: counts of East Frisia, kings of Prussia, kings of Holland, an emperor of the French, kings of Hanover, Prussia again, the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, and finally the modern state of Lower Saxony. None of these governments lasted in their original form. Aurich kept its administrative role anyway, because the geography that made it useful in 1539 has not changed - it still sits roughly in the middle of East Frisia, between the islands and the inland marshes, with rivers and roads converging on it.
The settlement first appears in writing in 1276 as Aurechove, in a Frisian legal text called the Brokmerbrief. Etymologists have argued for centuries about what the name means. One school traces it to a person - a man called Affo and his property, Reich. Another reads it as a description of the waterworks on the fertile lowland of the Aa or Ehe river, on which the town sits. Medieval scribes spelled it Aurike, Aurikehove, Auwerckhove, Auwreke, Awerck, Awrik - the variations run to fourteen documented forms. In 1517, Count Edzard of the House of Cirksena began rebuilding Aurich after an attack damaged the town. In 1539 he consolidated the land authorities here, making Aurich the capital of the County of East Frisia. The decision stuck.
When the Cirksena line died out, East Frisia passed in 1744 to the Kingdom of Prussia, and Aurich kept its administrative seat under Berlin. The Prussian Army's defeat at the Battle of Jena in 1806 broke that arrangement; in 1808 the region became part of the Kingdom of Holland, ruled by Napoleon's brother Louis Bonaparte. In 1810, when France annexed Holland directly, Aurich was elevated to capital of the Ems-Oriental department of the First French Empire - a brief promotion that lasted until Napoleon's defeat in 1814. The town then passed to the Kingdom of Hanover in 1815, was annexed by Prussia in 1866, and became part of the Province of Hanover within the German Empire. After the Second World War it joined the new state of Lower Saxony. Through every reshuffling, the town remained an administrative center. Bureaucracies, once anchored, are hard to move.
From 21 October to 23 December 1944, a Nazi concentration camp operated at Aurich as a subcamp of Neuengamme. The camp's existence here for those two months is part of a much larger system: thousands of subcamps spread across Nazi-occupied Europe, each one a node in a machinery of forced labor and murder. The Aurich subcamp was not large, and it was open only briefly, but the people who suffered and died in it were as fully human as anyone in the town's chambers of commerce. Among Aurich's later notable citizens is Laura Hillman (1923-2020), an American writer and memoirist who survived the Holocaust and returned to a town that had, in different rooms and offices, been complicit in trying to kill her. Her late memoirs are part of how Aurich now remembers what happened here.
Modern Aurich is, among other things, a wind-turbine town. The company Enercon, founded in 1984 by the Aurich-born engineer Aloys Wobben (1952-2021), is one of the world's largest manufacturers of onshore wind turbines, and its headquarters and major factories are here. The flat windy coast that made the East Frisian marshes so hard to farm in the Middle Ages turns out to be excellent for spinning blades. Drive into Aurich from any direction and you will see the white columns standing in the fields, slowly turning, and you will pass the long industrial halls where the next generation of them is being built. The town's other notable citizens cover an unexpected range. Rudolf Eucken (1846-1926) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1908 for philosophical work that is now mostly forgotten. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs (1825-1895) was a 19th-century lawyer and writer who was among the earliest public advocates for the rights of gay men. Uwe Rosenberg (born 1970) has designed some of the most respected board games of the modern era, including Agricola and Patchwork. A small town can grow surprising people.
Aurich today is the second-largest town in East Frisia - by population after Emden, by area after Wittmund. It is the capital of the Aurich district, the seat of regional administrative offices, and home to roughly 42,000 people. Its coat of arms carries a red shield with a gold A, a crown above, two trees on the sides, and mistletoe in the supporters - the kind of complicated heraldry that nineteenth-century towns liked to give themselves. The town is twinned with Appingedam in the Netherlands, across the marsh border. The Aa river still runs through it. The land authorities are still here. The names of the people who once ran them - counts, kings, prefects, district presidents - are mostly gone, but their offices are still being worked in.
Aurich sits at 53.47°N, 7.48°E - inland East Frisia, roughly 25 km from the Wadden Sea coast. Recommended viewing altitude 2,500-4,000 ft for the compact town center, the surrounding patchwork of marsh and geest farmland, and the array of wind turbines that distinguish the Enercon manufacturing zone on the town's outskirts. Nearest aerodromes: Emden (EDWE) to the southwest, Wilhelmshaven-Mariensiel (EDWI) to the east, and Norden-Norddeich (EDWS) to the north. The town's historic center is small enough to fit in a single aerial frame; look for the church spire and the formal grid of administrative streets around it. Best light is afternoon when low sun highlights the spinning blades of the wind farms.