In 1989, Bonn celebrated its two-thousandth birthday. Banners went up across the Marktplatz, the Beethoven Monument got a polish, and the Federal Republic of Germany - of which Bonn was the capital - threw a party for the founding of a Roman fortress in 12 BCE. Two years later the Bundestag voted to move the capital to Berlin, and Bonn began the strangest transition of any European city in the twentieth century: it had to figure out what a capital city does when it stops being one. Three decades on, it has become something genuinely odd - a place that was provisional for half its modern history and now refuses to be provisional again.
Bonn started as a logistics decision. After Roman governor Agrippa settled the Ubii tribe along the Rhine in 38 BCE, the empire built a small fortified camp on the river. Then in 9 CE three Roman legions were destroyed in the Teutoburg Forest, and the calculus changed. A full legion was stationed at what became the Legionary Fortress Bonn, and around the camp the usual Roman barnacles accumulated - traders, craftsmen, a vicus stretching south along what is now Adenauerallee. The fortress eventually faded with the empire. Vikings burned the rebuilt town twice in 882 and again in 883. A religious settlement formed around the Bonn Minster, a market settlement grew up around what is still the Marktplatz, and in 1243 Bonn received full city rights. The Cologne prince-electors made it one of their residences after the Battle of Worringen in 1288, and they liked it enough to stay: the Baroque palaces they built in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries are still the most distinctive buildings in the city center.
On 29 November 1949, by a vote that surprised most of the country, Bonn was chosen as the provisional capital of the new Federal Republic of Germany - over Frankfurt, which had expected the job. The word was provisional. Konrad Adenauer, the first chancellor, lived nearby in Rhondorf and wanted his desk close to home, but the official story was that Bonn was a placeholder while Germany waited for reunification and the return to Berlin. The provisional capital lasted forty-one years. Ministries spread along the Rhine south of the old town. Embassies took over villas. The Bundestag met in a converted teachers' college. From this small Catholic city on the Rhine, the Federal Republic ran the economic miracle, joined NATO, helped found what became the European Union, and negotiated reunification with the German Democratic Republic. The Beethovenhalle hosted four presidential elections by the Bundesversammlung between 1974 and 1989. JFK spoke from the balcony of the Altes Rathaus in 1963. De Gaulle spoke there in 1962. Gorbachev came in 1989. The Marktplatz, narrow and walled by Rococo facades, kept getting closed off for state visits.
On 20 June 1991 the Bundestag voted 337 to 320 to move the capital and most of the government to Berlin. The Berlin/Bonn Act softened the blow. Some ministries stayed. New federal agencies were created or moved in. The UN was invited to take over the former parliamentary office building, the Langer Eugen, and it accepted - the Bonn UN Campus now hosts agencies for everything from climate change to disability rights. The compensation package included three research institutes affiliated with the University of Bonn, which significantly upgraded the university's research profile. Deutsche Telekom, Deutsche Post, and Deutsche Welle planted their headquarters here. Haribo, founded in Bonn in 1920, kept a production site in the city even after moving its head office south to Grafschaft. The Post Tower, finished in 2002, became the tallest building in North Rhine-Westphalia. Bonn turned out to be unusually good at not collapsing.
Beethoven was born here on or around 17 December 1770 - the actual date is contested, but the baptism record at St. Remigius is dated the seventeenth - and the city has been working that fact for the better part of two centuries. The house at Bonngasse 20 has been a museum since 1889. The Beethoven Monument has stood in front of the Bonn Minster on the Munsterplatz since 1845. The Beethovenhalle, the third concert hall in the city to bear his name, opened in 1959 and has hosted the Beethovenfest, the orchestra, and a series of state events ever since. Beethoven left for Vienna at twenty-two and never came back. He still appears on the manhole covers.
Population around 330,000 and growing - one of the fastest-growing cities in Germany, projected to overtake Wuppertal and Bochum before 2030. The University of Bonn, founded in 1818, is one of the largest in the country and a designated University of Excellence under the federal funding scheme; eleven Nobel laureates have passed through it. The Museumsmeile along the southern axis of the old town includes the Haus der Geschichte, the Kunstmuseum, the Bundeskunsthalle, the Deutsches Museum Bonn, and the Museum Koenig. The Rhine promenade runs from the old toll station to the leisure park at Rheinaue. The Siebengebirge - the chain of low volcanic hills south of the city - is the start of the dramatic Middle Rhine valley. The Marktplatz still has the gilded Rococo perron of the Altes Rathaus, and the Old Town Hall is still where heads of state sign the Golden Book on visits.
Bonn lies on both banks of the Rhine at approximately 50.735 degrees North, 7.102 degrees East. The Cologne Bonn Airport (EDDK / CGN) is 15 km northeast - Germany's seventh-largest passenger airport. Cruise altitude views show the river bend, the old town clustered on the western bank around the Minster's distinctive tower, the green dome of the Beethovenhalle to the north, and the federal quarter (Bundesviertel) south along the river. The Post Tower at 162 meters is the tallest landmark. South of the city the Siebengebirge hills rise sharply above the river - the gateway to the UNESCO Middle Rhine valley.