Qualla: Brandenburg an der Havel

Brandenburg an der Havel: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Pribislav, the last prince of the Slavic Hevelli, died in 1150. His widow Petrissa let Albert the Bear take the fortress on the Havel, and Albert promptly restyled himself Margrave of Brandenburg. It did not hold at once — Jaksa of Kopanica drove him out, and Albert only came back in 1157, after a long siege and an agreement to garrison the place with Germans and Slavs together. But the name held. A bishopric, a margraviate, the founding core of Prussia and eventually a modern German state all took their name from this town on a river island, which today has 74,000 people and sits just far enough west of Berlin that almost nobody stops.

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Brandenburg an der Havel: Three Towns on the Water

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Brandenburg is built on islands and between them. For centuries it was not one town but three: the Altstadt on the western bank, the Neustadt on the eastern, and the cathedral district on its own island, the Dominsel, each with its own government and its own defences. The Old and...

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Brandenburg an der Havel: The Cathedral That Outlived the Capital

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The foundation stone of the cathedral of St Peter and Paul was laid on the Dominsel in 1165, and the building was consecrated five years later with Albert the Bear and his sons present. Begun Romanesque, finished Gothic in the fourteenth century, it is severe from outside — almos...

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Brandenburg an der Havel: Roland's Watch

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In front of the Old Town Hall stands a sandstone knight 5.35 metres tall, put up in 1474. Rolands like him were raised across northern Germany as declarations that a town answered to itself rather than to its bishop or its lord — a statue functioning as a legal argument, planted ...

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Brandenburg an der Havel: Brennabor

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

By the late nineteenth century this was heavy industry country. Steelworks arrived, then bicycles — Brennabor, Corona and Excelsior were all built here — then a toy industry, and between the wars an enormous Reichsbahn railway complex at Kirchmöser. In 1934 the Arado aircraft com...

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Brandenburg an der Havel: Loriot's Town

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Vicco von Bülow was born here on 12 November 1923 and became, as Loriot, the most quoted comic mind in postwar Germany — a cartoonist and film-maker whose bulb-nosed figures conduct themselves with catastrophic dignity, and whose lines are still traded across German dinner tables...

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