Qualla: Cottbus

Cottbus: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lukas Beck, CC BY-SA 4.0. The hole is filling up. For decades the Cottbus-Nord open-cast mine chewed lignite out of the flat ground north-east of the city, feeding the power stations that kept East Germany lit. Then the diggers stopped, and the water started coming in. When the flooding is complete, Cottbus will sit on the shore of the largest artificial lake in Germany by surface area - a beach where a coal pit used to be. Not many places get to watch their own industrial past turn into a holiday destination in real time. Then again, Cottbus has had practice at reinvention: cloth town, garrison town, coal town, and - in a language most Germans have never heard spoken aloud - Chóśebuz.

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Image: Lukas Beck | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cottbus: Chóśebuz on the Signs

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mariusz Paździora, CC BY-SA 4.0. Cottbus is one of the cultural centres of the Sorbs, the Slavic minority whose ancestors settled Lusatia long before Brandenburg existed as a margraviate, and whose language has clung on here through a thousand years of German rule. The city name itself is Sorbian, usually traced...

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Image: Mariusz Paździora | CC BY-SA 4.0

Cottbus: Cloth, Grain and Tree Cake

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trio3D, CC BY-SA 3.0. Ask what Cottbus was historically famous for and you get three answers: cloth, grain and beer, and Baumkuchen - "tree cake," a cylindrical layer cake baked on a rotating spit until its cross-section shows rings like a felled trunk. The cloth mattered most. From around 1860 the in...

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Image: Trio3D | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cottbus: A Theatre Built for a Boom Town

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Clemensfranz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Money that arrives suddenly wants somewhere to be seen spending itself, and in 1908 Cottbus got the Staatstheater - a jewel-box Art Nouveau house designed by Bernhard Sehring, the architect behind Berlin's Theater des Westens. The exterior is handsome; the interior is the point, ...

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Image: Clemensfranz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cottbus: Großstadt, Twice Over

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Teodor Bordeianu, CC BY-SA 3.0. The population arc tells the region's history without needing a single adjective. Cottbus first passed 100,000 residents in the 1970s - the threshold at which German bureaucracy grants a town the title Großstadt - and peaked above 130,000 in the East German years, when the mines ...

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Image: Teodor Bordeianu | CC BY-SA 3.0

Cottbus: Where the Spree Slows Down

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jan-Herm Janßen, CC BY-SA 4.0. North of the city the Spree loses its nerve and splits into hundreds of channels, and the result is the Spreewald - a waterlogged forest of alder and meadow navigated by flat-bottomed punts, where villages are reached by bridge or by boat. Burg lies about 15 km north-west and ser...

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Image: Jan-Herm Janßen | CC BY-SA 4.0