Görlitz is Germany's easternmost town, about 55,000 people on the west bank of the Neiße, and what makes it extraordinary is an absence. Dresden, ninety-five kilometres west, burned to its foundations in 1945 and was rebuilt from photographs. Görlitz was not. The medieval core survived, and so did the Renaissance and Baroque houses layered on top of it, and so did the belt of nineteenth-century tenements, villas and industrial buildings wrapped around the whole. Only the far outskirts look like anywhere else in Germany. The town did not escape 1945 entirely, though. When the border moved west that year, the Neiße became an international frontier, and everything on the east bank - roughly a third of the town - became Polish and was renamed Zgorzelec. The two halves have been looking at each other across the water ever since.

Film crews worked out what all that preservation was worth before the tourists did. Since 1990 Görlitz has stood in for cities that no longer exist, letting directors shoot pre-1945 Germany on location instead of building it on a soundstage. Inglourious Basterds was filmed here. So were The Reader, The Book Thief and Valkyrie. Wes Anderson turned the town's Art Nouveau department store into the lobby of The Grand Budapest Hotel. The press nickname stuck: Görliwood. Walk across the Untermarkt on an ordinary weekday and you may well find cables taped down over the cobbles and someone asking you to hold still for thirty seconds while a take finishes. There is a neat irony in the arrangement. A town whose chief distinction is that nothing happened to it now earns a living playing places where everything did.

The 15th meridian east runs through the town, and a marker in the streets notes where. That line is the one that defines Central European Time, which means the clocks in Madrid, Paris, Rome, Oslo and Warsaw are all, in a strictly technical sense, set to Görlitz time. The rest of the geography is just as tidy. A pedestrian footbridge crosses the Neiße into Poland, and the walk takes about a minute. From the far bank the old town assembles itself into the view that turns up on every postcard, the twin towers of the Peterskirche riding high above the water with the river running below. Since Poland joined the Schengen Area in 2007 there have been no border checks in either direction. People cross to buy cigarettes, to eat, or simply because the light is better from over there.

Görlitz sits in historic Lower Silesia and Upper Lusatia at once, and the shop windows still know it. Work on the Holy Sepulchre complex began in 1465, a set of buildings laid out to reproduce the sacred sites of Jerusalem for townspeople who would never make the journey themselves - a pilgrimage in miniature, five weeks' travel compressed into a short walk. The Silesian Museum occupies a Renaissance house on the Untermarkt. Souvenir shops sell Bunzlauer Keramik, the dotted blue-and-cream stoneware named for Bolesławiec, forty kilometres east in Poland. Antiquarian booksellers still trade in the old town, mostly in German. In the restaurants, eating out costs noticeably less than in Dresden or Berlin, and the local dish to order is Schlesisches Himmelreich - Silesian Kingdom of Heaven - which turns out to be pork cooked slowly in plum gravy.

Southwest of town the Landeskrone rises 419 metres out of otherwise gentle country, an isolated volcano on the edge of the Lusatian volcanic field and impossible to mistake for anything else. There has been a fortification of some kind on top since around 900, and the oldest surviving structure is an observation tower from 1796. The walk up takes about an hour from the tram terminus at Biesnitz, and on a clear day the view reaches the Jizera and Giant Mountains. The town's brewery took the hill's name, Landskron, and by virtue of the town's position it is the easternmost brewery in Germany. South of the centre lies Lake Berzdorf, which is not natural either: an open-pit lignite mine closed in the early 1990s, and in 2002 the crews began letting water in. Görlitz swims in it now.