The name Meppen comes from the old word Mappe, meaning delta - and the geography earns it. The Hase River flows in from the east. The Ems flows down from the north. The Nordradde joins from the southwest. The Dortmund-Ems Canal cuts through what the natural rivers don't already cover. The result is a town built on a tongue of slightly higher ground at the convergence of four navigable waters, which is precisely the kind of site medieval Europe valued enough to fortify. Meppen first appears in the historical record in 834, when the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious deeded a small missionary establishment here to the abbey of Corvey. The town has been continuously inhabited for the twelve centuries since.

Meppen's medieval town hall, the symbol of the town, was constructed in 1408 from glacial erratics - large stones dragged south by the last ice age and dropped across northern Germany when the glaciers retreated. The builders gathered these boulders from the surrounding fields and stacked them into walls. From 1601 to 1605 the building was expanded, an upper brick storey added, and a stepped gable installed in the Münster style. Inside is a 1605 sandstone fireplace that has watched four centuries of council meetings. The tower fell into disrepair in the nineteenth century, was demolished, and was finally rebuilt in 1909 to the form it shows today. The result is the kind of historical layering that makes German town halls confusing to date but satisfying to live with.

Just west of Meppen sits one of the strangest neighbors a small town can have: the Meppen Proving Ground, founded in 1877 by the Krupp arms company to test artillery. It is the largest weapons-testing range in Western Europe, covering more than 200 square kilometers of bog and forest. For nearly 150 years cannons have been fired across this landscape - first Krupp's enormous siege guns of the First World War era, later anti-aircraft weapons, then postwar tank guns and modern artillery systems used by the German Bundeswehr. The range has its own internal road network, its own railway sidings, its own controlled airspace. Locals long since learned to tell the difference between distant thunder and the dull thump of a 155mm test round.

Meppen has a darker layer to its twentieth century. The town sat near the Emslandlager system - the network of fifteen Nazi-era camps that exploited prisoners as forced bog labor across the Emsland. A satellite camp called Meppen-Versen, a subcamp of Neuengamme, held nearly 4,000 prisoners in 1944 and 1945. Most were forced to dig tank traps and antiaircraft positions in conditions calculated to kill. When Canadian forces liberated the area in April 1945 they found mass graves on the outskirts. The official town walk does not feature these sites prominently, but they sit a short drive from the town hall, and the documentation centers at nearby Esterwegen and Papenburg keep the record. The history of Meppen is not just town halls and rivers. It includes the worst that happened here, too.

Among the people who grew up in Meppen, two stand out for the breadth of their reach. The novelist Levin Schücking, born here in 1814, became a major figure in 19th-century German literature and a long-time correspondent with the poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. The show jumper Alwin Schockemöhle, born in 1937, won individual gold for West Germany at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal and team bronze at Mexico City in 1968 - the highest competitive achievements ever to come out of the town. The historian Karl Brandi, born in Meppen in 1868, wrote a definitive biography of Charles V that is still in print. Three different fields, three different centuries, one small Emsland town as the common origin.