In late Slavic times the Zamzizi tribe held this shore. After the Wendish Crusade of 1147 brought German nobility into the region, the counts of Lindow-Ruppin built a lowland castle around 1200 and founded a planned town southwest of it — the Neuruppin of today, first mentioned in 1238 and granted Stendal town rights on 9 March 1256.

A Dominican monastery went up in 1246, the order's first house between the Elbe and the Oder. Twenty-four Wiekhäuser and two high towers studded the town wall. In 1512 Elector Joachim I threw a three-day jousting tournament here to celebrate a peace treaty. In 1688 Neuruppin became one of Brandenburg's first garrison towns, and from 1732 to 1740 a disgraced Crown Prince Frederick — later Frederick the Great — served out his rehabilitation here after a failed escape from his father's court. French Huguenots settled after 1685, and one of their descendants would matter a great deal later.

The fire caused damage estimated at nearly 600,000 talers. The insurance fund covered about 220,000, a church collection raised 60,000, and the Prussian state put in 130,000 immediately — eventually more than a million talers in all. Prussia did not simply write cheques. It wrote rules.

The city planning director Bernhard Matthias Brasch executed the reconstruction commission's specifications between 1788 and 1803, expanding the town from 46 to nearly 61 hectares by removing the ramparts between the Tempelgarten and the lake. Two crowded parallel north–south streets were merged into a single broad axis. A rectangular grid went in, lined with continuous two-storey houses of uniform height and punctuated by generous squares. The architecture mixed late Baroque and Gothic details with the new Neoclassical taste, and the work was finished in 1803 — only St Mary's, built between 1801 and 1806, lagged behind.

This is why Neuruppin has been called the most Prussian of all Prussian towns: not for its soldiers, but for its right angles.

Karl Friedrich Schinkel, born here on 13 March 1781, lost his father to the fire and left for Berlin, where he became the architect who gave the Prussian capital its public face.

Theodor Fontane was born on 30 December 1819 into the town's Huguenot community, the son of an apothecary, and trained as an apothecary himself from the age of sixteen. He spent decades as a journalist before turning, in his late fifties, to the novels that made him — Effi Briest among them. First, though, came the Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg, published in volumes between 1862 and 1889: a patient, gossipy, affectionate survey of exactly this flat, sandy, lake-scattered country. No German region has ever been so thoroughly written into being by one man. Neuruppin was officially named Fontanestadt on 11 March 1998.

A third local boy, Paul Carl Beiersdorf, born in 1836, trained as a pharmacist and founded the company that would eventually put Nivea in medicine cabinets worldwide.

Long before mass photography, Germans got their images of war, royalty, scripture and scandal from Bilderbogen — cheap hand-coloured broadsides sold by the sheet. Johann Bernhard Kühn started producing them here, and his son Gustav built the trade into something extraordinary: print runs that reached over three million copies in a single year, notably during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. Sheets went out across the world stamped Neu-Ruppin, zu haben bei Gustav Kühn.

Three competitors — Oehmigke, Riemschneider and Bergemann — worked the same streets, and all three held leading positions in a German market of more than sixty firms. For a few decades, a garrison town in the Brandenburg sand was one of the visual engines of the German-speaking world. Fire extinguishers followed in 1905; the Minimax, easy enough for anyone to use, spread everywhere. There is a certain justice in a town that burned down becoming a place that made things to put fires out.

On 1 May 1945 Soviet forces reached the far shore of the Ruppiner See and prepared to shell the town. Someone — nobody knows who — climbed the monastery church tower and raised a white flag, and the same thing happened at the parish church. Neuruppin was not destroyed.

The garrison did not leave. Neuruppin became one of the largest Soviet bases in Germany, with roughly as many Soviet soldiers here as residents; the 12th Armoured Division stayed until 1991. Industry arrived too, and the town grew from about 18,000 people in 1970 to 33,000 by 1989, drawing workers from across the GDR and from Vietnam, Angola and Cuba. In 2004 six Stolpersteine were laid at the Ruppiner Kliniken for patients of the former state asylum murdered in the Nazi 'euthanasia' programme — a quiet correction to a long silence.

The barracks are apartments now. Part of the old airfield is used for gliding. And the lake still runs the length of the town, exactly as Fontane described it.