The story begins, as so many German stories do, with a river crossing. A settlement existed here by the eighth century, but the name first reaches us in 1108, attached to a man called Elimar I and a place written Aldenburg. The Hunte was navigable, and the ford turned a marshy crossroads into a count's seat. From this small power grew the County of Oldenburg, and from that small house grew, eventually, the dynasty that would put kings on the thrones of Denmark, Russia, Greece, and Norway. The House of Oldenburg still sits, by complicated descent, on the Danish throne. Not bad for a moated keep that kept sinking into its own muddy subsoil and had to be torn down in 1608 because it leaned.

The seventeenth century gave Oldenburg both wealth and ruin. The town grew rich while the Thirty Years' War devastated Germany around it, then in 1667 plague swept through and a fire finished what the plague started. The line of local counts ended that same year with Anthony Günther, and the territory passed to the Danish royal family, who governed from far away and cared even less. For more than a century Oldenburg was a Danish backwater, its burned-out lots left empty, its palace inhabited by a Danish governor. When Denmark finally let the territory go in 1773, the rebuilding began at last, this time in clean neoclassical lines. Walk the old centre today and you are walking, mostly, through the eighteenth century's idea of recovery.

After 1918 Oldenburg became the capital of the Free State of Oldenburg, a tiny republic carved from the old Grand Duchy. After 1945 it briefly became the capital of something larger: when the British folded the State of Oldenburg into Lower Saxony in 1946, the city became seat of the Verwaltungsbezirk Oldenburg, then in 1978 of the Weser-Ems administrative region. In 2004 Lower Saxony abolished those regions entirely. Oldenburg's administrative importance has been steadily redistributed for half a century, yet the city has only grown. Carl von Ossietzky University, founded in 1973 and now with more than 15,000 students, gave it a new identity. So did the European Medical School Oldenburg-Groningen, a cross-border partnership with the Dutch university 100 kilometres west.

Oldenburg's Jewish community went back to the fourteenth century. By the 1930s it numbered a few hundred merchants and tradesmen with a synagogue, a cemetery, and a school. On Kristallnacht the synagogue was burned and the men of the community were marched, in daylight, through the streets to the train station and on to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Among them was Rabbi Leo Trepp, who survived and lived to become an honorary citizen of the town that had expelled him. Since 1981, on every anniversary of the deportation, citizens of Oldenburg have walked the same route the prisoners walked. The Erinnerungsgang, the walk of remembrance, is one of the longest-running citizen memorials of its kind in Germany. A small community of about 340 people, mostly post-Soviet emigrants, maintains the synagogue again.

What an aerial view does not show is that this is one of the most cycle-mad cities in Germany. Bicycles do most of the work of personal transport, and on Saturdays in 2025 and 2026 every bus in town is free. The countryside around is roughly 80 percent grassland, full of dairy cows and the famously regional specialties of asparagus, corn, and kale. Every September the Kramermarkt opens at the Weser-Ems Halle, a funfair that has been running, in one form or another, since the seventeenth century, when it marked the end of harvest. The town has produced a remarkable density of names: the philosopher Karl Jaspers, the suffragist Helene Lange, the publisher Peter Suhrkamp, and Ulrike Meinhof of the Red Army Faction were all born here. So was the astronaut Thomas Reiter, who still lives nearby.