Quakenbrück was founded in 1234 by the Bishop of Osnabrück, although people had clearly been farming the river meadows around it long before any document existed to record them. The site was strategic: it sat at the northern edge of the bishopric, where Osnabrück's territory bumped up against rival lordships, and a town there meant a defensible point on the slow, dark River Hase. The name itself is older than the town - one popular etymology reads it as the Quaker Bridge, but the truer derivation likely refers to boggy, quaking ground at the river crossing. Quakenbrück joined the Hanseatic League in its heyday and became the unofficial centre of the surrounding Artland district, the deep, fertile farmland whose ancient half-timbered farmhouses still draw architecture students.

On 29 May 1916, in the middle of the First World War, the town received a strange gift. A wooden statue of a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century knight, carved from French poplar and built by two soldiers from the battalion of Clemens Freiherr von Schorlemer-Lieser, was installed in the town hall meeting room. It was a Nagelfigur - a nail-man - one of hundreds erected across Germany and Austria during the war. Civilians paid to drive an iron nail into the figure; the proceeds went to war charities and to the families of soldiers at the front. As the nails accumulated, the wooden knight gradually became armoured in iron - hence its name, the Quakenbrücker Eiserner Burgmann. It is one of the smaller and stranger artifacts of how a small town in Lower Saxony paid for a war it did not start and could not stop.

The Artland-Gymnasium - the local secondary school - has a habit of producing graduates who go further than its modest size suggests. Klaus von Klitzing studied here before going on to win the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the quantised Hall effect. Hans-Gert Pöttering, born in nearby Bersenbrück in 1945, went from the same school to a long career in the European Parliament, which he eventually presided over. Holger Czukay, founding bassist of the experimental rock group Can, taught music at the school in the 1960s before going off to invent his own kind of sound. The town also raised the German-Dutch art historian Wilhelm Martin, the film critic Enno Patalas, and the actor Wilhelm Bendow, who became one of pre-war Berlin's most distinctive cabaret comedians.

The other thing Quakenbrück is known for is, improbably, basketball. The Artland Dragons play in a small arena in a town of fewer than fourteen thousand people, and for most of the 2000s they competed at the top of the Basketball Bundesliga. They finished runners-up in the 2007 season and won the German Cup in 2008 - results that meant fans from larger German cities had to drive into the flat agricultural country north of Osnabrück to see their teams play. The climate here is the gentle, damp, slightly cool type of the North German Plain: about 700 millimetres of annual rainfall, an average air temperature of 8.5 degrees Celsius, and maybe twenty-five summer days when the thermometer reaches 25. It is not weather that suggests championships. The Dragons won anyway.