Solingen sits on the eastern bank of the Rhine basin, in the green Bergisches Land hills east of Dusseldorf and Cologne. The reason the bladesmiths set up here, a thousand and more years ago, was practical. The hills above the Wupper have the right kind of iron ore. The fast streams that fall down to the Rhine have the right kind of water - hard enough for tempering, fast enough to drive the grinding wheels. The hardwood forests have the right kind of charcoal for the forges. And Cologne, the great medieval city, was just down the river: a market and a port that connected Solingen blades to traders who would carry them as far as the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of Britain. Viking swords with Solingen marks have been pulled from English bogs. Crusader swords have been recovered from Holy Land battlefields. The city kept making the steel because the steel kept selling, and it never quite stopped.

Walk through central Solingen now and you can read the city in its trademarks. Zwilling J.A. Henckels was founded in 1731; the two facing red figures of its logo are still the world's oldest registered cutlery brand. Wusthof, the Trident company, was founded in 1814. Boker, with its tree, has been making knives since 1869. There are smaller firms still - Pott, Robert Herder, Linder - that have not been bought out by larger groups. The Deutsches Klingenmuseum, the German Blade Museum, occupies a former convent in the Grafrath district and walks you through five thousand years of blade-making, from Bronze Age daggers to the elegant scissors of the nineteenth century to the surgical instruments of the twentieth. The single most uncomfortable artifact is a Solingen-made sword from 1575 with a built-in flint wheellock pistol concealed in the hilt - a piece of Renaissance overkill from a city that has always preferred its weapons specialized.

Solingen is a city of slopes. The medieval old town - Burg, on the southern edge - is built around a castle of the Counts of Berg, the medieval lords for whom the whole Bergisches Land is named. The castle was destroyed in the Thirty Years' War, rebuilt, and then turned in the nineteenth century into the heroic Romanesque-Revival pile of red stone you can visit now, sitting above the Wupper like a Tolkien illustration. A few kilometers downstream stands the Mungstener Brucke, the highest railway bridge in Germany at 107 meters, built in 1897 to connect Solingen to its neighbor Remscheid. The bridge is an enormous wrought-iron arch, painted gray-green, fragile-looking from below and surprisingly graceful from a passing train. Beneath it is now a Bruckenpark - meadows, footpaths, a small pedestrian gondola that crosses the river without going up to the bridge. On weekends the park is full of cyclists and prams.

Solingen's old town was destroyed in 1944, when an RAF raid killed 1,800 people and flattened the medieval center. The reconstruction that followed has the slightly anonymous quality of so many German postwar city centers: practical, plain, low. Walk away from the center, though, and Solingen recovers itself. The Grafrath district, mostly intact, has a steep cobbled street of slate-shingled houses that has been used as a film set so often the residents have stopped looking up. The Hendrichs Drop Forge in Merscheid, now part of the Rhineland Industrial Museum, is the last surviving working drop forge in the city - a long shed of soot-blackened hammers that still occasionally fire up for demonstrations, the noise concussive even at a distance. Anchor Point of the European Route of Industrial Heritage. Free to enter on Saturday mornings.

It is impossible to write about Solingen now without mentioning what international newspapers have made of the name. In May 1993 a neo-Nazi arson killed five members of the Turkish Genc family in the city - one of the most severe racist attacks in postwar German history. In August 2024 a stabbing during the city's 650th-anniversary festival killed three more. Solingen has been, twice in a generation, asked to carry national arguments it did not start. What is worth saying is that the city has carried them with a kind of stubborn ordinary grace. Mevlude Genc, the matriarch who survived the 1993 fire, spent the rest of her life speaking in Solingen schools and city halls against revenge. The festival came back the year after the stabbing because the residents insisted. The Klingenstadt is, daily, a working town of 160,000 people who make scissors and surgical instruments and pocket knives and trolleybuses - one of only three trolleybus systems left in Germany - and who go home each evening to a city that, like its blades, has been tempered.