Magdeburg, located on the Elbe halfway between Hamburg and Dresden, is one of Germany’s oldest cities, with its massive cathedral tracing its roots back to 937. However history hasn’t been kind to it, having been destroyed twice over, first in the Thirty Years War (when as a prominent Protestant city it was sacked by Imperial troops in 1631) and second when it was levelled by heavy Allied bombing during World War II.

As one of the largest cities in the German Democratic Republic, aka communist East Germany, the postwar reconstruction can be described as functional at best. The Elbe, such a popular attraction further upriver in Dresden and Saxon Switzerland, became little more than an industrial waterway as it passed through Magdeburg.

However the city now boasts one of the most individual buildings helping to revitalise the region. The Grüne Zitadelle is the last project designed by the Austrian artist and architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser. Although not completed until 2005, five years after his death, this eccentric multi-purpose building reflects his philosophy of creating unique spaces for individuals, places not just ‘to be’, but also ‘to experience’. He saw structures as people’s third skin (after their actual skin and their clothing).

The perfect antidote

The original discussions about the development took place at the end of the 1990s, and the site was selected and the designs completed just before Hundertwasser died. The architect, whose style has been compared to Gaudí (responsible for the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona), passionately advocated individual building design and rejected anything thought to be uninspiring.  Consequently post communist Magdeburg, with its abundance of extremely functional and utilitarian architecture, was the perfect place to host this project.

The architect’s famous multicoloured Hundertwasserhaus in his native Vienna has undulating floors, trees growing from inside rooms and a roof covered in earth and grass. The Grüne Zitadelle was designed and built in a similar style, but with a bright pink exterior thrown in for added measure. No two windows are the same, whilst trees grow out of the building and are planted on the roof, thereby furnishing the building with the green element in Grüne Zitadelle.

Functionally it has a variety of uses. The ground floor features shops, business premises and a café, the Alt Magdeburg. The ART hotel Magdeburg, with over 40 rooms and suites, is on the second floor, along with a theatre and a crèche (which uses the roof garden for its outdoor play area), whilst the top floor features 55 individually designed (naturally) apartments.

After the nearby cathedral, this has become Magdeburg’s second most popular tourist attraction. Guided tours (in German), lasting an hour will give a greater understanding about the man and his philosophy.

One of the great myths about Germany is that the trains run on time. Increasingly, they don’t. ‘We are one of the richest industrial nations in the world, but we have one of the worst railways in the world!’ screamed a recent headline in Bild.

A key issue is a lack of funding, with only €69 per capita annual spending on infrastructure compared to €165 in the UK and a whopping €362 in Switzerland.

A further issue is the sheer size of Deutsche Bahn, which has myriad business interests across the globe (including Arriva in the UK), to the point where transporting the average German by train is only a small part.
I have had plenty of personal experience of delays over recent years, with a service from Stuttgart to Heidelberg an hour late on a visit in 2016. The following year, waiting for a cancelled train at tiny Sinsheim station in the snow and ice was not an experience I’d care to repeat.

And on my latest visit when travelling from Düsseldorf to Hannover my train was 20 minutes late setting off, not great in itself, but then proceeded to lose a further 45 minutes, meaning I arrived over an hour behind schedule in Hannover.

The next day my 75 minute journey back from Hannover to Magdeburg took just over two hours, with no apparent reason for the delay. After watching a game of football in Magdeburg and needing to catch a flight back to the UK, with my faith in Deutsche Bahn precarious, I left the match early. It was a wise decision, because the train, despite leaving on time, finally arrived an hour and quarter late! Three journeys, three major delays.

All this is a huge shame because rail travel through Germany, something I first experienced whilst living there as part of my degree, is one of the great pleasures in life. The quality of the trains themselves, once they arrive, is superb, and now as the parent of a disabled child I am immensely impressed by the availability of specialist facilities, including a fully accessible toilet.

Tickets are comparatively cheap (if you book in advance) and the extensive network means that it is easily the best means of seeing great swathes of the country. There can few pleasures as great as sitting on a state-of-the-art ICE train and watching the beautiful German countryside rolling past. If only they could run on time!