In Bensberg I boarded a bus to Bergisch Gladbach. I sat in the front seat, behind the driver, or rather behind the female driver, because there was a lady behind the wheel. The sun's rays played on the faces on the billboards – I was driving through the German hinterland in the middle of an election campaign. The road led downhill towards the city. At one of the stops I recognised the factory gates of the Krieger company, which had made a name for itself in the world in the 1970s with its instant drinks, and this one is a leaf above.
STONE SHINGLES
Almost all the houses along the road are two-story buildings covered with brown shingles. Roof shingles made of argilloschist – a dark stone that splits easily lengthwise – are still a common choice for people who want to cover their houses. During the building boom before World War I, this was almost the only way to cover newly built houses in western Germany, where this material is abundant. In the hillsides, not only roofs were covered with this material, but sometimes entire facades as well.

We are actually driving through Bergisches Land – the Berg Land, which owes its name to the Duchy of Berg. After centuries of existence, it was liquidated after the fall of Napoleon in 1815. But the territory was still called Bergisches Land by both the people and geographers. Thus, the city, located ten kilometers east of the Rhine, proudly proclaims the name Bergisch Gladbach.
MOUNTAIN LAYING BROOK
I get off the bus in the very center. The pedestrian zone is a few steps from the bus stop. So that a stranger doesn't accidentally forget where he is, a stylized name of the town is displayed at the beginning of the street.

In 1853, the town of 5 people was granted city status under the name Gladbach. Ten years later, the Prussian rulers made the word Bergisch a mandatory part of the name, as there was another Gladbach – Mönchengladbach. Football fans and bookmakers will immediately recognize the city where Borussia Mönchengladbach plays. But what does Gladbach actually mean?
"Glad" in the dialect called "plat" is what is "gelegt" in German - laid. The mountain stream (bach) that turned into a swamp in the valley was laid in another, dug channel towards the Rhine in the Middle Ages - so Gladbach is actually a "laid stream". The tamed water power was conducive to the construction of watermills. This was the first economic miracle in the area.
In 1895, city statisticians recorded that the population had doubled in four decades. After World War II, it rose to 40, and after another four decades, it exceeded 000.
LAWRENCE OF MUSIC
About 44 percent of citizens are Catholic, 21 percent are Protestant, the rest are not affiliated with any of the churches or belong to smaller religious communities.
In the center is a Catholic church dedicated to the Roman saint who died as a Christian martyr in the 3rd century AD. The Serbian Orthodox Church celebrates him as Saint Lawrence, for Croatian Catholics he is Saint Lawrence, while here, in Bergisch Gladbach, he is Laurentius. Numerous churches in Germany are named after him because on the day of Saint Archdeacon Lawrence, August 10, 955, the German King Otto I the Great defeated the Hungarians on the Leško Polje.
The church dedicated to St. Lawrence is located below the town hill, in the middle of the main square. Chronicles say that there was a place of worship here as early as the 13th century. This church was built from 1845 to 1907. The neo-Romanesque basilica has just been renovated.

I am the only visitor that morning. I notice the Byzantine style elements. The Bible on the counter by the entrance is open to the Gospel of Luke, where a man named Simeon in Jerusalem takes the baby Jesus in his arms and says that the Lord can release him from life: “For my eyes have seen your salvation, which you have prepared in the presence of all peoples.”
I think of Simeon as I leave the church. He is truly a unique figure. Who else can say that he held his God in his arms – when the Lord was a baby?
CITY HALL AND FIG TREE
On the main square, named after the first post-war Chancellor of West Germany, Konrad Adenauer, there is another building that dominates the area. It is the City Hall. It was completed in 1906. The main building is made in the German Renaissance style, and two wings in the domestic style with Bondručki floors.

Behind the City Hall, along the wall of the left wing, I discover a fig tree. I am as surprised as if I have seen an alien. This fig tree must be something special, because next to it is a plaque with a poem celebrating the fig tree in this hilly region.
The most beautiful building on the square is called the Lion of Berg. Of course, that lion is from the ducal coat of arms.
First, in the mid-19th century, an inn was built there, and at the beginning of the last century it was expanded and converted into the first town hall, and later into the "Citizens' House", with cultural facilities.
Eight decades later, a modern theater section was added. Interestingly, this red building was designed by Gottfried Böhme, the same Aachen architect who in Bensberg connected the old stone walls of the castle with the concrete of the new town hall – so the residents called the building “the monkey rock”. In Gladbach, the new building was glued to the old one with a greater sense of harmony.

At the entrance to that part of the complex I see a carnival society, and I remember that I am near the Rhine, which is the true backbone of German carnival identity. And to these people, their costumes and the “meetings” of carnival associations are obviously extremely important.
OLD WIZARD
I remember being in this very place two decades ago at the end of summer. There were stalls in the square, I happened to arrive on market day. From somewhere, pictures of large pumpkins being sold by a farmer pop up. Who knows if he's still alive.
A little further on, in the pedestrian zone, I come across a sculpture under which it says that it is a bronze representation of “The Sorcerer Cebes”. I later learned that it was Jakob Altenrath. In the local dialect, that name is transformed into Cebes. But “the sorcerer”? He performed as a magician at fairs, which is how he earned his nickname.

Jakob was born in the 19s in Bensberg. He spent his life in Gladbach as a dealer in scrap and junk of all kinds. But he was best known for his somewhat rude behavior and sharp tongue. People loved him.
He became an urban legend during his lifetime. He created his own museum in which he exhibited mostly worthless objects, claiming that they were Spartan swords, Muhammad's snuffbox, the skull of the wolf that ate Little Red Riding Hood. The sorcerer Cebes used his sorcerer's skill to make new out of the old, weaving irresistible stories around objects otherwise doomed to oblivion.
A STORY ABOUT PAPER
Bergisch Gladbach has been using mills for paper production for hundreds of years. During the industrialization era in the early 19th century, Düsseldorf lawyer Johann Wilhelm Zanders, whose wife was from Gladbach, decided to establish a paper mill. It would become an integral part of the city's success story over the next century and a half.

His eldest son, Karl Richard, traveled to cities with large paper factories – from Vienna to Hamburg. He visited factories in Belgium and the Netherlands. He took over the business after his father's death and by the end of the 19th century, together with his mother Maria, had built a powerful company.
In the 19s, the Villa Canders was built, separated from the factory by a park. The three-story building in the French Renaissance style, with two striking risalits, was truly representative – a status symbol of a powerful family. After the death of the widow of the last owner, the villa was taken over by the city in 1932. It first served the city institutions, and was renovated and turned into an art museum in 1980.
The city's connection with paper is evident to this day in the fact that it is still home to several important publishing houses, as well as a bronze statue in front of the villa.

Sculptor Werner Francen created the sculpture in 1982, four centuries after the beginning of paper production in this region. Anyone who knows anything about the history of papermaking will understand the artist's message: a craftsman pulls a mold with a sieve out of a barrel to make a sheet of paper from a layer of fibers. Although the Chinese, as inventors of paper, used mulberry bark or bamboo, in Europe the raw materials were old cotton and linen rags.
DARK SIDE
Most places in the world have their dark side. Anyone who has watched the cult TV series Twin Peaks knows this. A hundred devils lurk in the idyllic setting. It's just that tourist guides don't really like that dark side. For example, people who have traveled thousands of kilometers to admire the unique bridge in Ronda are reluctant to tell you that during the Spanish Civil War, opponents were thrown from that bridge into the abyss. There is a story like that around every corner in Europe.
Bergisch Gladbach is no exception. Anyone who wants to can discover a small plaque in the center, which was installed in June 2023. It is dedicated to the victim of right-wing violence Patricia Wright. In February 1996, Patricia was wearing a badge with an anti-fascist message at the train station in Hagen – Nazis out! She was approached by Thomas Lemke, an extreme right-winger and known thug. He pretended to be a leftist and in conversation learned the address in Gladbach where Patricia lived. He visited her, raped her and killed her – the autopsy showed 91 stab wounds. Lemke killed two more people before he was caught and sentenced to life in prison.
Patricia received a memorial plaque in her town. One could also mention the “Bergisch Gladbach case”: based on a raid in the town, 80 people across Germany were charged with child sexual abuse.
The only question is whether, when we hear these anti-tourist facts, we are able to separate the monsters from the majority of normal people in the city, as we walk its streets, like I am now. Or will we be haunted by the question of whether behind the idyllic facades, like everywhere else in the world, someone's personal hell is hidden.

I walk slowly towards the train station. Next to a fountain are lined up bronze figures of local painters, writers, and poets. There is also a monument to peasant women, as a sign that the people here know who feeds them. There are also two bronze sheep nearby.
I was happy about them, I don’t know why. A few years ago, the local newspaper received letters from angry citizens because the sheep had been removed because of a construction site in front of a new bank in the pedestrian zone. The work, created by the artist Hajde Doberkau, was called “Peasant Woman with Sheep.” The peasant woman remained idle. After the work was completed, the bank had to return the sheep to their stone pedestal. So the story of the local citizens’ love for the shepherdess and her sheep had a happy ending.
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