Hamburg & Northern Germany

Saxons and Frisians farmed the marsh and the sandy geest here when Charlemagne fought a thirty-year war to subdue and baptise the Saxons. The fortress of Hammaburg, built on the Elbe around 808, became the seat from which Ansgar set out to convert Scandinavia, with Bremen as its partner archbishopric, but the real rise came with the Hanseatic League: Lübeck, refounded on its island by Henry the Lion in 1159, was the League's capital, and Hamburg and Bremen grew rich as its western outlets, all three building in brick Gothic to show it.

The Hansa faded after the 16th century. Hamburg turned to Atlantic trade and became a free imperial city, while the countryside was divided among dynasties: Holstein and Schleswig under the Danish crown, Brunswick under the Welfs, and Hanover, whose elector inherited the British throne as George I in 1714 and whose successors kept the two crowns together until 1837. Prussia and Austria took Schleswig-Holstein from Denmark in 1864, and Prussia annexed it and the Kingdom of Hanover in 1866, and a plebiscite in 1920 drew today's Danish border. Between 1850 and the 1930s some five million emigrants sailed for America from Hamburg, and millions more left from Bremerhaven, the outport Bremen founded in 1827.

The 20th century was harsh. The sailors' mutiny at Kiel in November 1918 set off the revolution that ended the monarchy, the RAF firestorm of July 1943 killed more than 30,000 people in Hamburg, and the Bergen-Belsen camp near Celle was liberated in April 1945. The British occupiers created Lower Saxony in 1946 and restarted the Volkswagen works at Wolfsburg, Schleswig-Holstein absorbed a million refugees from the lost eastern provinces, and the Iron Curtain ran down Lower Saxony's eastern edge until 1989. The North Sea flood of February 1962 drowned 315 people in Hamburg; the Elbphilharmonie, opened in 2017, marks the port's turn towards culture.

The north is where Plattdeutsch, Low German, survives as a spoken language — closer to Dutch and English than to the standard German of the south — and its "Moin" serves as a greeting at any hour from Flensburg to the Harz. North Frisian is still spoken on Sylt, Föhr and Amrum, Saterland Frisian in a few villages near Oldenburg, and the Danish minority of South Schleswig has its own schools and a party exempt from the electoral threshold. The old Lutheran north is now largely unchurched, and Hamburg's merchant families set the tone: reserved, understated and suspicious of titles — the city's senators traditionally refused ennoblement — with a Hanseatic pride in a word being a bond.

Festivals turn on the water. Hamburg's Hafengeburtstag in early May celebrates the port's 1189 charter with a parade of ships, Kiel Week in late June is one of the world's largest sailing events, Bremen's Freimarkt in October has run since 1035, Hanover's Schützenfest is the largest marksmen's fair anywhere, and on 21 February the North Frisians light the Biike bonfires to see off winter. East Frisia drinks more tea per head than anywhere on earth, poured over rock sugar under a cloud of cream, and plays Boßeln, a bowling game along country lanes, through the winter.

Lübeck gave Germany Thomas Mann and Günter Grass settled just outside it, Hamburg gave it Brahms and, in the clubs of St. Pauli from 1960, made the Beatles; the Reeperbahn's musicals and the left-wing football club FC St. Pauli are as much part of the city as the Kunsthalle. The Nordderby between Hamburger SV and Werder Bremen is the region's sharpest rivalry, and the flat land's own pastimes are cycling, sailing, dyke-walking and the Wattwandern mudflat walks that follow the tide out.

About 13.5 million people live in the four states: Lower Saxony has 8 million, Schleswig-Holstein 2.9 million, and the city-states of Hamburg and Bremen about 1.9 million and 690,000. Hanover, Lower Saxony's capital, has around 540,000 people, Braunschweig and Kiel about 250,000 each, Lübeck 220,000, Bremerhaven 115,000, and Oldenburg, Osnabrück, Wolfsburg, Göttingen and Flensburg are middle-sized towns; beyond them the land is farm country, with some of the emptiest districts in western Germany.

The port makes Hamburg — Germany's largest and Europe's third, with Airbus's Finkenwerder plant, the shipping line Hapag-Lloyd and the publishers of Der Spiegel, Die Zeit and Stern beside it. Bremen builds Mercedes cars and satellites, brews Beck's and ships cars and containers through Bremerhaven; Wolfsburg is Volkswagen, one of the largest car factories in the world, and Hanover is Continental tyres and the trade fairs. Lower Saxony's countryside raises more pigs and poultry than any other state, grows potatoes and asparagus and builds cruise ships at Meyer Werft in Papenburg, while Schleswig-Holstein lives on farming, coastal tourism, Kiel's naval yards and more wind power than it can use.

Days start early — Hamburg's Altona fish market opens at five on summer Sunday mornings — and end with a Feierabend beer; summer evenings stay light until ten, and winter afternoons are dark by four. The live issues are the cost of housing in Hamburg and on Sylt, where islanders have been priced off the island, the port's loss of ground to Rotterdam, Volkswagen's job cuts, the dykes being raised against a rising sea, and the wind turbines, gas terminals and power lines that the energy transition has planted across the flat land.

Northern cooking is fish, cabbage and potatoes. The Fischbrötchen — a roll filled with Matjes herring, Bismarck herring or fried fish — is eaten on every harbour front, Finkenwerder Scholle is plaice fried with bacon, Pannfisch is leftover fish in mustard sauce, and Krabben, the small brown North Sea shrimp landed at Büsum, are piled onto scrambled eggs and rolls. Labskaus, a sailor's mash of corned beef, potato and beetroot under a fried egg, herring and gherkin, is the dish outsiders are dared to try; Aalsuppe is Hamburg's sweet-and-sour eel soup; and Birnen, Bohnen und Speck stews pears, green beans and bacon together in late summer.

Winter belongs to Grünkohl, curly kale cooked with smoked pork and Pinkel sausage and eaten after group walks called Kohlfahrten around Bremen and Oldenburg. The Lüneburg Heath contributes Heidschnucke lamb, honey and buckwheat pancakes, the Harz its pungent sour-milk Harzer cheese, Brunswick its spreadable Mettwurst, and the Altes Land on the Elbe the apples and cherries of northern Europe's largest orchard. Sweets are Rote Grütze, a red-berry pudding under vanilla sauce, Hamburg's cinnamon Franzbrötchen, Lübeck's Niederegger marzipan and Bremen's Klaben fruit loaf at Christmas.

Beer is pale and dry — Jever, Flensburger, Holsten, Astra and Beck's — and the spirits are Korn and Kümmel, drunk short beside it. Flensburg's rum houses date from the trade with the Danish West Indies, and the North Frisian coast stirs rum into a Pharisäer, coffee under whipped cream, or a Tote Tante of cocoa. East Frisian tea, strong and black over a lump of Kluntje rock sugar, is the region's other ritual, and Sylt farms oysters at List.

Hamburg is a harbour best seen from the water: the ferries and tour boats from the Landungsbrücken pass the container terminals, the Airbus works and the villas of Blankenese, and the Speicherstadt's brick warehouses and the Kontorhaus district, a UNESCO site, lead to the Elbphilharmonie concert hall on its old quay. The tower of the Michel church, the Alster lakes in the middle of town, the Fischmarkt at dawn on Sunday, Miniatur Wunderland's model railways, the Kunsthalle and the Reeperbahn fill the rest.

Lübeck, an hour north-east, keeps its island old town — the Holstentor gate of 1478, the Marienkirche that set the pattern for Baltic brick Gothic, the Buddenbrookhaus and the marzipan shops — with Travemünde's beach at the river mouth. Schleswig-Holstein's two coasts differ: the Baltic side has Kiel and its canal, the Laboe naval memorial, the lakes of Holstein Switzerland and the island of Fehmarn; the North Sea side has the Wadden Sea National Park, where guided walks cross the mudflats at low tide, the Halligen islets, the beach at St. Peter-Ording and Sylt, with Westerland's promenade, Kampen's red cliff and the dunes at List, while Helgoland's red sandstone stack rises far out to sea.

Bremen's market square holds the Gothic town hall and the Roland statue, both UNESCO-listed, with the Town Musicians in bronze beside them, the lanes of the Schnoor and the expressionist brick of Böttcherstraße; Bremerhaven has the German Emigration Museum on the quay the emigrants left from. In Lower Saxony, Hanover has the baroque Herrenhausen Gardens and the Maschsee, Celle its half-timbered streets and the Bergen-Belsen memorial, and Hildesheim its Romanesque St Michael's. The Lüneburg Heath turns purple in late summer around Wilseder Berg and the salt town of Lüneburg, and Goslar in the Harz pairs its imperial palace and slate-hung houses with the Rammelsberg mine, worked for a thousand years. The seven East Frisian Islands, from Borkum to Wangerooge, line the north-west coast.