About this blog

I moved to Braunschweig at the end of 2009 to be closer to my job in neighbouring Wolfsburg – a job that I thought I would do for a year at most. I had little idea that these two Lower Saxon towns were to be the setting for such a major chapter in my life! I continued working for the next five years and, during that time, was always vaguely aware that Braunschweig had an illustrious past - but I never really got to grips with it, despite occasional museum visits and talks. Over the past year I have had the time to properly engage with the local history, architecture, culture and literature. I set myself the task of doing a project that combined historical research (by which I mean reading some library books, nothing heavy-duty like trawling through the town archives) with drawing and painting, aiming to create a visual representation of at least some aspects of the city’s history. A friend (who I had no doubt been boring at the time by geekishly enthusing about the latest talk I had been to at the historical institute) suggested to me that I do a Braunschweig blog, something I would never have thought of doing otherwise, so thank you Rhiannon for inspiring this! I decided to focus on the various personalities who I have come across during my reading and whose portraits I have copied for my project. I hope people will enjoy seeing some of the pictures I have been doing recently and learning a bit about the history of this town – if I can inspire anybody about German history and culture, or at least make them aware that there is more to it than world wars and Nazism, then I would be delighted.

By the way, I am new to this blogging stuff and don’t really know what I am doing – there is probably cool formatting stuff I could do but I haven’t worked out how, so it will stay fairly basic for the moment.