The German National Tourist Board has been asking international visitors the same question since 2012. Which places here would you recommend? Over 25,000 people from more than 20 countries answer it every year.
The names at the top stay the same and only the order shifts. Miniatur Wunderland in Hamburg, a model railway filling several floors of a warehouse. Europa-Park in Rust. Phantasialand near Cologne. The Nürburgring.
And Rothenburg ob der Tauber, a walled medieval town in Franconia.
A model railway, two theme parks, a racetrack, and a medieval town of 11,000 people. Neuschwanstein comes in behind all of that. So does Cologne Cathedral.
There’s your top-twenty list. Now let me tell you why I never give one.
When somebody asks me what to see in Germany, I ask something back before I answer. Mountains or flat country? Cities or forest? Doing things or doing nothing? Wine or beer?
Because a list of famous places tells you what other people enjoyed. It tells you nothing about whether you would.
First, Narrow It Down
Here are the questions I actually ask. Answer three and this country gets a lot smaller.
Mountains or flat country? The Alps and the Zugspitze in the far south, the Black Forest and the sandstone towers of Saxon Switzerland in between. Or the other Germany entirely: two coastlines, the Lüneburg Heath, and the Mecklenburg lakes, where the horizon stays put all day.
Religion or industry? Nobody expects this one, and it’s the question I’d push hardest.
We have both at world-class level, and UNESCO has listed both. On one side Speyer Cathedral, the largest Romanesque church still standing anywhere, plus a thousand years of cathedrals and abbeys like Maulbronn and Lorsch.
On the other, a coal mine in Essen that sits on that same world heritage list. And an ironworks in the Saarland where the blast furnaces stand as the last shift left them. Cathedrals of a different faith, and every bit as deliberate about it.
History or right now? Roman walls in Trier, medieval streets in Quedlinburg, Prussian palaces at Sanssouci. And forty years of division still readable on the ground at the Wall. Or the far end of that: buildings finished this decade, galleries that opened last year, districts changing faster than any guidebook tracks.
Water or land? Two seas, the Wadden Sea mudflats that drain twice a day, lakes, and rivers you can ride down. Against 20,000 castles and every old town in between.
Doing things or doing nothing? Theme parks and the racetrack at one end. At the other, spa towns built for precisely this, monasteries that rent out rooms, and islands where the last ferry decides your evening.
Wine or beer? This redraws the map more than any other question, because both are fiercely regional here.
Wine means the southwest and the river valleys: the Moselle, the Rheingau, the Palatinate. Beer sends you to Bavaria and Franconia, and to three cities with three drinks you’ll barely find anywhere else. Kölsch in Cologne, Alt in Düsseldorf, smoked beer in Bamberg.
Order the wrong one in the wrong city and somebody will let you know. ;-)
And how do you want to sleep? This decides more routes than people expect. A castle hotel puts you in river valleys. A spa town puts you where the springs are.
A camper takes you to the coast and the lakes. A rented apartment in a village puts you somewhere with a bakery and no hotel at all.
Settle that one and half the country falls away before you’ve booked a thing. Which is exactly the point.
Four Cities, Four Different Cultures
If the answer came back “cities,” start with the big four. Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne.
They’re the four largest, and that order has held a long time. The reasons go back centuries, and you can still feel every one of them on the street.
Berlin was Prussian. A garrison and administration town that grew into a capital, lost the job, got split down the middle, and took it back. Nowhere else here carries that much recent history in the pavement.
Munich was the seat of a kingdom. Bavaria had its own king until 1918, Catholic, courtly, and thoroughly convinced of itself. That has never worn off, and a Bavarian would tell you it shouldn’t.
Hamburg answered to no prince at all. A free city, Protestant, run by merchants for merchants, facing the sea instead of the land. It still looks outward, and the manner there is cooler and more reserved than anywhere south of it.
Cologne is older than the other three by a wide margin. Romans founded it and archbishops ran it for centuries. It has been Catholic, carnival-minded, and loudly sociable ever since. Strangers talk to you in bars there. In Hamburg they will not.
Four cities, four founding stories, four ways of being German. Pick two of them and you’ve seen more contrast than most countries manage end to end.
Want it finer-grained? Add the state capitals, like Dresden, Stuttgart, Mainz, Erfurt. Each runs its own region and shows it.
For the 25 biggest cities I keep a top ten of the essentials on a page of its own.
Or Start with What You Like
Some people arrive knowing already. If that’s you, skip the questions.
There are somewhere north of 20,000 castles here, a number that stops meaning anything the moment you say it out loud. Eltz has belonged to one family for over 800 years. Heidelberg is a ruin above a river and better for it.
Churches split across two pages, the cathedrals and the minsters.
For a route rather than a destination, the Romantic Road is the one everybody knows. There are dozens more nobody outside the country has heard of.
And if you’d rather somebody else did the filtering, UNESCO already has. More than fifty sites here, which puts Germany in the global top three.
That list is worth reading precisely because it ignores fame. The coal mine and the cathedral sit on it as equals.
So: mountains or flat, church or factory, wine or beer, and where you want to wake up.
Answer three of those and twenty famous places turn into four that are actually yours. That’s your trip. :-)