Cologne, located on the Rhine River, is the fourth-largest city in Germany. Its location has made it a natural crossroads throughout its history. The area was occupied by Germanic tribes as early as the first century B.C., but the Romans moved in and established it as Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (Colony of Claudius and Altar of the Agrippinians) in the first century A.D. Over the centuries the name got shortened until it was simply Colonia, from which the present-day French name "Cologne" and German name "Köln" were eventually derived. The city has been both a German and a French possession at various times, but most non-German speakers seem to have settled on referring to it as "Cologne", despite its having been a German-speaking city for the past two centuries. Maybe because nearly all non-Germans in the western world (including many who aren’t familiar with the city at all) are aware of Eau de Cologne, a substance that was invented in Cologne in the early 18th Century for the benefit of people who preferred smelling like something other than themselves (an outstanding idea in many cases). To the non-German speakers of the world, "Eau de Cologne" unquestionably sounds classier than the German translation, "Kölnisch Wasser".

During World War II, Cologne’s strategic position made it a favorite target of Allied bomber formations. As a result much of the city was reduced to rubble, and the city’s population was reduced by 95%. Most of the population reduction resulted from the widespread notion that Cologne was a dangerous place to live, causing most of the people to move to where high explosives from the sky was a less common experience. The population recovered nicely after the war, and reconstruction work has brought the city back to prominence.

To get to Cologne from Berlin, we elected to take an airplane. While Berlin is very close to the Polish border, Cologne is very close to the Dutch border, so a trip from one to the other pretty much spans the full width of Germany, which would have made for a very long train ride. Not wishing to spend so much of our limited time sitting in a train, we took a one-hour Lufthansa flight, followed by a short train ride from the Cologne airport to the city center. On exiting the train station we could not help but notice Germany’s most-visited landmark on our left, the immense Cologne Cathedral (more on the Cathedral later). We headed in this direction, as our hotel was a few blocks on the other side of the Cathedral.

We found the hotel, the Hotel Königshof, without too much trouble, and we deposited our luggage in the room. We found our room to be on the small side and without much of a view, but it was reasonably priced and adequate to our needs. Our needs didn’t include spending too many of our waking hours there, and we immediately set off to see what there was to see in Cologne.

We passed a number of store windows that displayed tasty treats that we were somehow able to resist (it helped that we’d just eaten lunch at the train station). One such treat is a common German pastry called a Berliner, which outwardly resembles an American jelly donut but which doesn’t appear to have any filling. One can understand that, while respecting the message, 1960’s Germans also drew a certain amount of amusement from John F. Kennedy’s "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech.


We took a few minutes to gaze at the Cathedral (again, stay tuned), but at the moment were more in the mood for a museum. We briefly considered the Römisch-Germanisches Museum just south of the Cathedral (which displays artifacts from Cologne’s Colonia days), but felt more like seeing 20th Century art.

This took us to the Ludwig Museum.