Bamberg impresses with many beautiful restaurants, between which there are all kinds of other remarkable buildings.
The restaurants are called, for example, Schlenkerla (Dominikanerstraße 6) or Hofbräu (Karolinenstraße 7), and they offer regional specialties that are as unhealthy as they are tasty – as long as you can get a seat anywhere in view of the overcrowded city center, which is why reservations are not a bad idea.
The Sights
Manfred Koehler
Head of department of the Rhein-Main editorial team of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Follow I follow
Florian Balke
Culture editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.
Follow I follow
Sights nestled between the restaurants include the Old Town Hall, the Cathedral and Little Venice, all of which can be reached in just a few steps.
A ride over the left arm of the Regnitz with a ferry hanging on a steel cable is pretty, and it is operated as a social project.
That's why it's called the Chance Youth Ferry, it runs from Mühlwörth to Oberen Leinritt.
On the other hand, you have to walk a long way from the train station to the city center and therefore return in good time so that you don't miss the train.
If you prefer to drive after a heavy meal and a beer or two: From the bus station called ZOB on the edge of the old town to the main station, regular buses with the numbers 901, 902, 907 and 931 go in close succession, they only take eight minutes.
The souvenir
Well, smoked beer!
It has little in common with apple wine, but it does have a peculiarity: they say the second glass tastes better than the first.
The dark smoked beer used to be brewed in many places in Bamberg, today this is still done in two companies.
The legend says that it was invented - or should I say discovered?
– was when it once caught fire in a brewery and the smoke wafted through the stored malt, but the brewer couldn't afford to throw it away and used it to make a beer that, unexpectedly, met with great approval.
The Travel Reading
Yes, you can read Tanja Kinkel when you drive to her birthplace Bamberg, for example "The Nightingale's Game", full of arguments between Staufers and Guelphs, emperors and Jewish doctors.
Or reach for ETA Hoffmann, the master of all genres, whose "Fräulein von Scuderi" is a historical novel and crime thriller in one.
The lawyer and civil servant had his first Kapellmeister position in Bamberg – a dream.
Even if he failed.
He doesn't let the student Anselmus fail in the "Golden Pot", his hero gets the life he longs for in the world of fantasy.
The story with illustrations by Alexander Pavlenko has just been re-released in the Frankfurt Edition Faust for 20 euros.
A museum at Bamberg's Schillerplatz is dedicated to the man who so skilfully anticipated Freud's insights that he resorted to Hoffmann's books to develop his psychoanalytic concepts.