Chemnitz

Places researched in this city

A selection of the 35 places we've researched in this city. The full set is in the Parroo app.

• Socialist monument
• Medieval towers
• Art Nouveau villa
• Petrified forest
• Expressionist art
• Gothic churches

• Karl Marx Monument

  Locals call it 'Nischel', Chemnitz dialect for 'noggin', and the nickname has stuck to this 7.1-metre, 40-tonne bronze head designed by Soviet sculptor Lev Kerbel and unveiled in 1971 when the city was still named Karl-Marx-Stadt. Behind it, the phrase 'Workers of the world, unite!' is carved in four languages, making it one of the most photographed Cold War relics in Germany.

• Petrified Forest

  A volcanic eruption roughly 291 million years ago buried a tropical forest under ash so quickly that entire tree trunks, some standing upright up to 3.7 metres tall, were silicified in place. First documented in 1546 by the scholar Georgius Agricola, the fossil site is now displayed inside the Museum of Natural History in the DAStietz building.

• Art Collections Chemnitz

  The König-Albert-Museum, a 113-metre sandstone building inaugurated in 1909 before King Friedrich August III, became one of Germany's most progressive contemporary art venues during the Weimar Republic, staging major exhibitions as early as 1925. Its collection of 65,000 works spans Caspar David Friedrich to local expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff.

• Old Town Hall

  The tower standing beside this late-Gothic town hall dates to around 1200, making it older than the cities of Dresden and Berlin, and it was already ancient when the current hall was built between 1496 and 1498. A carillon with moving bronze figures installed in 2001 now marks the hours on the square below.

• Villa Esche

  Belgian architect Henry van de Velde designed this Art Nouveau villa between 1902 and 1903 for textile manufacturer Herbert Eugen Esche, making it his first residential house in Germany and a marker for the arrival of modernism in German architecture. Its interior centres on a skylight shaped like a branching tree, conceived as a total work of art where architecture and furnishings form a single design.

• Colorful Hearth (Bunte Esse)

  French conceptual artist Daniel Buren divided a functioning 302-metre industrial chimney into seven bands of colour, from aquamarine to signal violet, completing the transformation in October 2013 and creating what is considered the tallest artwork in the world. After dark, 168 LED lights illuminate the sections, turning a Soviet-era power-plant stack into a beacon visible across the city.

• State Museum of Archaeology (smac)

  The building opened on 15 May 1930 as the Schocken Department Store, designed by Erich Mendelsohn with a sweeping curved facade and continuous ribbon windows that made it an icon of New Objectivity. In 1938 the Jewish Schocken family was expropriated and the store renamed; today the same building houses Saxony's state archaeology museum, which reopened here in 2014 after the structure spent decades as a GDR Centrum department store.