Qualla: Schwerin

Schwerin: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In 1990 the recreated state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern had to pick a capital. Rostock was the obvious candidate: a Baltic port, a university dating to 1419, more than twice the population. Schwerin had lakes and a palace. Schwerin won. Three and a half decades later it remains the least populous of all German state capitals — roughly 96,000 people spread across 130 square kilometres that hold twelve lakes — and its parliament still meets on an island.

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Schwerin: Zuarin

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The name is Slavic before it is anything else. In the middle of these lakes stood a settlement of the Obotrites, and the area was called Zuarin; Schwerin is a German mouth working on a Slavic word. In 1160 Henry the Lion defeated the Obotrites and took the place, and the town tha...

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Schwerin: Twelve Lakes and a Canal to the Sea

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Water is the organizing fact here. The city sits on the southwestern shore of the Schweriner See, which covers 61.54 square kilometres, runs about 21 kilometres end to end and drops to 52.4 metres at its deepest — the second-largest lake of the Mecklenburg Lake Plateau. Eleven mo...

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Schwerin: A Drop of Blood and 117 Metres of Brick

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The cathedral's foundation stone went down in 1172 and the building was consecrated in 1248, a construction period of seventy-six years, making it one of the earliest large works of Brick Gothic in northern Europe. It got its pilgrims by accident of loot: in 1222 Count Henry of S...

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Schwerin: Seven Minutes in April

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Schwerin came through the Second World War largely intact — around three per cent of the city destroyed by air attack, which is why the old town is still legible. The exception was 7 April 1945. The target was the freight station. The bombers missed it, and roughly 1,500 bombs ca...

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Schwerin: What the City Keeps

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Staatliches Museum holds the kind of collection a small court accumulates when it has money and time: seventeenth-century Dutch painting, German medieval and Renaissance work, Greek vases, sculpture by Houdon, an unusually deep holding of Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and modern work ...

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