Chemnitz - Meet Mr. Marx

Chemnitz: The city was 90% destroyed by WWII bombing. Many such places were reconstructed with bare approximations of the old manner, but Chemnitz decided to start over. Instead, mostly, they rebuilt in a new socialist style and renamed the town, Karl-Marx-Stadt.

This seems to have worked because the town is thriving, and its wide streets and fine office buildings have brought business. Sterile at first look, much like Plymouth in England (also rebuilt to accommodate predictions of traffic needs for a new city, rather than preserve-recreate historic areas)(see England Road Ways. But I don't think Plymouth ever recovered.

This head of Mr. Marx, at the new City Hall, is several stories tall. Wikipedia has a good reference section for Chemnitz at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemnitz. The city name means "stony brook" says the site.

The area of Saxony: How to make sense of all the germanic states and tribes? Start at home.carolina.rr.com/wormold/germany/. That site says, in summary, that a large tribe, the Franks, ruled much of what later was France and western Germany and Italy. Big King: Charlemagne in 800A.D crowned as emperor. Empire split into the West Frankish, evolving into French, and East Frankish ("Franconians, Saxons, Bavarians, Swabians, and several others") evolving into German and electing a Franconian, Conrad I, as king after Charlemagne's descendants. See chronology of German history, overview, at www.germany.info/relaunch/culture/history/milestones.

We were headed from Berlin and Dresden, going south. It got dark, so we stopped here by chance. Excellent choice.