Bad Kissing, Grub, Worms and Hamm.

Germany is dotted with diverse–and occasionally whimsical–city, town and village names. Many of these names have common suffixes inspired by natural or manmade attributes, including:

• Au (meadow)
• Bach (brook)
• Bad (spa)
• Berg (mountain)
• Brücken (bridge)
• Burg (fortress)
• Dorf (village)
• Fels  (cliff)
• Furt (ford)
• Hof (farm)
• Tal (valley)
• Wald (forest).

Though the source of many place names, including the Rhine-side town Assmanshausen, the Alpine resort Füssen (“Feet”) and the Hessen city Darmstadt (“Intestine City”), will always remain a mystery, most names are easily decoded.

It’s all Celtic, Slavic and Latin to me

Germany’s founders, including Celtic and Slavic tribes and Latin-speaking Romans, are responsible for many of the country’s place names. Several town and city names in southwestern Germany, including Remagen (“King’s Field”) and Mainz, have Celtic roots. Romans gave birth to Confluentes  (joining rivers), which later became Konstanz; Colonia (“colony”), which eventually became Köln (or Cologne); and Aquae, which evolved into Aachen. Eastern Germany, once the domain of the Slavs, has these tribes to thank for their exotic names. Lipa (lime tree) became Lipsk, then Leipzig; Drezdzany became Dresden; and rostok  (“river fork”) became Rostock. The name Berlin is derived from the Slavic word for “Swamp”. A good rule of thumb is that any names that end in

• -anz
• -gard
• -gast
• -itz
• -ow
• -witz

were once Slavic.

I say potato, you say Kartoffel…

München (Munich), Nürnberg (Nuremberg), Konstanz (Constance) and other major cities throughout Germany are pronounced slightly–or even drastically–different in English than in German.  In most cases, Allied–British and U.S.–troops who couldn’t pronounce those hefty German names simply replaced the German with something easier on the Anglo-American tongue. Thus Braunschweig became Brunswick, Augsburg became Augusta and Kaiserslautern was simply shortened to K-Town. Centuries earlier, when Napolean had swept into and occupied German cities, he re-christened them with French names. For this reason Mainz is sometimes referred to as Mayence.

Istanbul (Not Constantinople)

Shortly after the dismantling of East Germany, some cities in the eastern half of the country that had been renamed during the GDR, reclaimed their original, historic names. Karl Marx Stadt, for example, went back to its pre-1950s name: Chemnitz. The iron factory town where the Eisenhüttenkombinat Ost (Iron Works Factory East”) was located, went by Stalinstadt (“Stalin City”). Today, it goes by Eisenhüttenstadt (“Iron Works City”).

Photo by: Pasukaru76