Qualla: Meppen

Meppen: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andreas Abeln, CC BY 2.5. The Swiss artist Christoph Rihs spent months painting a map of the world onto the side of a 131-meter cooling tower at the old Meppen-Hüntel gasworks. The Guinness Book of Records recognized it as the largest world map in the world. The gasworks itself is closed now - a peak-load plant that hasn't fired up in years - but the cooling tower still stands at the edge of town with the continents wrapped around it, and the contour of South America visible from kilometers away. This is Meppen: a thousand-year-old river town where the largest landmark is a Cold War power plant decorated like a souvenir globe.

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Image: Andreas Abeln | CC BY 2.5

Meppen: Where Three Rivers Meet

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michielverbeek, CC BY-SA 3.0. The name Meppen comes from the old word Mappe, meaning delta - and the geography earns it. The Hase River flows in from the east. The Ems flows down from the north. The Nordradde joins from the southwest. The Dortmund-Ems Canal cuts through what the natural rivers don't already c...

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Image: Michielverbeek | CC BY-SA 3.0

Meppen: The Town Hall and the Glacial Erratics

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harald Gallinnis, CC BY-SA 4.0. Meppen's medieval town hall, the symbol of the town, was constructed in 1408 from glacial erratics - large stones dragged south by the last ice age and dropped across northern Germany when the glaciers retreated. The builders gathered these boulders from the surrounding fields an...

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Image: Harald Gallinnis | CC BY-SA 4.0

Meppen: The Krupp Range

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Charlie1965nrw at German Wikipedia (Original text: Charlie1965nrw (Karl-Heinz Meurer)), Public domain. Just west of Meppen sits one of the strangest neighbors a small town can have: the Meppen Proving Ground, founded in 1877 by the Krupp arms company to test artillery. It is the largest weapons-testing range in Western Europe, covering more than 200 square kilometers of bog and fo...

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Image: Charlie1965nrw at German Wikipedia (Original text: Charlie1965nrw (Karl-Heinz Meurer)) | Public domain

Meppen: What the War Left

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Meppen has a darker layer to its twentieth century. The town sat near the Emslandlager system - the network of fifteen Nazi-era camps that exploited prisoners as forced bog labor across the Emsland. A satellite camp called Meppen-Versen, a subcamp of Neuengamme, held nearly 4,000...

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Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Meppen: Famous Sons

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Among the people who grew up in Meppen, two stand out for the breadth of their reach. The novelist Levin Schücking, born here in 1814, became a major figure in 19th-century German literature and a long-time correspondent with the poet Annette von Droste-Hülshoff. The show jumper ...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0