Qualla: Quakenbrück

Quakenbrück: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RoswithaC, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1891, a twenty-year-old saddler named Friedrich Ebert wandered into Quakenbrück looking for work, found it briefly at a local workshop, and moved on. He was on the road in the way young craftsmen had been for centuries, taking jobs where he could, learning what he could. Twenty-eight years later he would be the first President of the new German Republic, sworn in during the chaos that followed the First World War. The saddlery is gone now. The town that took him in for a season has the kind of low-key density of remarkable history that turns up only when you start asking who actually came from here.

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Image: RoswithaC | CC BY-SA 3.0

Quakenbrück: A Founding on the Hase

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RoswithaC, CC BY-SA 3.0. Quakenbrück was founded in 1234 by the Bishop of Osnabrück, although people had clearly been farming the river meadows around it long before any document existed to record them. The site was strategic: it sat at the northern edge of the bishopric, where Osnabrück's territory bump...

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Image: RoswithaC | CC BY-SA 3.0

Quakenbrück: The Iron Knight of 1916

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit RoswithaC, CC BY-SA 3.0. On 29 May 1916, in the middle of the First World War, the town received a strange gift. A wooden statue of a thirteenth- or fourteenth-century knight, carved from French poplar and built by two soldiers from the battalion of Clemens Freiherr von Schorlemer-Lieser, was installed i...

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Image: RoswithaC | CC BY-SA 3.0

Quakenbrück: A Town That Sends People Out

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Unknown photographer, Public domain. The Artland-Gymnasium - the local secondary school - has a habit of producing graduates who go further than its modest size suggests. Klaus von Klitzing studied here before going on to win the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics for the discovery of the quantised Hall effect. Hans-Gert P...

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Image: Unknown photographer | Public domain

Quakenbrück: Dragons in a Hayloft Town

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Draco, CC BY 3.0. The other thing Quakenbrück is known for is, improbably, basketball. The Artland Dragons play in a small arena in a town of fewer than fourteen thousand people, and for most of the 2000s they competed at the top of the Basketball Bundesliga. They finished runners-up in the 2007 s...

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Image: Draco | CC BY 3.0