Leipzig

One of the largest monuments in Europe, a ninety-one-metre pile of dark granite and concrete raised in 1913 for the centenary of the battle against Napoleon. Its dim, echoing crypt is ringed by eight giant stone death masks and the Totenwächter, guardians of the dead, while a hall of fame above holds four vast statues of the virtues of the fallen. Mausoleum-scale and genuinely brooding.

Best shot The crypt, the ring of Totenwächter guardians under the rotunda.

• Touristy

Leipzig’s largest cemetery, eighty-odd hectares of wooded park laid out from 1886 around a neo-Romanesque crematorium and columbarium under a sixty-three-metre bell tower, modelled on an abbey. Long avenues of weathered tombs and a cathedral-of-the-dead at the centre. Vast, solemn and half-empty.

Best shot The crematorium chapel and bell tower head-on.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

A late-Gothic hall church of 1496 where Bach was cantor from 1723 until he died in 1750, his bones reburied under a bronze slab in the chancel. Home of the Thomanerchor boys’ choir, and a pilgrimage for the flowers laid on the grave. The interior has been under restoration but stays open.

Best shot Bach’s flower-strewn grave slab in the chancel.

• Touristy

The largest church in Leipzig, Romanesque and Gothic outside and a startling pastel neoclassical inside, its columns topped with carved palm fronds. From 1982 its Monday peace prayers grew, in the autumn of 1989, into the mass marches that helped bring down the GDR. Heavy history in a light room.

• Quiet

The “Round Corner”, the district headquarters of the East German secret police, stormed by Leipzig citizens in December 1989 to stop the shredding of files and kept ever since as a museum in the original, unrestored rooms. Bugging kit, disguises and jars of stored body-smell samples. One of the most chilling monuments to a surveillance state anywhere. Free.

• Quiet

The oldest burial ground in Leipzig, begun in 1278 beside a leper hospital and the city’s main cemetery until 1883, now a listed park of Baroque and Classical tombs and ivy-clad epitaph walls. Overgrown, weathered and hushed, a favourite of the dark-history walking tours.

Best shot Leaning tombs and moss-covered slabs under bare winter trees.

• Quiet
• Solo-friendly

The last surviving bastion of Leipzig’s Renaissance walls, built in the 1550s, its cannon cellars buried under rubble and forgotten for centuries until students dug them out by hand in the seventies. Now eight brick-vaulted underground cellars run as a cultural centre: candlelit concerts, club nights and cinema in the arches. One of the best rooms in the city.

Best shot The brick barrel-vaulted cellars underground.

• Adults only

A monumental Art Deco complex of 1929 holding three museums, ethnography, musical instruments and applied arts, the ethnographic wing heavy with ritual masks, ancestor figures and death-and-mourning objects from around the world, memento mori among the applied arts. Severe brick outside, cabinets of the strange within.

Best shot The Art Deco brick facade and pillared central passage.

• Quiet

A twenty-room hotel in the Fregehaus, a listed merchant’s house of around 1535, each room furnished by the architect-owner in antiques and flea-market finds among original stucco ceilings, old floors and a sixteenth-century courtyard. Small, vintage and full of character.

• Adults only
• Quiet

A hotel behind a kept 1913 Jugendstil front opposite the main station, built the year the Battle of the Nations monument opened, the historic exterior wrapped around period Art Deco interiors. Turn-of-the-century architecture in the middle of the city.

• Adults only

A grand hotel in the Handelshof, a monumental trade-fair palace of 1909 by the old town hall, reopened in the restored landmark in 2011 with rooms shaped to the building so that no two are alike. Big, formal and genuinely historic, a chain flag on a real palace.

• Adults only

A family hotel in a restored Gründerzeit building south of the old town, individually decorated rooms of period detail and modern comfort, with a restaurant rated among the best in Leipzig. Independent and characterful.

• Adults only

The most famous cellar in Leipzig, a restaurant since 1525 in the vaults under the Mädlerpassage, and the scene in Goethe’s Faust where Mephisto conjures wine and rides out on a barrel, with bronze Faust and Mephisto figures at the door. Low vaulted rooms, Saxon cooking, five centuries of it.

Best shot The vaulted historic wine rooms, or the Faust and Mephisto bronzes at the entrance.

• Adults only

A Saxon tavern in Barthels Hof, the last fully preserved through-courtyard of Leipzig’s old trading houses, behind a Baroque front, vaulted ceilings inside and a cellar that brewed beer five hundred years ago. Regional cooking and local Gose in genuinely old rooms.

• Adults only

A cavernous restaurant in the vaulted cellars under the New Town Hall of 1905, one of the grand civic Ratskeller of Germany, brick-and-stone vaults and low arches over Saxon and German plates. Moody, subterranean and a local institution for a celebration.

• Adults only

A Viennese-style coffee house in the Riquethaus, a protected Jugendstil corner building of 1909 raised for a coffee and chocolate importer, two copper elephant heads flanking the door and a restored ornamental interior. Old-world cake and coffee under the elephants.

Best shot The two copper elephant heads over the door.

• Quiet

A dedicated goth shop in the city’s Dark City since 2008, clothing, boots, decor and accessories from the scene labels, open all year round and not just for the Wave-Gotik-Treffen. In the goth capital of Germany, this is the everyday supply line.

• Solo-friendly

A cabinet-of-curiosities witch shop, its name a pun on Wunderkammer, crammed with raw crystals and geodes, cauldrons, crystal balls, incense, tarot, ritual supplies and occult books on rough crate shelving. A real bricks-and-mortar esoteric shop, and a good one.

• Solo-friendly

An atmospheric antiquarian bookshop behind the Nikolaikirche, run since 1996, dark wooden shelves to the ceiling, rolling library ladders and tables piled with old and rare books on history, philosophy, literature and music. The candlelit, labyrinthine interior has done service in German film.

• Solo-friendly
• Quiet

A record shop and second-hand clothing store in the east of the city whose vinyl leans hard into the dark end: wave, post-punk, EBM, synthpop and electro alongside techno and house, with racks of old clothes in between. Made for the wave and industrial crowd.

• Solo-friendly

A second-hand shop in alternative Connewitz dealing in used goth, punk, metal and rockabilly clothing, corsets, coats, leather and latex, plus shoes, jewellery, records and esoteric odds. One of the longest-running dark second-hand shops in the city, freshly moved to a bigger space.

• Solo-friendly