An Invitation

"So may Potsdam rise and call out: I shall not
give way, even to those cities hailed as the most beautiful."

Dear guests of the state capital Potsdam,

With these words of the Potsdam poet Bellamintes from the year 1727, I am pleased to invite you for a visit to the center of our city. Before today's famous palaces and parks were built, Frederick William I, known as the "Soldier King", had his residence city twice expanded and beautified. His successors also made themselves comfortable in Potsdam and created space for the royal court, for civil servants, the military, and craftsmen. In this way, an architectonic treasure arose during the 18th and at the beginning of the 19th centuries. Parts of it, for example the French Quarter, were destroyed by an air raid on 14 April 1945. Parts fell into ruin with the passage of time and could not be preserved. Other parts however, shine in a new splendour.

If you search for records from medieval times in Potsdam, you won't find them. Despite the city already being more than 1,000 years old, its upward trend only began after the Thirty Year's War when the Elector Frederick William made the city his residence, and Prince Johann Moritz von Nassau-Siegen produced the vision for what has become today's UNESCO world heritage site: Daß gantze Eylandt mus ein paradis werden: "The entire island must become a paradise."

I invite you to go for a stroll through this Eylandt, the island of Potsdam - between Breite Straße and Hegelallee Avenue, between the French Church and Brandenburg Gate, between the 18th century and today.

Because, as Bellamintes says:
"That's why my quill exerts itself to speak a little more about Potsdam's genuine glory, and thus reveals it is flourishing t'day."

Jann Jakobs
Lord Mayor
State Capital City of Potsdam