Other places in Germany

Berlin Eifel/Rhine-Mosel Saxony

A city to die for

My 12-year-old daughter and I are at the foot of Münster's St Lamberti Church, staring up at three cast-iron, man-sized cages hanging from the topmost point.
She frowns. 'You mean they were still alive when they were put in?'
'That's what the history books say,' I reply. 'The executioners tore their flesh with red hot pincers and then flung them in the cages and hauled them up to the top.'
'Total gross-out!' Chloë shrieks, before adding eagerly: 'And they just left them there?'
In 1533 Münster became the centre of the Anabaptist Uprising, part of the wave of Protestantism that swept through Europe.
Anabaptists wanted all property to be shared communally. Münster's citizens went collectively crazy - everyone converted. But the local ruler, Prince-Bishop Franz, didn't go a bundle on this (tax-free) exercise in communal living, and he set about besieging the city.
It took him two years, during which things inside Münster went downhill. Mass polygamy was instituted, public beheadings were a daily occurrence and Jan Leyden, an illiterate tailor from Holland, proclaimed himself King of New Jerusalem and took 16 wives.
It was 'King' Jan and his two henchmen who were left hanging from St Lamberti.
Today, the residents of Münster don't quite know whether to be proud or ashamed of their most famous citizens. At night, a single light burns in each of the cages - a reminder that the human spirit can never be tamed. And the surviving artefacts - including the torture pincers - are preserved in the City Museum.
But wild uprisings don't quite tally with Münster's new self-image. The moat that protected the Anabaptists for so long is now a benign three-mile promenade round the city.
And yet this is a city that also hankers after its past. After World War II, everything here was faithfully reconstructed while the rest of Germany was re-making itself in concrete and steel. But the result is a rare jewel, an exquisite 18th-century city. At the centre of the old town, dominating the flat landscape, lies Dom St Paul, the cathedral.

Read more in our destination guide to Germany.