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Leipzig occupies a particular place in the German imagination that its size alone does not explain. Saxony's largest city, set on the flat lowlands where the White Elster, Pleisse and Parthe rivers converge, has accumulated an outsized cultural and intellectual weight across the centuries. Johann Sebastian Bach spent the most productive decades of his life here, directing music at the Thomaskirche, where his remains now rest beneath the chancel floor. Felix Mendelssohn was born into the city's orbit and later founded the Gewandhaus Orchestra into a European institution. Richard Wagner was born here in 1813, in a house that still stands in the old quarter near the Brühl. That concentration of musical heritage in a single city is not coincidence but consequence: Leipzig was, for much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one of the great trading and publishing centres of the German-speaking world, wealthy enough to attract and sustain serious artistic ambition.

The physical city that visitors encounter today is a layered thing. The Innenstadt, the compact historic core, contains the Marktplatz with its Renaissance Altes Rathaus, the Mädler Passage arcade where Goethe set a scene of Faust in Auerbachs Keller, and the Nikolaikirche, whose congregation played a central role in the peaceful revolution of 1989 that helped bring down the East German state. That autumn's Monday demonstrations, which gathered here week after week until the regime could no longer hold, give the city a civic pride that runs deeper than tourism. The Forum for Contemporary History on Richard-Wagner-Platz addresses that period with considerable seriousness.