Hof and Fürth come off badly in a quartet of cities – Bavaria

The paths of the Internet are unfathomable and it is difficult to reconstruct exactly why a card game from Munich’s Riva publishing house is making waves in two Franconian towns right now. The quartet takes care of the supposedly “ugliest cities in Germany”, has a manageable depth of thought and has been on the market since 2018. research of Süddeutsche Zeitung lead to the city of Hof, maybe someone cleaned up the box with the most shallow gifts of the last few years over Christmas and then cursed into a network of their trust.

In fact, one of the quartet cards is dedicated to the Frankish court. In the “special attraction” category, it lists a “monument to Heinrich Gottfried Gerber”, which is still somewhat nice, since even insiders consider it an extremely secret tip. The fact that the city gets four out of five possible thumbs down in terms of “insignificance” is less nice, after all Hof was the focus of world publicity twice during the time of the German-German reunification.

Well, all in all, the people of Hof react in large numbers, albeit in a Franconian humble manner (“Hof has nice corners, you just have to find them”). They know that the Untreusee and around the Theresienstein can be comfortably endured, and that some streets are pleasant. Of course, even more so that the leap onto the list of top Central European destinations is not imminent.

A row of streets in the inner city of Hof.

(Photo: Olaf Przybilla)

Things are a bit different in Fürth. As a smaller neighbor of a city of half a million, one is used to all kinds of ridicule (“Westvorstadt”), so one knows how to routinely breathe away the classification in a love league with Bremerhaven and Ludwigshafen, Frankfurt/Oder and Offenbach. At least publicly.

Of course, if you talk to people from Fürth, you very soon come to the admiring question of exactly how many wheat beers you must have squeezed into your armor in order to keep an old town surrounded by floodplains and meadows (with one of the highest densities of monuments in the republic) to be perceived as ugly. And whether one should more urgently recommend going to the optician or art historian in this cheerful case of sensory fogging.

Lord Mayor Thomas Jung has the Upper Bavarian publishing house in the Fuerther News now offered a guided tour just to be on the safe side. Maybe they’re still working on other games.

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