Rothenburg ob der Tauber

Rothenburg ob der Tauber is a small town in Franconia and **the most complete walled medieval town in Germany** — its wall can be walked in a full, unbroken circuit. The reason it survives this way is **poverty**. In the sixteenth century it was a prosperous free imperial city of six thousand people; then the **Thirty Years' War** and plague destroyed it, and it stopped growing altogether. The industrial revolution and the expansions of the nineteenth century never reached it, so it stayed frozen in the seventeenth. Romantic painters rediscovered it in the nineteenth century and it became the emblem of «old Germany». Note: in **March 1945** about 40% of the town was destroyed in an air raid, and the ruined part was rebuilt exactly, funded by international donations — many of them American. Note: Rothenburg is **extremely crowded by day** with coach visitors; staying the night gives you an entirely different town after six in the evening.