Neu-Ulm

Neu-Ulm is a town in Bavarian Swabia. It's just across the Danube from Ulm. In many ways Neu-Ulm serves as a suburb of Ulm, but it has attractions of its own. Despite being the "new" part of Ulm, Neu-Ulm offers many historically significant buildings, churches and streets. At just under 60,000 inhabitants it serves as a local centre for the Neu-Ulm Landkreis (district).

Understand
Until 1810, Neu-Ulm was a part of Ulm, which was a Reichsstadt, a self-governing free imperial city of the Holy Roman Empire. What is now Neu-Ulm was very small with little more than a few houses, taverns, pieces of land, and the village of Offenhausen. In that year, Ulm was split at the Danube between the kingdoms of Württemberg and Bavaria,

In 1841, Ulm became the site of a "federal fortress" ("Bundesfestung") of the new German Confederation which was built for a potential defensive war of the German Confederation against French or Russian aggression. Neu-Ulm was included in the fortress, which never saw a shot fired in anger. The connection to Ulm was maintained by a streetcar line that opened in 1897, and which was later abandoned. There are now talks on both sides of the Danube to extend the Ulm tram network into Neu-Ulm again.

The city was bombed in World War II because of the military presence. The former Wehrmacht barracks were taken over by an American Army garrison after the war, but the Americans left at the end of the Cold War, and the former site of the garrison has been turned into a new quarter. A major development of the 21st century was "Neu-Ulm 21" which changed the layout of the railway infrastructure enabling the redesign of the city center. Unlike the sister projects in Stuttgart or Lindau Neu-Ulm 21 was relatively uncontroversial locally and never attracted nationwide media attention. The Landesgartenschau ("state gardening exhibition") of 2008 was used - as is often the case for such events - to further build on the urban redesign enabled by Neu-Ulm 21. A debate of the 2010s was "Nuxit", the proposal by some politicians in Neu-Ulm to exit the Landkreis and become a self-governing city (as it had been prior to the 1970s) however, despite a lot of heated debate and attempts to hold a referendum on the issue, it was ultimately shot down by the Bavarian ministry of the interior in 2019.

By car
There are three major road crossings of the Danube from Ulm to Neu-Ulm

See
Walk along the river bank to get some great views of Ulm.



Go next

 * Ulm is just across the Danube