Tell me a story--Bremen as a symbol of sovereignty.

• Author: Wurmann, Kirsten
• Position: Travel to Legal Landmarks - Excerpt

"Most of our experience, our knowledge, our thinking, is organized as stories."

In The Literary Mind, author Mark Turner asks further, "If we don't remember the stories, what will we remember?"

The answer?

Not a whole heck of a lot if you are a 10-year-old Canadian boy on a nostalgic journey to his Opa's hometown in Germany with both his mother and his grandparents.

My son, Isaac, and I stood in the middle of Bremen's town square facing the old Town Hall, an architecturally beautiful representation of Weser Renaissance in Northern Germany. "This Town Hall," I proclaimed sweeping my arms around me, "and the statue of Roland standing in front, were declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2004 for their outstanding representations of civic autonomy and sovereignty."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Isaac sagely nodded his head and dutifully snapped a photograph, but I knew the grandiose importance of my statement was lost on him.

Fortunately for all concerned, my father stepped in, and the storytelling began.

Standing in the cobblestoned square of his birthplace, my father gestured down towards the Weser River and then straight up again to the Rathaus (or Town Hall). He began to describe the first people ever to settle the area, and how they arrived by boat 1200 years ago and wandered up from the Weser River to the place where the Rathaus now stands in all its UNESCO-approved glory. But those first settlers had no outstanding architecture to feast their eyes upon, instead choosing to observe an independent chicken and her chicks happily making their own home in the place that would become Bremen. The story goes that those first men and women recognized that if that chicken could survive and flourish with her offspring, then so could they.

And flourish they did, the people of Bremen fought long and hard for free access to the sea and to establish their civic independence from bishops and princes. Bremen first joined the Hanseatic League in 1358. The Hanse was a medieval merchant's league that dominated trade over most of Northern Germany. By 1646, Bremen had further asserted its independence by achieving its status as a Free Imperial City. When the old German Empire was dissolved in 1806, Bremen became an independent, sovereign free state and in 1871, a federal state of the new German Empire. Today Bremen (officially known as the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen) remains an independent state of the Federal Republic of Germany and consists of the cities of...