Chemnitz, Germany

Chemnitz sits at the foot of the Ore Mountains in Saxony and, with roughly 248,000 residents, ranks as the third-largest city in eastern Germany. Founded in 1143, it grew into "the Manchester of Saxony," where the textile industry employed 90% of workers by 1900. The city was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt from 1953 until reunification restored its original name in 1990, and a 7.1-metre bronze head of Karl Marx, sculpted by Lev Kerbel in 1971, still watches over a square bearing his name. The 1909 Gunzenhauser Museum holds the world's largest collection of Ernst-Ludwig Kirchner Expressionist works, while the 1935 Chemnitz Art Collections keep pieces by Joseph Beuys. How a single industrial center came to anchor such an unlikely art legacy is worth a closer look.