Bremen

Bremen Town Hall with the Roland statue in the foreground. Lower right: the name of the city 'BREMEN'; upper left: the mint mark — A, D, F, G or J. Below the design, the initials of artist Bodo Broschat.

Bremen is one of the oldest trading cities in Northern Europe and was, for centuries, one of the most important hubs for Atlantic and overseas trade. As a member of the Hanseatic League since the 13th century, the city on the Weser connected northern Germany's hinterland with the ports of England, Scandinavia and the New World. The town hall on the market square, completed in 1405, is considered one of the outstanding examples of Weser Gothic architecture, was later extended with a Renaissance façade, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site together with the Roland statue since 2004. The Roland, erected in 1404, was the symbol of civic freedom and market rights — a symbol understood far beyond the city's borders and one that still dominates the market square today.

As a city-state, Bremen is the smallest of Germany's federal states and consists of the two cities of Bremen and Bremerhaven. The Free Hanseatic City looks back on a constitutional history of its own reaching back to the Middle Ages, and after 1945 it was one of the original founding states of the Federal Republic. As part of the German Federal States series, Germany honoured this distinctive profile in 2010: each federal state receives its own issue, spotlighting a defining building or landmark and thereby making the Republic's cultural diversity visible.