Schleswig-Holstein

The Holstentor — the landmark of the city of Lübeck. The inscription 'Schleswig-Holstein' appears beneath the gate along the lower inner edge. The engraver's initials 'HH' are to the right of the design; to the left, the mint mark — 'A', 'D', 'F', 'G' or 'J'. On the upper outer ring, twelve stars in a semicircle interrupted at the centre by the year '2006'. 'Bundesrepublik Deutschland' forms a semicircle on the lower outer ring.

In Germany's northernmost federal state, the North Sea and the Baltic Sea meet — a geographic position that made Schleswig-Holstein a hub of maritime trade for centuries. Lübeck, the region's most important city in the Middle Ages, became the leading power of the Hanseatic League from the 13th century onward and thus the center of northern European trade between the Atlantic world and the Baltic. The Holstentor, built as the city's western gate between 1464 and 1478, is the best-known surviving building from this era. With its two massive round towers and connecting central section, it is regarded as an outstanding example of northern German brick Gothic and has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1987 — together with the entire historic center of Lübeck.

Schleswig-Holstein itself has a politically turbulent history: the duchy was contested for centuries between Danish and German rule before becoming part of Prussia as a province following the German-Danish War of 1864 and the German War of 1866. It was only constituted as an independent federal state in 1946. Culturally, the region remains diverse to this day, shaped by its maritime character, its Frisian population in the west, and its Danish minority in the north. As part of the German Federal States series, the Federal Republic of Germany honored Schleswig-Holstein in 2006 with a 2-euro commemorative coin depicting the Holstentor as a defining symbol of the state.