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Hello again, Today I will invite you for part 3 of our fountain sightseeing tour. The walk is leading us to different places at the outskirts of Hannover. After the 2nd World War, expellees from Silesia (now Poland) came to Hannover to find a new home here. Flats for these people were built in Hannover-Mittelfeld, many streets get names of towns from Silesia. In the biggest mountain of Silesia, the Riesengebirge (Giant's mountains), lived the legendary giant "Rübezahl". He was the keeper of the mountains, the nature and the people. In memory of Silesia 1954 the "Rübezahl" was created by Kurt...

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EU citizens that the deadline to apply to the EU Settlement Scheme to stay living in the UK is 30 June.  Please share with you contacts, family and friends. Bristol City Council auf Twitter: "The deadline to apply to the #EUSettlementScheme is 30 June. Please apply so you can stay living here. All #Bristol citizens are valued. Find out how to apply & where to get help: https://t.co/pG3K8Q0dSR #WeAreBristol @MarvinJRees @CllrAsherCraig @91Ways @upourstreet @ambitionlw https://t.co/GDLbNKfPK4" / Twitter

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We are delighted that approval has been granted to rename seven of the meeting rooms in City Hall to represent all of Bristol’s twin cities.  The names will appear on the doors and there will be a panel inside each room, with text and photographs to give information about the relevant city.  We are very excited about this, and grateful to the Guild of Guardians, who work closely with the Lord Mayor, for funding most of the costs.  It also means that anyone booking the rooms, including city officers, will book them as the ‘Bristol-Hannover Room’ etc.  which means that the twinnings’...

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Having had to abandon the plans for our Hannover friends to visit us in 2020, we had pencilled in a postponed visit at the end of August this year.  However, as things are still very uncertain, not least in terms of vaccine distribution, your committee has proposed to the Gesellschaft in Hannover that we cancel any further group visits this year, and plan to make up for it next year.  So in 2022, our 75th anniversary! We hope to manage to organise visits in both directions, as we did for both the 60th and the 70th anniversaries.  This will give us more time to organise really exciting visits...

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Bristol-Hannover Council played a leading role in organising an online regional twinning conference on behalf of Bristol International Twinnings Association on February 25th, a belated follow-up to the conference held in City Hall in September 2019. 49 delegates attended from a wide region encompassing Portsmouth, Devon, Worcestershire and Reading, and there was both great enthusiasm in the discussions on the day, and a lively response afterwards. People were stimulated by the ideas which came up in discussion groups after a year of exclusively online activity. Going forward as the lockdown eases,...

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Dear friends in Bristol, Part 2 of our fountains sightseeing tour will start at the old market place between Old Townhall and Marktkirche. The Marktbrunnen was designed by one of the most famous architekts of Hannover, Conrad Wilhelm Hase. The figures on the top of the fountain shows two marketwives. One of them has a watering can in her hand, she was trading with flowers. The other maid with the fish is a colleague of Sweet Molly Malone from Dublin, the wellknown fishmonger with her own song. Only a few steps away we are reaching the Ballhofbrunnen, it is an "Aquamobile". Three hollowballs...

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Socialist realism is unmistakable. The stark political messaging, most notably developed in the two decades after the Russian Revolution in 1917, is simultaneously impressive and intimidating. The style was also intended as inspirational for the purpose of political propaganda amid the social, industrial and economic turmoil within the Soviet Union under Stalin. Posters with spacemen, soldiers, workers, women and children, doves of peace showed Stalin’s desire to portray the Soviet Union as a forward-looking workers’ state. BHC member Colin Evans, in the latest of his German art talks,...

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Happy Christmas and a better New Year from Hans of Hannover!

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Dear friends in Bristol, With this letter I will take you on a sightseeing tour to Hannover’s fountains. This is to maintain the Hannover-Bristol connection in these bad times. I hope you will enjoy the article and you will get an appetite to visit the fountains during your next stay in Hannover. First I will introduce you fountains in Hannover’s City Centre, maybe you know them from a visit in Hannover. Let’s start with the Leafs(Blätter)- or Cimiotti-Fountain. Emil Cimiotti created this bronze fountain with different leafs. The water comes out of four wells on the top of the fountain....

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This year, Germany’s National Day of Mourning or Volkstrauertag was held on Sunday November 15th, to commemorate the bombing of Coventry on that date in 1940. The remembrance ceremony was held in the Bundestag in Berlin, and there was a photograph of Coventry’s bombed-out cathedral in the background. We were alerted to this by our friend Thomas Hermann, mayor of Hannover, telling us that it would be broadcast on ZDF, so it was possible to watch it via satellite TV. Prince Charles was the guest of honour and gave a full and heartfelt speech on British-German friendship, alternating between German...

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