Even so, certain superlatives from Germany’s second-largest state cannot be repeated often enough. For example, Germany’s biggest auto factory – the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg – makes its cars in Lower Saxony. The most beautiful luxury liners in the world are built in Lower Saxony – at the Meyer Wharf in Papenburg. Most Germans book their vacation trips in Lower Saxony – with TUI in Hanover.

Over the decades, 43 great minds that teach and research in Lower Saxony have been awarded a Nobel Prize – most of them from the University of Göttingen. And let’s not forget: Lower Saxony probably has the highest per capita concentration of marksmen’s guild members of all the German Länder taken together, a fact that is demonstrated once a year at the biggest marksmen’s fair in the world in Hanover.

A mere one-and-a-half decades ago, our Land was armed with weapons of a much bigger calibre. At that time, Lower Saxony was the end of the free world for the military strategists in the Pentagon in Washington and at NATO Headquarters in Brussels.

These times are past, thank goodness. Today, Lower Saxony lies in the middle of a peacefully reunited Germany. When the Cold War came to an end in the early nineteen-nineties, a couple of men from Hanover wrote the music to fit the occasion. Klaus Meine and his band “The Scorpions” were even cheered on Moscow’s Red Square by an audience of more than a hundred thousand as they played and sang their global hit “Wind of Change”.