Schleswig-Holstein is the most northerly German federal state. It borders on Hamburg, Lower Saxony and Mecklenburg-Western Pommerania to the south, and on Denmark to the north. Its population of 2.8 million people live on a land area of 15,761 square kilometres. The state government headed by Minister President Peter Harry Carstensen (CDU) sits in Kiel, the state’s largest city.
www.schleswig-holstein.de
The history of Schleswig-Holstein unfolds between Germany and Denmark. In 1386 the Germans and the Danes agreed to unite the Danish principality of Schleswig with the German county of Holstein under one sovereign. In 1460 Christian I of Denmark created Schleswig-Holstein, assuring both territories their unification and their internal independence. Today, national minorities still live on both sides of the German-Danish border.
Schleswig-Holstein’s traditional sources of income are agriculture and fisheries. Two thirds of the German fishing fleet are based in Schleswig-Holstein. Recently, however, the state has also developed into an important technology location with innovative sectors, such as medical, energy and environmental technology and maritime trade. The state is a leader in wind power; more electricity per inhabitant is harnessed here from wind power than anywhere else in the country.
www.wtsh.de
Schleswig-Holstein has an excellent educational network, with nine state and three private institutions of higher education with more than 46,000 students. In the future, that network is to be further strengthened through the fusion of the Kiel, Flensburg and Lübeck universities to form a state university. It also has prestigious research institutes, such as the Leibniz Institute for Oceanography, the Fraunhofer Institute for Silicon Technology and the Institute for World Economics at the University of Kiel.
Schleswig-Holstein has a wide range of museums and exhibitions, concerts and major cultural events to offer. The Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival is one such outstanding international event. Every summer, musicians of international repute entertain thousands of music lovers in different manors and country estates. Other summer highlights are the Jazz Baltica held at Schloss Salzau, the Karl May Festival in Bad Segeberg and the Eutin Festival.
Thomas Mann said of his own works that they were unmistakably German and could only have been written by a German, indeed only by someone hailing from Lübeck. For the star literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Mann, who was born in Lübeck, is the “most German of all Germans”. He is considered to be the greatest German novelist of the 20th century. Thomas Mann gained fame with his novel Buddenbrooks, which is set in Lübeck. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
