Simsbury's Sister City
Since 1991 Simsbury has shared a partnership with Wittmund, Germany, a small town located in the northwestern part of the country.
A Visit to Wittmund
by Tido Holtkamp
In September 1998 my wife and I visited Wittmund, Simsbury Partner-City in Northern Germany. We stayed at the "Residence" Hotel, a member of the Ring-Hotel Group, had 2 rooms and a bath for DM 140 a night ($80.-) including a sumptuous buffet-breakfast each morning, and were treated like royalty. The hotel uses the attractive residence of the former county administrator as its office, behind which a modern hotel is added.
The Hotel is situated in town, facing the market square (where a farmer's market is held every Monday and Thursday mornings), where people seem to have a lot of fun.
Adjacent to the hotel is the so-called "Town Hall", a building containing a restaurant, a dance hall, an assembly hall, the town's information and tourist office, and a travel bureau. It was built by the town, but is now managed privately. The "Town Hall" serves as a place for banquets, meetings, dinners, elections, and even had a roller derby for kids one Saturday.
Behind the Hotel stretches the town park with several ponds and many birds. Next to it rises the old wall of the former castle which was demolished by the Prussians when the occupied the land in 1744. A picture of the castle can be seen in the park. Behind the park lies the new town hospital, a brand-new institution. All this area, as all parts of town, can be reached on foot - there are easy connections everywhere, and there is no crime. Bicycles are used everywhere and everything is accessible to bicycles; in many places there are separate bicycle paths.
The center is closed to automobiles, but easy parking is available on the periphery, and from the parking areas to the center it is only a couple of minutes. Wittmund lies on the Harle river, a small stream which ends in the North Sea about 8 miles north. While the old town of Wittmund now has about 8,000 inhabitants, the new Town of Wittmund, which incorporates many surrounding villages, has a total of 22,000 inhabitants. With the incorporated villages Wittmund now stretches to the North Sea and has the only school in town, to which kids are bussed every day.
From the hotel one can visit any place in town on foot. It is only three minutes to the center of town, a pedestrian zone with post office, town administrative offices, shops, bars, restaurants, etc. Not to forget a disco for the teenagers. This pedestrian zone was created about 25 years ago, when Wittmund built a new road detouring traffic south around the center. The center is still very attractive and active, people love to walk through the streets, window-shopping and meeting friends or having one of several Italian ice creams, but more and more new housing is being built at the west end of town, while industry is settling on the east side of town, and a new detour road is being built through the industry zone. The city is growing, and the old sense of the center is being eroded, with new shopping centers beckoning outside. It will be interesting to see what Wittmund will do with this situation. Wittmund is attracting industry, but so far nothing that would be of interest to Simsbury.
Wittmund is a town in the Land of Lower Saxony (roughly equivalent to our State of Connecticut) and its capital in Hannover. The Land is quite powerful, obtains its portion of the federal income taxes, pays all teacher salaries and schools, and also prescribes the form of town government for all towns. Until last year each town had a town manager and a mayor, but - to save expenses - now only a mayor. The new mayor is Karl-Heinz Kruger, a career bureaucrat, who seems to take his job with a decent sense of humor. He is supported by a town council of some thirty councilmen representing several parties, of which the largest are the Social Democrats (similar to Democrats here), in second place the CDU - Cristian Democratic Union (similar to Republicans here).
In front of the town administrative offices, an attractive new building, stands a statue showing Wittmund's two partner towns: Simsbury in the USA, and Odinzovo near Moscow. Mr. Kruger has already visited Odinzovo ("If you cannot handle Vodka, don't go!" he says.) and would like to visit Simsbury. When I asked him about funds, he laughs: "When a town signs an international treaty, then it should pay for the mayor to visit the partners. That is a straightforward matter." When I met with him, we discussed the visit by Wittmund school children to Simsbury October 15-20, 1998, and the visit by the Simsbury High School choir to Wittmund in April 1999. He offered to put up additional visitors to Wittmund next Spring - be they parents of kids going with the choir, or anybody else from Simsbury - in homes, and said Wittmund would welcome them.
Later in the week the assistant mayor from Odinzovo arrived with his wife, and Mayor Kruger arranged a dinner in his honor, to which we were also invited. The evening was fun with the conversations going from German to English to Russian to Low German, all sprinkled with multiple Vodka toasts (I survived because I cheated).
During our stay the German national elections took place, a rather quiet affair compared to US elections. The German Government is obligated to finance the campaigns and the elections for all candidates; this year the total bill is expected to reach the monumental amount of 50 million dollars. One of the candidates campaigned in front of our hotel one day, and we had a chance to meet him.
Mr. Kruger and his friends all send their best wishes to Simsbury and hope to see many new faces in Wittmund next Spring when the High School Choir will sing in Wittmund. They are eagerly looking forward to it.