Germany's most east city — Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest and Hollywood's favourite backlot
Görlitz is Germany's easternmost city, split down the Neisse river by the Polish border (the Polish half is called Zgorzelec) and blessed with the most intact old-town architecture in Germany — it escaped WWII bombing almost entirely. The result is a vertical sample case of 500 years of European urban architecture from Gothic through Baroque that has attracted over 100 film productions, most famously Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel (actually filmed here and in Bautzen). Germany has a word for it: Görliwood.
Görlitz was a prosperous Hanseatic trading city in the 15th and 16th centuries, growing rich on the cloth trade and spending its wealth on architecture that survives almost entirely intact. The Thirty Years' War and the Napoleonic Wars brought economic decline but also preservation — without money to build, nothing was demolished either. The Potsdam Agreement of 1945 placed the Neisse river as the Polish-German border, cutting the city in half overnight; the two halves were separated until German reunification and Polish EU membership gradually allowed them to merge into a single twin city. A…