According to the story, as ghastly as it is apparently untrue, Cologne, Germany, once hosted the martyrdom of 11,000 virgin handmaidens. They were the traveling companions of a fourth-century Christian princess named Ursula, who was on a pilgrimage to Rome when she and her entourage were waylaid and killed by Huns on the banks of the Rhine. In the early 1100s, a basilica was built on the spot where Ursula and her handmaidens were supposed to have perished; it still stands, in a somewhat dreary section of the city, right next to a wide swath of train tracks. Inside there's a reliquary known as the Golden Chamber, in which bones and skulls are arrayed in rampant splendor; on one wall they spell out the words "St. Ursula, Pray for Us."
The Church itself finds the legend deeply suspect, and the woman who told it to me, a native Cologner, related it with the distant amusement of Americans explaining how George Washington chopped down the cherry tree. But it's an efficient way to get a sense of the place: Cologne is a difficult city, and an easy one; hard to grasp and perfectly plain. It has made gains out of its losses, and lost its gains, so many times that it can be hard to tell them apart. Its architecture is a mix of the secular and the sacred, part ancient and part new, with very little that's merely old; when the sun shines it feels businesslike and sensible, but in the rain it's more than usually gloomy, and on average it rains half the year. It's a proud city, in a modest sort of way. Its cathedral, known as the Dom, is unapologetically towering and dominant; the Museum Ludwig houses an enormous collection of Picassos, works by the Russian avant-garde and American Pop; but the rest of the city operates on a scale so small and intimate as to feel almost Japanese. With just over a million inhabitants, it's the fourth largest metropolis in Germany, but it's small in scale, easily walkable, finite.
My usual routine in unfamiliar places is to start my first morning by walking aimlessly, until my path takes me someplace unintended and unexpected — a forgotten neighborhood or curious landmark. Ordinarily this is readily done, since I have a bad sense of direction, but Cologne proved to be a hard city to get lost in. Virtually all the interesting parts are contained within a discrete and manageable semicircle, formed by the Rhine to the east and a boulevard (it goes by various names along its route, but locals just call it "the Ring") to the west. Moreover, the Dom looms over everything, the dark openwork of its Gothic spires glowering down on the city. For once that overoptimistic phrase, too well known to travelers, is true: you can't miss it.
I can think of no comparably sized city in the world that's as dominated by a single landmark as Cologne is by the Dom. For a few years in the late 19th century, it was the tallest building in the world; it's still the tallest Catholic cathedral, and marks a kind of Second City, in a country split between Catholics and Protestants. "They say this is where Rome ends," explained Gisela Capitain, an art dealer whose gallery has been among the most prestigious in the city for over 20 years. It's a threefold description: an acknowledgment of the Church's power, a point of historical fact (the northeast border of the Roman Empire at its largest was the Rhine) and a claim to the kind of chaotic spirit for which Germany, as a whole, is not generally known. "People here don't wait for the light to change before they walk across an intersection," she told me.
I watched for jaywalkers over the next few days, saw not one, and began to wonder if she was kidding. It can be hard to tell: there's something about Cologne that seems to invite disparagement, as if it were a European Cleveland; even locals tend to put the place down, albeit gently and dispassionately. In a documentary a few years ago, Gerhard Richter, perhaps the greatest and certainly the most revered German artist alive, is shown driving toward the cathedral in the rain. "Cologne is a bit ugly," he says amiably and matter-of-factly. He pauses briefly. "Very ugly." And yet he's lived there for 30 years; there's something very Cologne about that.
"The city has had its ups and downs," the young proprietor of a fashionable clothing store told me. When I asked where it was now, he smiled and held his hand as low as he could without stooping, though he gave no indication that he wished he was somewhere else. What is there to do here? I asked the desk clerk at my hotel. "Shopping," he replied. Anything else? He shrugged. "People come here to shop."
This is not entirely fair, or at least it's uncharitable. There's been a settlement where Cologne now stands since Roman times, but the city as we know it is relatively recent. About 95 percent of the city center was destroyed during World War II, and unfortunately it was quickly rebuilt, in that typical, postwar low-key style that conduces to a dreary anonymity. What remains of the city's history is, above all, the cathedral, a dozen or so other churches and a few surviving Roman gates and walls.
Still, the city's story had a few chapters left. Perhaps because of its Catholic sensibility, Cologne was unusually open to visual culture. What's more, as the largest city in the Rhineland, it was home to a wealthy population of industrialists and insurance magnates. Art tends to cluster in such places, in this instance seeded by a wealthy lawyer's 1946 bequest to the city of a first-rate collection of Expressionist painting. A chocolatier named Peter Ludwig and his wife, Irene, added their huge stores of high modernism, and housed it all together in the museum that bears their name. By the late 1970s, Sigmar Polke, the late great German Magus, had settled in town; a few years later his onetime cohort Richter moved there, as well as Rosemarie Trockel and Martin Kippenberger; and by the late '80s, Cologne was the contemporary art capital of Europe, and so cross-pollinated with American art of the same period that it felt like a suburb of SoHo.
Then came reunification and the rise of Berlin, abetted by cheap housing and government subsidies, and Cologne's art world deflated almost as suddenly as SoHo's did. These days its former glory is represented by a handful of galleries (among them Ms. Capitain's — although she, too, has opened a space in Berlin), the Ludwig Museum and somewhat offstage, the sotto voce presence of Richter.
In the meantime, there's shopping, indeed, though of an odd and charming sort. The postwar reconstruction retained the old city's street plan, so the scale of things remains relatively diffident: inside the Ring, the blocks are small, the sightlines are short and the buildings are pokey. Accordingly, stores tend to be modest — though the streets they lie on (primarily Hohe Strasse and Schildergasse) can be crowded. And while you'll find the usual chain stores and luxury boutiques among them, more interesting by far are the many shops dedicated to single, and sometimes curious, passions: Filz Gnoss, which specializes in all things made of felt; Gummi-Grün, which does the same for rubber; Honig Müngersdorff, which is devoted to honey. Of course, cologne — the fragrance — was invented here, too. Farina, the firm that concocted the stuff in 1709, maintains a museum and shop in its original headquarters, a few blocks from the river. And there are bookstores: it's pleasing, as an American, to walk through a city where bookstores are so common and prominent — and, again, tending toward focus. Two of the world's largest art book publishers, Walther König and Taschen, are based in Cologne, and both maintain flagship stores in the city. (König's is far broader and more scholarly: it's one of the best in the world.) There's a store devoted entirely to cookbooks, another to travel guides and maps, and there are two great private libraries: one assembled by O. M. Ungers and devoted to architecture, the other a massive collection of Proustiana accumulated by a doctor named Reiner Speck. (It includes — shades of St. Ursula's reliquary — a lock of Proust's hair, which he bought at auction for $15,000.)
Nowhere is this affinity for the small and singular more evident than in the local tradition of Kölsch, a microbrewed beer that's as specific to Cologne as bourbon is to Kentucky. (It also serves as a neat proxy for the city's longstanding rivalry with Düsseldorf, to the north, which has its own version, called Altbier.) About 20 breweries make the drink, and many of them are associated with pubs, rowdy and unpretentious places, famously friendly and democratic, where you can order up a sausage and sit for hours, knocking back a few, or more than a few: it's served in elongated glasses, roughly the size and shape of a can of Red Bull — and be warned, the waiter will assume you want another if you don't lay a coaster over the top of your last.
As I say, the only thing Cologne does on a large scale is sacred architecture. It rained most of the week I was there, and by the end of it I was in a contrary mood, so I saved my visit to the Dom for my last day. In fact, it seemed like such an obvious and obligatory stop that I was considering skipping it altogether, but good sense got the better of me and I went.
It was a Thursday afternoon, and there were services in progress. There were more worshipers there than tourists, and there were a lot of tourists; I found that surprising, not because devotion is inherently improbable, but because the primary function of icons as aged and prominent as the cathedral is rarely the purpose for which they were designed. I waited behind the barrier until they were finished, and then wandered down the nave, my head craned back to stare at the stony heaven above, all arches upon arches and acres of stained glass.
Earlier I'd stopped at the Church's official art museum, Kolumba, which has been housed since 2007 in a building designed by the Swiss Pritzker Prize winner Peter Zumthor. The new structure wraps around and incorporates ruins dating back to Roman times. It's an extraordinary presence, lovely and serene, with perforated gray brick walls that give it a Moorish feel. The collection includes everything from medieval textiles to religious portraits to rosaries, but their brief is anything but conventional. When I was there, they were putting up a show by Paul Thek, the fiercely impious and unnerving American artist, who died of AIDS in 1988 — work that many lay museums might find difficult to show. How progressive, I thought, albeit with a certain dismay, and I went off looking for something less rational and frictionless.
I found it at the cathedral itself, at the end of its south transept, which hosts a huge and hard-to-grasp anomaly. In 2002, Richter was asked to design the window there — the sort of commission that comes along every thousand years or so. In 2007 it was finished, and proved to be an enormous pixelated abstraction, which reportedly made the archbishop so unhappy (he was hoping for more saints) that he did not attend its unveiling. In our day such conflict is almost unheard-of; all but the most aggressive artists and the most hidebound institutions are playing on the same team. It was gratifying, then, to see two old foes — secular art and ancient religion — equally matched and genuinely at odds. It was heartening to see it happen in Cologne. Perhaps, I thought as I was leaving, there's life in the old city yet.
ESSENTIALS: COLOGNE, GERMANY
Hotels
Althoff Grandhotel Schloss Bensberg A stunning 18th-century castle on a hilltop nine miles from the city. Kadettenstrasse, Bergisch Gladbach; 011-49-220-442-906; doubles from about $368. Antik Hotel Bristol Lovely and inexpensive and filled with antique furniture. Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ring 48; 011-49-221-120-195; doubles from $128. Pullman Cologne A high-end business hotel in the middle of town. Helenenstrasse 14; 011-49-221-275-2200; doubles from $189.
Restaurants
Brauerei Päffgen One of the city's oldest and most storied Kölsch houses, famous for its beer and sausages. Friesenstrasse; 64-66; 011-49-221-135-461. Salon Schmitz Every city has a place like this: a comfortable bistro and hangout. Aachener Strasse 28; 011-49-221-139-5577; entrees from $9. Zhing-Sam Restaurant Great Thai and Vietnamese food. Sachsenring 3; 011-49-221-801-4008; entrees from $12.
Shops
Cologne's main shopping district, around Hohe Strasse and Schildergasse, has many small shops dedicated to single passions. Filz Gnoss stocks all things felt (Apostelnstrasse 21). Gummi-Grüen has nothing but rubber and rubber products (Richmodstrasse 3-7). The Lomography Gallery Store sells a wide range of lomography cameras (Ehrenstrasse 57). Peter Heinrichs is filled with tobacco and its accouterments (Hahnenstrasse 2-4). The polar opposite is Manufactum, a branch of the cult-favorite home and hardware store, where you can find anything and everything (Brückenstrasse 23).
Sights
Cologne Cathedral Just head toward the spires, which are visible from everywhere (Domkloster 4). Kolumba The archdiocese's own museum, with a beautiful building and daring exhibitions (Kolumbastrasse 4). Museum Ludwig One of Europe's great museums of modern art (Heinrich-Böll-Platz).
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