Chapter 1 · July 2026
A town regrouping
The story of the year is the university. In May 2025 the Excellence Commission declined to renew funding for the Multiscale Bioimaging cluster, leaving the former “Excellence University” with no clusters at all — locally read as a science-policy alarm bell. The response is a rebuild: in May 2026 the Senate unanimously elected physicist Johannes Wessels, formerly of Münster, as the new president, arriving late this year. In the rankings the university still sits around 243rd worldwide and roughly eighth in Germany, and remains strong in the life sciences.
The city contradicts the gloom
The numbers on the ground are healthier than the mood. Enrollment held near 27,700–28,000 for the winter semester, with international students rising to 18.5%. Sartorius, the city’s flagship employer, opened 2026 with first-quarter sales of about €899 million, up 7.5% in constant currencies, and added staff to more than 14,200. And the enormous new university hospital — 624 beds, 31 operating rooms — poured its foundations early this year, on track to open around 2030.
What it costs to live here
The city government is in hard consolidation mode, closing a roughly €50 million annual gap with a 97-measure savings package that a three-party council coalition pushed through; the state approved the supplementary budget in June. Expect ongoing fights over pools, youth services and fees. For residents, the practical dial moved a little: the Deutschlandticket rose to €63 a month in January, and rents keep creeping up to around €12.50 per square meter, still far below big-city levels, with tenant-protection caps in force through 2029. One running local joke got shorter — the long-closed Godehardkreisel roundabout in the Weststadt finally reopened on June 30.
The summer
Culture is in full swing. The 38th Göttinger Kultursommer runs July 4 to August 15 across the Deutsches Theater, the Altes Rathaus and smaller venues, with the KWP open-air festival in the Stadtwald capping it on August 14–15. The International Handel Festival, this year themed “Enticement,” ran in May with some 550 artists.
Chapter 2 · July 2026
An E. coli scare, mid-summer
The one hard piece of news this week was a public-health one. On July 2 the Landkreis Göttingen ordered a recall of several raw-sausage (Rohwurst) products from Fleischwaren Wulff GmbH & Co. KG, based in the city on Hans-Böckler-Straße, after Shiga-toxin-producing E. coli — the bacteria behind EHEC — was found in a day’s production. The affected items were batches of Schinken-Streichmettwurst, Zwiebelmettwurst and Delikatess Schinken Zwiebelmettwurst in various pack sizes.
Authorities urged people not to eat the products and to return them, noting that infection can appear within about a week and that infants, young children, older people and those with weakened immune systems are most at risk of severe illness, which in rare cases can include acute kidney failure. Away from the recall, the summer kept its calm rhythm — the Larifari Kindersommer children’s series opened on July 5 — a reminder that a single bad batch is a local health matter, not a town in crisis.
Chapter 3 · July 2026
Wartime bombs under the Leine bridge
The week’s hard news came out of the ground. On July 7 the Bundesstraße 27 was closed in both directions near the Leine bridge after construction crews from the state road authority uncovered unexploded German ordnance from the Second World War. What began as two small bombs became three once the ground was probed, all of them detonated on site under a 300-metre exclusion zone from 11 a.m. The road reopened the same day and the bridge came through undamaged — a reminder that the war left things buried under the everyday.
A flag against the bomb
The timing made for a quiet rhyme. The very next day, July 8, the city raised the Mayors for Peace flag in front of the New Town Hall on Hiroshimaplatz, joining the more than 600 German municipalities that mark the network’s Flag Day with an appeal to abolish nuclear weapons. One kind of bomb pulled from beneath a road; another kind protested in the square above it.
Otherwise the town kept its summer rhythm. Alongside the ongoing Kultursommer, Göttingen Marketing began a series of short “Gänseliesel Live” performances at the market-square fountain every Saturday afternoon, running through mid-September — the small, steady civic life that a single bad week never really interrupts.
Chapter 4 · July 2026
Eight more bombs, and a deadline to stand for office
The ground under the B27 was not finished. On July 15, crews from the state road-building authority in Gandersheim, probing near the Leine bridge, turned up five more small German bombs from the Second World War — the third such find at the same stretch of road, after the three detonated on July 7 recorded in the last chapter. Preparations began at 11 a.m. the next morning behind the same 300-metre exclusion zone. The city said only a few households were affected and opened the Nachbarschaftszentrum Holtenser Berg at 10:30 as a place for evacuated residents to wait.
Then the count moved again. Probing on the morning of July 16 found three more, bringing the total to eight — which changed neither the radius nor the procedure. All eight were detonated on site at about 1 p.m. The exclusion zone was lifted afterwards and residents went home, but the B27 itself stayed shut while the bridge was examined for damage.
A ballot to fill by six o’clock
The town’s other clock was civic. Göttingen votes on September 13 for a new district assembly, a new city council and the local borough councils, with the offices of mayor and district administrator on the same ballot; polling stations open from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Anyone at least 16 years old holding German or EU citizenship, with their main residence registered here for at least three months, may vote. If the mayoral or district-administrator vote produces no clear result, a runoff follows on September 27. Anyone wanting to stand had until 6 p.m. on Monday, July 20 to file a nomination; the municipal electoral committee rules on what came in two days later, on July 22, in a public session at the New Town Hall. The city is still looking for volunteers to staff the polling stations.
The twentieth of July
That filing deadline fell on a date this town keeps. July 20 is the anniversary of the 1944 plot in which Claus Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg and a group of conspirators tried to kill Hitler and bring down the regime. Two of them, Fritz-Dietlof Graf von der Schulenburg and Adam von Trott zu Solz, had studied in Göttingen; the city put up a memorial stone for the twentieth anniversary. This year a wreath was laid at 5 p.m. at the Ehrenmal on the Stauffenbergring. Bombs out of the roadbed on Thursday, nominations due Monday at six, a wreath the same afternoon — one week holding the town’s past and its next council at once.
One smaller loss came to light in the same days. Police said a flowering-capable tuber of the rare titan arum was taken from a greenhouse in the Old Botanical Garden sometime between June 14 and 17, probably during ordinary opening hours, with the damage put at a mid three-figure sum. The plant blooms only every three or four years, for just under 48 hours, and draws crowds when it does.
Chapter 5 · July 2026
The September ballot is set
The civic clock the last chapter started has struck its next hour. On July 22, in a public session at the New Town Hall, Göttingen’s municipal electoral committee certified the nominations for the September 13 vote — the step that turns a filing deadline into an actual ballot. Four candidates cleared for the office of mayor: one each from the Greens, the Social Democrats, the Christian Democrats and the Left. For the city council the committee recorded 52 lists — the same number as in 2021 — from nine parties along with two local voter groups and a single independent, and 37 more for the nine borough councils. In all, 573 people are standing across the city’s ballots, twelve fewer than five years ago.
One name left off
One would-be candidate did not make it. The satirical party Die PARTEI’s pick for mayor was turned down because no valid nomination for the direct mayoral election reached the city by its own earlier deadline, July 6 — though the party still holds a list in the council race. With the slate fixed, the town enters what the city’s own notice calls the “hot phase” of the campaign. A month that pulled wartime bombs from the roadbed and laid a wreath for the twentieth of July now hands the summer a quieter civic task: a September ballot, printed at last with names.
Chapter 6 · August 2026
The summer runs dry
Since August 1 it has been temporarily forbidden in the city of Göttingen to take water from lakes, streams or the Leine. The city issued an Allgemeinverfügung — a general decree — at the end of last week; it runs to the end of September and applies even where water rights have already been granted. Groundwater drawn from private wells may not be used to water gardens or green spaces between 10 a.m. and 7 p.m. The surrounding district had moved a day earlier: on July 31 the Landkreis Göttingen banned withdrawal from flowing waters using technical means such as motor or electric pumps, and imposed the same daytime watering restriction, citing „die anhaltende Trockenheit“ — the continuing drought. Agricultural and commercial land, and drinking water, are exempt. Both measures run until 30 September.
Planning for the heat, not just reacting to it
The city is also making the longer arrangement. On July 30 it said it intends to designate „kühle Orte“ — cool places — across the city, working with the Hamburg planning office urbanista on a map due in 2027 that will then be folded into Göttingen’s existing Hitzegefahrenkarte, its heat hazard map. A river that no one may draw from and a map of where to go when it is too hot are two halves of the same summer. Elsewhere in the region the drought is visible on the water itself: low water on the Oberweser has been restricting shipping since late July.
A different kind of preparation finished in the same days. Eleven new sirens have now been installed across the city area. Two of them run on solar power and work independently of the grid: without any power supply they can sound the alarm at least twenty times within 48 hours and also play spoken announcements. They stand „Auf dem Hagen“ and at the Gartetalbahnhof.
Two numbers on the same Friday
On July 31 the Agentur für Arbeit Göttingen published its July labour-market report. Across the districts of Göttingen and Northeim, 16,077 people were registered unemployed — about 700 more than the month before — for an unemployment rate of 6.6%, exactly the rate recorded in July last year. There were 3,753 vacancies to fill, 560 fewer than a month earlier. Antje Frische, the agency’s operational managing director, put the rise down mainly to employment contracts commonly ending on 30 June, and to young people registering over the summer while they look for work before starting studies or vocational training. The other number concerns the students themselves: for the winter semester 2026/27 the Semesterbeitrag at the Georg-August-Universität is €484.18, the highest the university has charged since 2014 and the second-highest of any state university in Germany — behind Leuphana Universität Lüneburg by about six cents. Much of the spread between German universities comes down to whether a Deutschlandticket is included.
The ballot certified in the last chapter now runs into all of this. Nominations closed in July, the campaign for September 13 has begun, and it will be fought through a town that has been told not to draw from its own river until the end of the month the vote falls in.
Chapter 7 · August 2026
Six hundred thousand ballot papers, and a week too hot to work outside
The ballot this book watched being certified now has to be physically made. On August 7 the city published what the September 13 vote takes: around 600,000 ballot papers, roughly 5.5 tonnes of paper to be packed by hand, 392 plastic ballot boxes, some 1,500 dispatch bags, 49 extra signposts, and about 150 partition walls to be carried into school canteens. Voting happens at 48 locations holding 111 polling stations, with 40 postal-voting districts counted at two further sites. The furthest polling station from the centre is at Knutbühren, about 10.2 kilometres out. The largest is the Hainberg-Gymnasium annexe, with seven rooms holding 21 plastic ballot boxes and seven cardboard ones.
Thirty-nine of forty-eight
The reason the city published the inventory was accessibility. Thirty-nine of the 48 in-person voting locations are now barrier-free, twelve more than at the last municipal election in 2021; nine are still not fully compliant. Twelve sites with lower thresholds get radio doorbells so voters who cannot manage the entrance can call for help. Polling stations have been returned to a set of senior and care homes, chosen because their surrounding areas recorded low turnout at the 2025 federal election. Daniel Bratschek, the deputy returning officer, put the reasoning this way: „Wahlen sollten für alle Menschen gleichermaßen zugänglich sein. Barrierefreiheit ist deshalb kein Zusatzangebot, sondern unsere ständige Bestrebung“ — elections should be equally accessible to everyone, so accessibility is not an add-on but a constant aim. One line in the same release is a gap rather than an achievement: the city still needs around 400 more poll workers, the same shortfall it reported two weeks earlier.
The heat comes with a schedule attached
The drought that filled the last chapter turned into something more immediate. The German Weather Service issued an official warning of extreme heat for the city and district, published on August 3 and then extended on August 4; it ran from 11:00 on Tuesday, August 4 to 19:00 on Wednesday, August 5. Extreme heat stress was forecast up to 400 metres of altitude on the Tuesday and strong heat stress above that line, easing to strong heat stress on the Wednesday. The warning notes an added burden from reduced overnight cooling, particularly in the densely built-up part of the city. What the city published alongside it was the weather service’s own three recommendations — drink enough, avoid direct sun and strenuous activity, keep the home as cool as possible — and a pointer to the heat portal it set up. Municipal operations moved separately, and on a later forecast. On August 6 the waste service announced that from Monday, August 10 to Friday, August 14 refuse collection would start an hour early, with bins out by five in the morning, and gave its reason plainly: „Unsere Kolleg*innen in der Abfuhr verrichten schwere körperliche Arbeit, bei der besondere Schutzbekleidung getragen werden muss. Entlastende Maßnahmen sind - anders als in Innenräumen - nicht möglich“ — the crews do heavy physical work for which special protective clothing has to be worn, and unlike indoors, measures to relieve the load are not possible.
The same river, two preparations
At the time of writing no change had been published to the withdrawal ban recorded in the last chapter; on its own terms it runs to September 30. The river itself stopped falling. On August 10 the gauge at Göttingen read 34 centimetres against a ten-year mean low water of 35 and a mean water level of 52, with the lowest reading of the past decade at 31 centimetres in September 2019. A centimetre under mean low water, and flat. What the town is spending this month on the Leine is the opposite problem. The municipal works have been fitting backflow protection at around 30 outfalls since the autumn of 2025; the stage at the Nelkenwinkel finishes at the end of September, and from mid-August the work moves to the Hagenweg, the second of four structures that will eventually shield the Blümchenviertel from water coming the other way. That is one of four jobs closing the Hagenweg completely on Thursday, August 13 for about eleven weeks, alongside district-heating expansion, cable renewal and then resurfacing. A city that may not draw from its river until the end of September is spending the same weeks arming itself against the river arriving uninvited.
Chapter 8 · August 2026
The postal vote opens its doors
The 5.5 tonnes of paper the last chapter counted now exist. On August 14 the city announced that the ballot papers for the September 13 vote are “erstellt, gedruckt und vollständig eingegangen” — created, printed, and received in full — and that the processing and dispatch of postal-voting packets has begun. The Briefwahlbüro, the city’s postal-voting office, opened its doors on Monday, August 17 at Philipp-Reis-Straße 2a, where voters can also cast their ballot in person ahead of election day.
Two administrative windows follow. The electoral register for the municipal elections can be inspected from Monday, August 24 to Friday, August 28; for the Integrationsrat election, inspection runs only until Friday, August 21. And the gap the last chapter recorded is still open: the city says it continues to need poll workers for the main vote and any runoff, and is particularly looking for people willing to serve as Wahlvorstehende — the volunteers who preside over a polling station. This time the notice gave no number; a week earlier the shortfall was about 400.