What to See in Wuppertal - Top Sights and Attractions

Engels-Haus is a museum in Wuppertal, Germany, located in the house where Friedrich Engels grew up. The museum is a constituent member of the Museum of Industrial Culture in Wuppertal.

The late baroque Berg house was built in 1775 by Eberhard Haarmann in what was then Barmen, Berg. The father of Engels, Friedrich Engels Sr. was born in the house in 1796. Engels himself was born in a different house owned by the family approximately 100 m (330 ft) to the east that has since been destroyed, but spent his youth growing up at Engels-Haus.

The museum was opened in 1970 on the 150th anniversary of Engels' birth, and became a popular destination for socialist tourists. The museum was closed in 2016 for refurbishment. The museum's planned re-opening in 2020 for the 200th anniversary of Engels' birth was canceled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Nevertheless, in the presence of the Minister for Culture and Science of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia, Isabel Pfeiffer-Poensgen, and over 300 guests, the museum was reopened with the new permanent exhibition on the life and work of Friedrich Engels on 11 September 2021. The highlight of this event was the unveiling of the international art project Inside out Engels.^[2]

Botanical garden with a large glasshouse. The Botanischer Garten Wuppertal, also known as the Botanischer Garten der Stadt Wuppertal, is a municipal botanical garden located at Elisenhöhe 1, Wuppertal, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It is open daily without charge.

The garden dates to 1890 when a botanical school garden was first created on a 4600 m² plot that is now the Rose Garden. Between 1908-1910 it relocated to today's site, the Villa Eller'schen, a former country house of textile manufacturers named Eller, which contained a villa (built 1820), orangery, residential and farm buildings, and the Elise Tower (built 1838) which provides the garden's focal point. After Wuppertal was established in 1929, it became a municipal botanical garden. In 2006 three new greenhouses were constructed on the former site of the city nursery, thus extending the garden: a large demonstration greenhouse (400 m²) and two smaller ones (each about 100 m²).

Today the garden cultivates about 400 protected species of the genus Babiana, Cyclamen, Gladiolus, Iris, Moraea, Paeonia, Scilla, etc. The large greenhouse contains tropical crops, exhibition and event space, and room for overwintering plants. The smaller greenhouses exhibit bulbs, tuber plants, and cacti.^[3]

Nazi concentration camp. Kemna concentration camp was one of the early Nazi concentration camps, created by the Third Reich to incarcerate their political opponents after the Nazi Party first seized power in 1933. The camp was established in a former factory on the Wupper river in the Kemna neighborhood of the Barmen quarter of Wuppertal. It was run by the SA group in Düsseldorf.

The purpose of the early concentration camps was to repress and terrorize opponents of the new regime, primarily communists, but also socialists, dissenting Christians, and trade unionists. Unlike later concentration camps, the prisoners and the guards at Kemna were from the same cities and in many cases, knew each other and were already enemies from the German Revolution of 1918–1919 and subsequent political battles of the 1920s. Torture was practiced and the screams of the men were audible to people living and working nearby, and severely injured men were taken to nearby hospitals, all causing word of the camp's misdeeds to spread quickly. There was a major release of prisoners in October 1933; those released were forced to sign a document promising to keep secret all they had seen and experienced at the camp, and were threatened with re-arrest if they disobeyed. The Nazis wanted the public to become familiar with the term "concentration camp" and regard it with dread, but worried that the excesses at Kemna and the other early concentration camps would turn public opinion against them and thwart their plans. As a result, the camp was closed in January 1934, just six months after it opened. After the SA lost political influence, reports of torture led to an investigation and eventually to hearings and the perpetrators given a warning. No crimes were prosecuted.

After the war, the Kemna Trial became the first major German trial regarding a concentration camp. Nonetheless, the camp was afterward largely forgotten, with no research into its past and for decades, only two sources supplying most of the information known about the camp. In 1983, a monument honoring the prisoners who suffered there was installed across the street from the former concentration camp; the builders of the monument were forbidden by the owner of the property from erecting any memorial on the site itself.^[7]

The Barmer Anlagen are the second largest private park in Germany, which is nevertheless freely accessible to the public. They are located in the Wuppertal district of Barmen, which was an independent major city in the Bergisches Land region until its unification with the neighboring city of Elberfeld in 1929. The grounds were designed from 1864 onwards according to plans by the royal horticultural director Joseph Clemens Weyhe.

The park extends from the Heidt residential district on the southern edge of the Barmer inner city area up to the Barmer Südhöhen with the Barmer forest around the Toelle Tower at an elevation of 330 meters above sea level in the Lichtenplatz residential district. The difference in elevation between the northern part and the highest elevation is about 135 meters with a length extension in north-south direction of about 1200 meters. The area, including the part of the Barmer Forest belonging to the facilities, is about 300 hectares, of which 77 hectares are owned by the Barmer Verschönerungsverein and 212 hectares by the city of Wuppertal. About 100 hectares of the grounds are designed as landscape gardens.

The Barmer Anlagen are divided into three parts by the east-west running roads Untere Lichtenplatzer Straße, which is qualified as state road 419, and Lönsstraße. The smaller part of the Barmer Anlagen, north of Untere Lichterplatzer Straße and at its lowest point, has a park-like character with two ponds and lawns with old trees. In the central part, where more ponds and more extensive lawns have been laid out, the landscape garden merges with the Barmer forest as the elevation rises. The southern part, especially south of Lönsstraße down to the Murmelbach valley, consists mainly of a closed forest area with numerous forest paths. At the highest point is the Toelle Tower, which can be climbed as a lookout tower on selected days during the summer months.

There are numerous monuments, memorial stones and commemorative plaques on the grounds. One of the monuments commemorates the Barmer Bergbahn, a rack-and-pinion railroad that was shut down in 1959 and whose former route led for long stretches through the park to the Toelle Tower and whose course was made recognizable in the form of a double row of granite steles in the park grounds as part of the Regionale 2006. The very attractively designed Vorwerkpark and a cemetery of honor, which is enclosed by the park, adjoin the facilities. Furthermore, the park grounds included the sites of the buildings of the Barmer Stadthalle, the Barmer Planetarium and the Meierei Fischertal, which were destroyed in the Second World War and not rebuilt.

The Barmer gardens have been in the care of the Barmer Verschönerungsverein (Barmer Beautification Association) since the beginning, which is financed by membership fees and donations and pays for their upkeep. They are one of 57 parks and landscape gardens on the Road of Garden Art between the Rhine and the Meuse, a cross-border association of particularly beautiful and high-quality, mostly historic gardens in North Rhine-Westphalia and the Netherlands.

In September 2013, the European Garden Heritage Network (EGHN) announced that the Barmer facilities would be named a partner garden and receive the EGHN plaque in the year of its 150th anniversary, 2014. This makes them one of currently 180 European gardens in the network of culturally and historically significant gardens. The plaque was presented by LVR representatives on February 14, 2014.

The Elisenturm is a good 21 meters high observation tower in Wuppertal in a park on the ridge of the Hardt, north of the Wupper.

The tower received its name in honor of Elisabeth Ludovika of Bavaria, called Elise, the wife of Frederick William IV of Prussia. In 1820, the textile manufacturer and city councilor Engelbert Eller founded a country estate on the Hardt with a villa, orangery and factory buildings. In 1838, he built the tower as an observatory on the foundation of an old windmill from 1812. From about 1850 it was open to the public as an observation tower. Eller's widow bequeathed the property to the German Red Cross, which transferred it to the city of Wuppertal in 1907. The park surrounding the tower became part of the botanical garden founded in 1890 in 1910. After World War II, the Elisenturm was again used as an observatory by the Volkshochschule, but became increasingly dilapidated.

After a thorough renovation in the 1960s, the tower is now accessible on guided tours. The domed hall inside serves as an exhibition space and wedding hall.