Every design for Emden

At Dat Otto Huus, visitors come to see where Otto Waalkes began, the comedian who, together with Karl Dall, another son of the town, shaped the East Frisian joke. It is a good place to start in Emden, the largest town in East Frisia, a seaport on the Ems close to the Dutch border, where daily life still turns on the harbour, the shipyard and the Volkswagen plant, and where students have been part of the scene since 1973.

What sets Emden apart is the role it played in the Reformation. In the 16th century Johannes a Lasco preached here, thousands of Protestant refugees arrived from Flanders and Brabant, and the Synod of Emden in 1571 is seen as the founding of the Dutch Reformed Church. The Kunsthalle Emden, the Pelzerhäuser and the lightship Feuerschiff Amrumbank give the town its other faces, from art and history to the sea.

And on the coat of arms, granted by Emperor Maximilian I in 1495, sits the Engelke up de Muer, the little angel on the wall, still keeping watch over the harbour town.