8 Best Sights in Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia, Germany

This unique (even in a country with a national tendency for excessive cleanliness) and unfortunately named museum relates the history of public health and science. The permanent exhibit offers lots of hands-on activities. The building itself once housed the Nazi eugenics program, and the special exhibit on this period is not recommended for children under 12.

Historical musical instruments, mostly from the Renaissance, include the world's oldest clavichord, constructed in 1543 in Italy. There are also spinets, flutes, and lutes. Recordings of the instruments can be heard at the exhibits.

This museum makes a valiant attempt to evaluate the history of the GDR. It provides fascinating insight into the day-to-day culture of East Germans through the re-creation of a typical East German apartment, and a display of more than 20,000 objects, including detergent packaging and kitchen appliances. A special section deals with Germans and Russians in the Wittenberg region.

This building once served as the headquarters of the city's detachment of the Communist secret police, the dreaded Ministerium für Staatssicherheit. The exhibition Stasi—Macht und Banalität (Stasi—Power and Banality) presents not only the Stasi's offices and surveillance work, but also hundreds of documents revealing the magnitude of its interests in citizens' private lives. Though the material is in German, the items and atmosphere convey an impression of what life under the regime might have been like. The exhibit about the death penalty in the GDR is particularly chilling. For a detailed tour of the Revolutions of 1989, be sure to download the museum's app.

Saxons drink coffee like it is a religion, and this museum and café-restaurant tells the fascinating history of coffee culture in Saxony and Europe. It is one of the oldest on the continent, and once proudly served coffee to such luminaries as Gotthold Lessing, Schumann, Goethe, and Liszt. The museum features many paintings, Arabian coffee vessels, and coffeehouse games. It also explains the basic principles of roasting coffee. The café is divided into traditional Viennese, French, and Arabian coffeehouses, but no coffee is served in the Arabian section, which is only a display. The cake is better and the seating more comfortable in the Viennese part. There is an ongoing discussion in Leipzig that this building, with its Turkish imagery, needs to be put into its post-colonial context.

Inside the Altes Rathaus, this museum documents Leipzig's past. The entrance is behind the Rathaus. The museum's extended collection continues behind the Museum for Applied Arts.

The city's small but fascinating municipal museum tells the ups and downs of Dresden's turbulent past—from the dark Middle Ages to the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. There are many peculiar exhibits on display, such as an American 250-kilogram bomb and a stove made from an Allied bomb casing. The building has the most interesting fire escape in the city.

This excellent history museum focuses on issues surrounding the division and unification of Germany after World War II.