Helmstedt is a town that has lived through several lives. In the sixteenth century it was a university town: the Academia Julia, founded in 1576 by Duke Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, drew scholars from across Europe, and its handsome building, the Juleum, still stands in the old quarter. The university closed in 1810, but the streets kept their half-timbered charm, with lovely house fronts and a little market square that is a pleasure to sit in.
Then came the Cold War. Just a few kilometres east of town at Marienborn was the biggest border crossing between West and East Germany, where the motorway from Hanover to Berlin passed through checkpoints, watchtowers and long queues of trucks. Helmstedt itself was the last West German town on the transit route, a place where drivers filled their tanks and bought their last coffee before the long, tense journey across the other side. The border installations at Marienborn are now a memorial and museum.
Lignite shaped the area too. Open-pit mines ate into the countryside for decades, and the diggings gave up something astonishing: near Schöningen, archaeologists found wooden throwing spears about three hundred thousand years old, some of the oldest hunting weapons ever found, and a museum there tells the story. To the south, just outside town, stand the Lübbensteine, a pair of Stone Age megalithic tombs, huge slabs of rock lying quietly in the woods.
As a rider's stop, Helmstedt is easy. There are filling stations on the roads in, bakeries and cafés around the market, and plenty of parking. The roads in from the west cross the low ridge of the Elm, a wooded upland of beech, with a mix of straight and curving sections, and they carry little traffic outside commuter hours. Park by the old university, and have a slow walk around the old streets. You will see how small a town can hold a great deal of history.