41st Pan-European Days in Weiden

Pan-European Union Germany and the Czech Pan-European Union jointly organised the 41st Pan-European Days in the Upper Palatinate town of Weiden from 5 June to 7 June 2015.

The congress participants also travelled to Ronsperg on the edge of the Bohemian Forest, where Pan-Europe was born, and to the neighbouring Egerland town of Haid.

Bavaria and Bohemia are not only linked by their country name, which is of Celtic origin, but also by a neighbourhood that goes back well over a thousand years. A special cultural link was the medieval Nordgau, whose successor regions, the Upper Palatinate and the Egerland, are hosting the Pan-European Days this time.

The conference took place in the town of Weiden in the Upper Palatinate, which was built by Bavarians, Sudeten Germans and Czechs. The participants travelled to Ronsperg on the edge of the Bohemian Forest, where the cradle of Pan-Europe stood, and to the neighbouring Egerland town of Haid, where the Catholic Social Doctrine was founded in the castle of the Löwenstein princes in the 19th century. They commemorated the Congress of Vienna 200 years ago at Metternich Castle in Königswart, visited Maria Kulm, a place of pilgrimage that unites peoples, and visited the former Flossenbürg concentration camp to remember the murderous Nazi terror that ended 70 years ago. The borderland, destroyed in many ways by the Iron Curtain and the expulsion of the Sudeten Germans, is growing together today and is once again becoming the thriving heart of Europe.