This German city doesn’t exist, according to a decades-long conspiracy theory
Bielefeld sits in the shadow of a 30-year-old satirical hoax that claims the city is completely fictional. But is it?
If the German city Bielefeld was real, you could climb the staircase of the 120ft-high Sparrenburg Castle tower, the tallest point in the region, to admire the surrounding landscape. Your thighs would burn from the hefty ascent, but you’d be rewarded on the rooftop with cool wind on your skin, and views of 13th-century church spires and red rooftops mingling with the green trees below.
But a community of conspiracists will claim it’s impossible to make this trip. Bielefeld, they insist, doesn’t really exist.
Achim Held, a software engineer from Kiel, north Germany, tells me he didn’t mean to start this popular conspiracy theory 30 years ago. Rather it was just a joke that grew out of control.
He’d been chatting with friends at a dormitory party in Kiel University in the mid 1990s when they met a new student who said he was from Bielefeld. They had all heard of the region, which was 185 miles south of Kiel, between Berlin and Cologne, but they’d never been, so one of Achim’s friends quipped that it wasn’t real.
It became a running gag in the group. When they drove towards Essen on the autobahn in 1993, they noticed a large construction site around Bielefeld and that the surrounding exit signs leading into the city were covered with tape due to the works taking place. They joked this was further proof Bielefeld was made up.
Achim was a member of an online forum called Usenet, a pre-Reddit Reddit. It featured a group where people shared conspiracy theories they whole-heartedly believed in, like those convinced the 1969 Moon landings were fake. In May 1994, Achim uploaded an ironic post about Bielefeld.
"I thought it would be a great idea to take this joke conspiracy theory and make a satire out of it," he tells me. "To make fun of the real conspiracy theories."
He declared Bielefeld was a total charade, that each detail of the city was fake, right down to their football team and regional licence plates. He suggested they were planted by a shadowy governmental force. Members of the forum quickly caught onto the stunt and played along.
Anyone who believed in Bielefeld had to contend with three questions posed by Achim. Do you know anybody from Bielefeld? Do you know anybody who’s ever been to Bielefeld? Have you ever been to Bielefeld yourself?
"I thought it would be a joke for perhaps one or two weeks in a small circle of friends," Achim says. He doesn’t know how the satirical theory spread so far throughout Germany, or why it stuck around for so long. It even became a popular internet meme. The former Chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel, made reference to it in 2012 as well, when she jokingly questioned Bielefeld's existence after recalling a visit to the city.
What Achim hadn’t predicted was that it would last for decades and completely re-shape the reputation of Bielefeld.
A tired punchline
This year marks the 30th anniversary of the conspiracy theory. I successfully ticked off Achim’s list by visiting the city and standing atop the Sparrenburg Castle tower beside Ditta Sokolowsky, a local resident, and a member of Bielefeld’s marketing department.
Ditta regularly hosts tours of the 13th-century landmark, which was once home to a sovereign prince, has featured in countless historic battles and is now one of the most popular tourist attractions in the city.
She says visitors constantly joke about Bielefeld being fake or feign surprise that the place exists. It’s something locals are used to at this point, but it’s a tired punchline. Ditta says it’s hard to smile after the fifth time the joke is cracked in one day.
In 2019, 25 years after Achim’s post, Bielefeld’s marketing team leaned into the persisting conspiracy and offered €1m (£914,000 at the time) to anyone who could prove they didn't exist. They received over 2,000 submissions, however officials examined and then dismissed each case, before announcing Bielefeld was indisputably real. The city then unveiled a large boulder that aimed to commemorate the end of the conspiracy.
The campaign didn’t stop the faux theorists, but Jens Siekmann, head of city advertising and communications for Bielefeld, says they didn’t expect it to. They simply saw a chance to put a real picture of Bielefeld in people’s minds in a bid to attract more visitors, and it worked. In 2023, the city received over 600,000 overnight visitors.
So, is it real?
Jens takes me on a lap of the castle grounds, which provide a panoramic view of Bielefeld, and points to the various features visitors can enjoy.
A walking tour of Bielefel’s Old Town includes 20 notable sights that can be visited within two hours on foot. These include the Bielefeld Theatre, which hosts around 600 performances each year, the Old Market Square, with its historical facades and outdoor cafe, and the Neustädter Marienkirche, a church whose spires stand out against the sky and which houses art dating back to the 1400s.
The city is incredibly green, which Ditta says keeps it cool in the summer. There’s an abundance of parks like the Bürgerpark and Ravensberger Park, and Bielefeld borders directly onto the Teutoburg Forest. Jens says there are “countless excursion options” there, with “fairytale-like little Old Towns” along the way, and the Externsteine, a natural monument made from sandstone.
There are no skyscrapers on the horizon, which Ditta says is part of Bielefeld’s charm. It has all the amenities and travel links of a large city, with the feel of a small town.
Jens says there are no plans to commemorate the 30th year of the conspiracy, but they’re not opposed to it. Bielefeld is stacked with centuries of history, and the satirical hoax is just another modern twist that can help attract potential visitors.
It’s a unique selling point, but there’s more to the city than claims it doesn’t exist. Of course, there will be many who continue to insist that this is simply what those mysterious forces would like you to think.
