It feels like half of all SC away games now take place in their new home: Freiburg’s Dominik Wengschick has moved to near Cologne. Why did he leave the Breisgau?
Almost 20,000 residents move away from Freiburg every year and are replaced by a new 20,000 and a few more. Behind these bare numbers are people who spent their student years here or who met the love of their life here. What remains for them: stories and feelings. Because every city shapes its inhabitants. We asked people who had left Freiburg what they still had in store for them – in our series “Bye Freiburg”.
“I was born in Freiburg, a real Bobbele, lived there for 25 years: I know the city inside out. And that was the problem at some point. Freiburg got a bit too boring for me, especially in terms of nightlife. In Freiburg there is everything, but only one of everything: a club for Schlager, a club for rock, a club for hip-hop. That’s it. As a passionate pub-goer, I just got bored at some point. That’s why my girlfriend and I decided to to move closer to Cologne because there are more opportunities to go out there.
Departures in numbers
There is a constant coming and going in Freiburg. Almost a tenth of the 230,000 inhabitants are exchanged every year: 20,000 move away, 20,000 and a few more come here. To be more precise: Last year 21,135 moved to Freiburg, 20,934 of them, as the city of Freiburg determined. In recent years, the increase has been almost 4,500 a year, mostly somewhere around 1,000. Twice, in 2018 and 2020, more people had moved away than moved here. 2020 can certainly be explained by the pandemic: “Only” 18,166 people registered in Freiburg, 19,164 re-registered.
In addition, my girlfriend is studying media and communication management and is currently completing her mandatory internship – she also has significantly better career opportunities in the media city of Cologne than in Freiburg. I was able to start as a clerk in waste management in Bonn. We’ve been in Cologne for almost four months now.
“Half of all SC away games are now played near me”
Compared to Freiburg, we now enjoy living more centrally in Germany. From Freiburg you always had to travel half the world to get to other cities in the Federal Republic. Here we have Holland around the corner, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt. And it feels like half of all SC away games now take place near me. Also beautiful.
Advantages of a young student city
Freiburg made me an open and tolerant person. I was sometimes able to go out on my own and either meet and join friends, or just get to know new people – the advantage of a young student city. People know each other and greet each other on the street. We can well imagine moving back to Freiburg in the future, to the countryside, to the homely. But only when we retire.”
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