Braunschweig – Esperanto in Lower Saxony: Almost 200 guests are expected in Braunschweig in the coming days for the 100th German congress of the language community. The participants are coming from 15 countries including Israel, Indonesia and the USA, as the spokesman for the German Esperanto Association (DEB) Louis von Wunsch-Rolshoven announced on Friday. Several concerts, cabaret and guided tours, for example with kayaks, are planned for the meeting until June 2nd.
According to the organizers, the second largest city in Lower Saxony was chosen as the venue because the first German Esperanto Congress took place in Braunschweig in 1906. Esperanto is an artificially created language that was published in the late 19th century. The inventor Ludwik Zamenhof, an ophthalmologist from Poland, wanted to contribute to international understanding and published in 1887 under the pseudonym “Dr. Esperanto” in Warsaw the first textbook.
The DEB estimates that millions of people worldwide speak the language. There is an Esperanto center in Lower Saxony, for example, in Herzberg im Harz. In 2017, on the 100th anniversary of Zamenhof’s death (April 14), a previously nameless square was named after the inventor of Esperanto. Since 2006, the small town has called itself “la Esperanto-urbo”, the Esperanto city. Signs at the train station and menus in restaurants are sometimes bilingual. Even before the renaming, a marble bust on the central square commemorated Zamenhof.