Neighbors

In the historic city of Magdeburg, Germany, there is a “Johnny Cash”-themed country music festival called Nashville Days – complete with corn dogs and cowboy hats. This is one of the fruits of the sister city relationship between Nashville and Magdeburg. Host Jakob Lewis, a Nashville citizen, goes to Magdeburg to see where the rubber meets the road for Sister Cities' idealistic vision to “promote peace one individual, one community at a time.” If you’ve been to Germany, Magdeburg probably isn’t the first city that comes to mind when you to think of cosmopolitan cities. Yet for the past 15 years, Magdeburg has developed a great relationship with its sister city Nashville through the Sister Cities International program. For The Big Pond, Jakob Lewis traces the origins of the sister cities back to the aftermath of World War II as a means to (re)connect former adversaries. Or, as Joel Dark, the Nashville chair of the Nashville-Magdeburg partnership puts it: “The concept is to build a local-to-local relationship