With about , inhabitants, the Hanseatic city is the 11th-largest city of Germany and the second-largest city in Northern Germany after Hamburg. Bremen is the largest city on the River Weser , the longest river flowing entirely in Germany, lying some 60 km 37 mi upstream from its mouth into the North Sea at Bremerhaven , and is completely surrounded by the state of Lower Saxony.
Bremen is the centre of the Northwest Metropolitan Region , which also includes the cities of Oldenburg and Bremerhaven, and has a population of around 2. Bremen's port , together with the port of Bremerhaven at the mouth of the Weser, is the second-largest port in Germany after the Port of Hamburg. Bremen is a major cultural and economic hub of Northern Germany. Bremen is well-known through the Brothers Grimm's fairy tale " Town Musicians of Bremen " Die Bremer Stadtmusikanten , and there is a statue dedicated to it in front of the city hall.
Bremen has a reputation as a working-class city. For most of its 1, year history, Bremen was an independent city within the confederal jurisdiction of the Holy Roman Empire. Its governing merchants and guilds were at the centre of the Hanseatic League that sought to monopolise the North Sea and Baltic Sea trade.
To enlarge and confirm its independence, the city had, until the Reformation , to contend with the temporal power of the Church , and after the Thirty Years' War with Sweden , the masters of the surrounding Duchy of Bremen-Verden. In , Bremen was drawn by Prussia into the German Empire. In the twentieth century, Bremen, a broadly liberal and social-democratic city, lost its autonomy under the Hitler regime. Bremen lies on both sides of the River Weser , about 60 kilometres 37 miles upstream of its estuary on the North Sea and its transition to the Outer Weser by Bremerhaven.
Opposite Bremen's Altstadt is the point where the "Middle Weser" becomes the "Lower Weser" and, from the area of Bremen's port, the river has been made navigable to ocean-going vessels. The region on the left bank of the Lower Weser, through which the Ochtum flows, is the Weser Marshes, the landscape on its right bank is part of the Elbe-Weser Triangle.
