The Osnabrück Rathaus is one of the finest Gothic civic buildings in Germany, a long, gabled structure on the north side of the Marktplatz that looks exactly like what it is: a building that has been at the centre of public life for six centuries. It was built in the late fourteenth century and has been the seat of city government for most of the time since. What brings visitors here, though, is the Peace of Westphalia: in 1648, after five years of negotiations, the treaties ending the Thirty Years' War were signed simultaneously in this building and in the Rathaus of Münster, forty kilometres to the southwest.
The Hall of Peace — the Friedenssaal — is upstairs and open to visitors. It is a remarkable room: the original seventeenth-century wood panelling survives intact, and the walls are hung with portraits of the diplomats who attended the negotiations, looking out from their frames with the satisfied expressions of men who have just ended the worst war Europe had seen in a generation. The atmosphere is genuinely evocative in a way that many historic rooms are not, partly because the space has not been substantially altered since the delegations departed.