The name is Slavic before it is anything else. In the middle of these lakes stood a settlement of the Obotrites, and the area was called Zuarin; Schwerin is a German mouth working on a Slavic word. In 1160 Henry the Lion defeated the Obotrites and took the place, and the town that grew afterwards became a serious regional centre with a bishop attached. In 1358 Schwerin became part of the Duchy of Mecklenburg and its seat, and around 1500 the dukes began building themselves a palace on the island. Its status has wobbled ever since. After the partition of Mecklenburg in 1621 the city was capital of the Duchy of Mecklenburg-Schwerin; from 1765 to 1837 the court decamped to the small town of Ludwigslust and the capital went with it; then it came back. The grand duke abdicated in the revolution of 1918 and Schwerin became capital of the Free State of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. When the GDR dissolved the states in 1952, it settled for being capital of a district.

Water is the organizing fact here. The city sits on the southwestern shore of the Schweriner See, which covers 61.54 square kilometres, runs about 21 kilometres end to end and drops to 52.4 metres at its deepest — the second-largest lake of the Mecklenburg Lake Plateau. Eleven more lakes lie inside the municipal boundary. What that means on the ground is that Schwerin has almost no long straight streets; roads bend around water, neighbourhoods end at a shoreline, and the walk between two addresses is often twice the distance a map suggests. The Wallensteingraben, a sixteenth-century canal, connects the lake north to the Baltic at Wismar, which is how a landlocked residence town kept a hand in maritime trade. On a still morning the palace doubles itself in the water, which is a cliche about lakeside castles everywhere and happens to be literally true about ten months a year.

The cathedral's foundation stone went down in 1172 and the building was consecrated in 1248, a construction period of seventy-six years, making it one of the earliest large works of Brick Gothic in northern Europe. It got its pilgrims by accident of loot: in 1222 Count Henry of Schwerin came back from the Fifth Crusade carrying a reliquary said to hold a drop of Christ's blood, and the traffic followed. The church went Lutheran in 1524 and remains the seat of the bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church of Mecklenburg. The spire that dominates every photograph is far younger than the church beneath it — 117.5 metres, built between 1889 and 1893, still the tallest church spire in the state. Around the Alter Garten square stand the eighteenth-century Altes Palais, the neoclassical Staatliches Museum of 1877–1882 and the Staatstheater of 1886. The Schelfkirche, first built in 1238, had to be rebuilt in 1713 after a storm took it down.

Schwerin came through the Second World War largely intact — around three per cent of the city destroyed by air attack, which is why the old town is still legible. The exception was 7 April 1945. The target was the freight station. The bombers missed it, and roughly 1,500 bombs came down on the city instead, killing 224 people and destroying 42 houses. Those were households, not statistics: a residential district hit by ordnance meant for a rail yard three weeks before the war in this corner of Germany ended. What followed was one of the odder handovers of 1945. American troops took Schwerin on 2 May. They passed it to the British on 1 June. On 1 July the British passed it to the Soviets. Three occupying armies in ten weeks, and then forty-four years on the eastern side of the line.

The Staatliches Museum holds the kind of collection a small court accumulates when it has money and time: seventeenth-century Dutch painting, German medieval and Renaissance work, Greek vases, sculpture by Houdon, an unusually deep holding of Jean-Baptiste Oudry, and modern work reaching to Liebermann, Stuck and Duchamp. Its graphic cabinet runs from Duerer, Cranach and Rembrandt to a substantial collection of colour prints from the GDR — two very different Germanies filed in the same drawers. The city's exports include Walther Flemming, born here in 1843, who watched cells divide under a microscope and founded cytogenetics, and August Kundt, born in 1839, whose tube for measuring the speed of sound in gases still turns up in physics classrooms. Schwerin has never been large. It has simply been the place where Mecklenburg kept its records, its art and its arguments, and it is still doing that.