Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Founding
Founding of Tübingen
town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany
- 1078
- Europe
Founding
town in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany
Fetching the article from Wikipedia…
Tübingen (; German: [ˈtyːbɪŋən] ⓘ; Swabian: Dibenga) is a traditional university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany, 30 km (19 mi) south of the state capital, Stuttgart. With students accounting for almost one in three of Tübingen's 90,000 residents, the city has one of the youngest profiles in Germany, with an average age of just under 40.
Founded in 1477, Eberhard Karl University is one of the oldest universities north of the Alps. The university associated Tübingen in the 19th century with the German-patriotic student Burschenschaften, whose large fraternity houses are still a notable feature of the town; in the years between the World Wars, with the rise of National Socialism; and in the German Federal Republic with the emergence of the liberal-left Greens, currently the largest tendency in local government.
Exceptionally, Tübingen survived the Second World War with its historic fabric almost wholly intact. It has since experienced two major expansions: in the 1960s, the construction of university institutes and new housing on the high ground to the north, and, following the end of the Cold War and the evacuation of extensive military bases by the French, the new mixed-use Loretto and French Quarter to the south.
Tübingen developed around the base of the fortress Schloss Hohentübingen and of the St. George's Collegiate Church, and on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer rivers.
Immediately north of the city lies the Schönbuch, a densely wooded nature park. The Swabian Alb mountains rise about 13 km (8 mi) (beeline Tübingen City to Roßberg - 869 m) to the southeast of Tübingen. The Ammer and Steinlach rivers are tributaries of the Neckar river, which flows in an easterly direction through the city, just south of the mediaeval old town. Large parts of the city are hilly, with the Schlossberg and the Österberg in the city centre and the Schnarrenberg and Herrliberg, among others, rising immediately adjacent to the inner city.
The highest point is at about 500 m (1,600 ft) above sea level near Bebenhausen in the Schönbuch forest, while the lowest point is 305 m (1,001 ft) in the city's eastern Neckar valley. The geographical centre of the state of Baden-Württemberg is in a small forest called Elysium, near the Botanical Gardens of the city's university.
The area was probably first settled in the 12th millennium BC. The Romans left some traces here in AD 85, when, in confrontation with the local Alamanni, they built a limes frontier wall at the Neckar River. The local castle, Hohentübingen, has records going back to 1078, when it was besieged by Henry IV, King of Germany.
In the middle of the 12th century, the local the Counts of Zollern were raised to Imperial Counts Palatine, with their seat in Tübingen. By 1231, Tübingen was a civitas, indicating recognition by the Crown of civil liberties, a market and a court system. In the later decades of the 13th century, the town saw the establishment an Augustinian, and a Franciscan, monastery, and a Latin school (today's Uhland-Gymnasium). In 1342, the town and castle passed to the Counts of Württemberg.
Coinciding with his expulsion of the town's Jewish community, in 1477 Count (later Duke) Eberhard V (Eberhard im Bart) founded the university. The university, for which St George's, built between 1430 and 1470, became the collegiate church (Stiftskirche), developed as one of the most influential places of learning in the Holy Roman Empire, particularly in theology. Today, the Eberhard Karl University is the largest source of income for the residents of the city and one of the biggest universities in Germany with more than 26,000 students.
Faced with a popular rebellion, in the Treaty of Tübingen 1514, Eberhard's successor, Duke Ulrich, was obliged to submit to co-governance with the assembled Estates (knights, clergy and burghers) and to concede freedom of movement, profession, and enterprise, achievements that were still being fought for in other German states in 1848. In recognition of the treaty, the town assumed the right to bear the Ducal stag antlers above its blazon on its coat of arms.
In 1535, after recovering his bankrupted duchy from a prolonged imperial-Hapsburg occupation, Duke Ulrich declared for the reformed Lutheran faith and seized church property (the Augustinian monastery was converted to a Protestant seminary, the Tübinger Stift). The religious division in Germany contributed to the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) during which the town was successively occupied by the Catholic League, by the Swedes in 1638, and by the French, and was devastated by plague.
In 1789, parts of the old town are burned down, but were later rebuilt in the original style. In 1798 the Allgemeine Zeitung, a leading newspaper in early 19th-century Germany, was founded in Tübingen by Johann Friedrich Cotta. At his residence, the Cottahaus, a sign commemorates Goethe's stay of a few weeks while visiting his publisher: "Hier kotzte Goethe" (lit.: "Goethe puked here").
From the beginning of the 19th century, the town grew significantly beyond its medieval borders for the first time with the rectangular Wilhelmsvorstadt at the Neue Aula and the old Botanical Garden.
In the so-called Gôgenaufstand (Gôgen Uprising) of 1831, journeymen and winegrowers marched through the town in protest against police brutality, singing a hymn to freedom from Friedrich Schiller's drama Die Räuber (The Robbers). The local authorities appealed for help to the officially banned Burschenschaften, and armed student security guards were deployed against the insurgents. They relied on students once more during the Tübinger Brotkrawall (Tübingen Bread Riot) of 1847.
In 1861, with the opening on the right bank of the Neckar of today's main train station, Tübingen was connected to the Royal Württemberg State Railways network.
In 1873, the 10th Württemberg Infantry Regiment was quartered in barracks erected behind the station, the later Thiepval Kaserne so named for the village where the regiment suffered heavy losses during the First World War Battle of the Somme in 1916. A second barracks, later named the Loretto Kaserne, was built in 1913, and a third, the Hindenburg Kaserne was constructed in the course of National Socialist rearmament in the 1930s.
Tübingen had been a regional stronghold of National Socialism before Hitler's ascent to power in January 1933. The university became a leading centre for research on the "Jewish question", with faculty in both the sciences and humanities contributing to the notions of "racial hygiene" that informed the genocidal policies of the new regime. On Kristallnacht, 9 November 1938, the Nazi Stormtroopers burned down the Tübingen Synagogue. Of the 23 members of synagogue who remained in Tübingen at the outbreak of war, only two survived the Shoah.
In 1934, in a rare instance of resistance to the new order, Corps Suevia, one of the university's typically nationalist and conservative student Burschenschaften, refused an order to exclude Jewish students and was dissolved.
There were three bombing raids on the town during Second World War, but damage was comparatively slight: the Neckar Bridge and some 85 houses. In April 1945, the town was surrendered to the French who were to remain as occupiers until the creation of the German Federal Republic in 1949, and as an allied garrison until the end of the Cold War in 1991.
Consistent with the role of the Marshall Plan in post-war reconstruction, the United States also had a presence in the town. Originally the Amerika Haus, the German-American Institute ("d.a.i."), at the Neckar Bridge continues to promote English-language classes and "cultural exchange".
In 1946, under the French, Tübingen served as the capital of the consolidated state of Württemberg-Hohenzollern, but in 1952, in a further amalgamation, it was absorbed in the federal state of Baden-Württemberg with its capital in Stuttgart.
In the second half of the 20th century, Tübingen's administrative area was extended beyond what is now called the "core city" to include several outlying small towns and villages. Most notable among these is Bebenhausen, a village clustered around a castle and Bebenhausen Abbey, a Cistercian cloister about 2 miles (3.2 km) north of Tübingen. The enlargement accommodated a 1958 general development plan for hills overlooking the town from the north, which included, a new botanical gardens, natural sciences institute and contemporary art museum (Kunsthalle Tubingen).
Following the departure of the French in 1992, the vacated Thiepval Barracks served as a hostel for asylum seekers and German immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the Loretto and Hindenburg barracks were redeveloped as the new mixed-use French Quarter (Französische Viertel). Success in developing the new district has been followed up, more recently, by a car-free, courtyard-cluster project in the Derendingen district, and an extensive renovation of the Waldhäuser Ost district featuring timber-hybrid construction methods.
In the 1960s, Tübingen was one of the centres of the German student movement and of the protests of 1968, which made an issue of perceived continuities between the Federal Republic and the Hitler regime. In a town in which neither of the major federal parties, the SPD and the CDU, could command majorities, in 1980 the generation of '68 helped promote a new electoral force. Since 2004, the Greens have been the largest party in the local council (Gemeinderat). In the 2024 local elections (in which there was no mandate for the AfD or other far-right groupings), they commanded over a third of the vote.
In 2020, the city had 90,000 inhabitants. Life in the city is dominated by its roughly 28,000 students rendering it the city with the youngest average population in Germany. In 1995, the German weekly magazine Focus published a national survey, according to which Tübingen had the highest quality of life of all cities in Germany. Factors taken into consideration included the infrastructure, the integration of bicycle lanes into the road system, a bus system connecting surrounding hills and valleys, late-night services, areas of the city that can be reached on foot, the pedestrianised old town, and other amenities and cultural events offered by the university.
Unlike its industrial neighbour, Reutlingen, in World War II Tübingen was not a persistent target for Allied bombers. Visitors come to wander through one of the few completely intact historic Altstädte in Germany. The highlights of Tübingen include its crooked cobblestone lanes, narrow-stair alleyways picking their way through the hilly terrain, streets lined with canals, and well-maintained traditional half-timbered houses.
Old town landmarks include the Rathaus (Council Chambers or Town Hall) on the central market, Castle Hohentübingen, now part of the University, and the St. George's Collegiate Church from whose oldest feature, the clock tower begun in 1411, visitors have a panoramic views. Below the Rathaus is a quiet, residential street called the Judengasse, which was at the heart of the Jewish community in Tübingen until its expulsion in 1477.
The centre of Tübingen is the site of weekly and seasonal events, including regular market days on the Holzmarkt by the St. George's Collegiate Church and the Marktplatz by the Rathaus, an outdoor cinema in winter and summer, festive autumn and Christmas markets and what was for a time Europe's largest Afro-Brazilian festival. Additionally, Tübingen hosts a yearly Chocolate festival in December.
As it reaches the town's historic centre, the Neckar divides briefly into two streams, forming the elongated Neckarinsel (Neckar Island), famous for its Platanenallee, an avenue of plane trees accessed at its eastern end by a staircase down from the Neckarbrücke, the bridge leading into the old town.
During the summer, the Neckarinsel is occasionally the venue for concerts, plays, and literary readings. The island provides a view of the town's Neckarfront, a collection of historical buildings that includes the Hölderlinturm, the tower house in which poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin spent the last 36 years of his life, as he struggled with mental instability.
Controversially, the island retains a relic of the National-Socialist era, a memorial to the nineteenth-century composer and Volkslied collector, Friedrich Silcher. The authorities especially appreciated Silcher's Soldatenlieder, or soldier's songs, which were included in the songbook German soldiers carried in their backpacks during the war. War itself is a theme of the memorial: from behind the seated composer three soldiers advance toward the east, one already falling in battle, and a third locked in a farewell embrace with a woman beside whom marches a child with a rifle over his shoulder. In 2020 the monument was rededicated as a “memorial against the capture of the arts by racist and nationalist forces". A plaque provides historical context.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Tübingen”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.