Place:Braunschweig, Braunschweig, Germany

Note: In keeping with the 1900-rule at WeRelate, places in Germany are organized as they were in 1900 when Germany was known as the German Empire.

In 1900, Brunswick was a city in the state (land) of Brunswick in the German Empire.

Today (2017), Brunswick is a city in the state of Lower Saxony in Germany.

Modern Brunswick from Wikipedia

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Braunschweig or Brunswick (from Low German Brunswiek , Braunschweig dialect: Bronswiek) is a city in Lower Saxony, Germany, north of the Harz Mountains at the farthest navigable point of the river Oker, which connects it to the North Sea via the rivers Aller and Weser. In 2016, it had a population of 250,704.

A powerful and influential centre of commerce in medieval Germany, Brunswick was a member of the Hanseatic League from the 13th until the 17th century. It was the capital city of three successive states: the Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel (1269–1432, 1754–1807, and 1813–1814), the Duchy of Brunswick (1814–1918), and the Free State of Brunswick (1918–1946).

Today, Brunswick is the second-largest city in Lower Saxony and a major centre of scientific research and development.

History

the text in this section is copied from an article in Wikipedia

Foundation and early history

The date and circumstances of the town's foundation are unknown. Tradition maintains that Brunswick was created through the merger of two settlements, one founded by Brun(o), a Saxon count who died in 880, on one side of the River Oker – the legend gives the year 861 for the foundation – and the other the settlement of a legendary Count Dankward, after whom Dankwarderode Castle ("Dankward's clearing"), which was reconstructed in the 19th century, is named.

The town's original name of Brunswik is a combination of the name Bruno and Low German wik (related to the Latin vicus), a place where merchants rested and stored their goods. The town's name, therefore, indicates an ideal resting place, as it lay by a ford across the Oker River. Another explanation of the city's name is that it comes from Brand, or burning, indicating a place which developed after the landscape was cleared through burning. The city was first mentioned in documents from the St. Magni Church from 1031, which give the city's name as Brunesguik.^[1]

Middle Ages and early modern period

Up to the 12th century, Brunswick was ruled by the Saxon noble family of the Brunonids, then, through marriage, it fell to the House of Welf. In 1142, Henry the Lion of the House of Welf became duke of Saxony and made Braunschweig the capital of his state (which, from 1156 on, also included the Duchy of Bavaria). He turned Dankwarderode Castle, the residence of the counts of Brunswick, into his own Pfalz and developed the city further to represent his authority. Under Henry's rule, the Cathedral of St. Blasius was built and he also had the statue of a lion, his heraldic animal, erected in front of the castle. The lion subsequently became the city's landmark.

Henry the Lion became so powerful that he dared to refuse military aid to the Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa, which led to his banishment in 1182. Henry went into exile in England. He had previously established ties to the English crown in 1168, through his marriage to King Henry II of England's daughter Matilda, sister of Richard the Lionheart. However, his son Otto, who could regain influence and was eventually crowned Holy Roman Emperor, continued to foster the city's development.

During the Middle Ages, Brunswick was an important center of trade, one of the economic and political centers in Northern Europe and a member of the Hanseatic League from the 13th century to the middle of the 17th century. By the year 1600, Brunswick was the seventh largest city in Germany. Although formally one of the residences of the rulers of the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg, a constituent state of the Holy Roman Empire, Brunswick was de facto ruled independently by a powerful class of patricians and the guilds throughout much of the Late Middle Ages and the Early modern period. Because of the growing power of Brunswick's burghers, the Princes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who ruled over one of the subdivisions of Brunswick-Lüneburg, finally moved their Residenz out of the city and to the nearby town of Wolfenbüttel in 1432. The Princes of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel didn't regain control over the city until the late 17th century, when Rudolph Augustus, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, took the city by siege.

In the 18th century Brunswick was not only a political, but also a cultural centre. Influenced by the philosophy of the Enlightenment, dukes like Anthony Ulrich and Charles I became patrons of the arts and sciences. In 1745, Charles I founded the Collegium Carolinum, predecessor of the Brunswick University of Technology, and in 1753 he moved the ducal residence back to Brunswick. With this he attracted poets and thinkers such as Lessing, Leisewitz, and Jakob Mauvillon to his court and the city. Emilia Galotti by Lessing and Goethe's Faust were performed for the first time in Brunswick.

19th century

In 1806, the city was captured by the French during the Napoleonic Wars and became part of the short-lived Napoleonic Kingdom of Westphalia in 1807. The exiled Duke Frederick William raised a volunteer corps, the Black Brunswickers, who fought the French in several battles.

After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Brunswick was made capital of the re-established independent Duchy of Brunswick, later a constituent state of the German Empire from 1871. In the aftermath of the July Revolution in 1830, in Brunswick duke Charles II was forced to abdicate. His absolutist governing style had previously alienated the nobility and bourgeoisie, while the lower classes were disaffected by the bad economic situation. During the night of 7–8 September 1830, the ducal palace in Brunswick was stormed by an angry mob, set on fire, and destroyed completely. Charles was succeeded by his brother William VIII. During William's reign, liberal reforms were made and Brunswick's parliament was strengthened.

During the 19th century, industrialisation caused a rapid growth of population in the city, eventually causing Brunswick to be for the first time significantly enlarged beyond its medieval fortifications and the River Oker. On 1 December 1838, the first section of the Brunswick–Bad Harzburg railway line connecting Brunswick and Wolfenbüttel opened as the first railway line in Northern Germany, operated by the Duchy of Brunswick State Railway.

Early to mid-20th century

On 8 November 1918, at the end of World War I, a socialist workers' council forced Duke Ernest Augustus to abdicate. On 10 November, the council proclaimed the Socialist Republic of Brunswick under one-party government by the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD); however, the subsequent Landtag election on 22 December 1918 was won by the Social Democratic Party of Germany (MSPD), and the USPD and MSPD formed a coalition government. An uprising in Braunschweig in 1919, led by the communist Spartacus League, was defeated when Freikorps troops under Georg Ludwig Rudolf Maercker took over the city on order of the German Minister of Defence, Gustav Noske. An SPD-led government was subsequently established; in December 1921, a new constitution was approved for the Free State of Brunswick, now a parliamentary republic within the Weimar Republic, again with Braunschweig as its capital.

After the Landtag election of 1930, Brunswick became the second state in Germany where the Nazis participated in government, when the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) formed a coalition government with several conservative and right-wing parties. With the support of Dietrich Klagges, Brunswick's minister of the interior, the NSDAP organized a large SA rally in Braunschweig. On 17–18 October 1931, 100,000 SA stormtroopers marched through the city; street fights between Nazis, socialists, and communists left several dead or injured. On 25 February 1932, the state of Brunswick granted Adolf Hitler German citizenship to allow him to run in the 1932 German presidential election. In Braunschweig, Nazis carried out several attacks on political enemies, with the acquiescence of the state government.

After the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, several state institutions were placed in Braunschweig, including the Luftfahrtforschungsanstalt in Völkenrode, the Hitler Youth Academy for Youth Leadership, and the SS-Junkerschule Braunschweig. With the Reichswerke Hermann Göring in Salzgitter and the Stadt des KdF-Wagens, as well as several factories in the city itself (including Büssing and the Volkswagenwerk Braunschweig), the Braunschweig region became one of the centres of the German arms industry.

During the Second World War, Braunschweig was an Untergebiet Hauptquartier ("Sub-Area Headquarters") of Wehrkreis XI ("Military District XI"), and was the garrison city of the 31st Infantry Division that took part in the invasions of Poland, Belgium, and France, largely being destroyed during its retreat following the invasion of Russia. In this period, thousands of Eastern workers were brought to the city as forced labor, and in the 1943–1945 period at least 360 children taken away from such workers died in the Entbindungsheim für Ostarbeiterinnen ("Maternity Ward for Eastern Workers").

In 1944, a subcamp of the concentration camp Neuengamme was established in Braunschweig. Hundreds of prisoners, mostly Jews, lived in brutal conditions and hundreds died from hunger, disease, and overwork. Piera Sonnino (1922-1999), an Italian author, writes of her imprisonment in that camp in her book, This Has Happened, published in English in 2006 by MacMillan Palgrave.

The Allied air raid on October 15, 1944, destroyed most of the city's churches, and the Altstadt (old town), the largest homogeneous ensemble of half-timbered houses in Germany.

The city's cathedral, which had been converted to a Nationale Weihestätte (national shrine) by the Nazi government, still stood.

Postwar period to the 21st century

Small sections of the city survived Allied bombing, so remain to represent its distinctive architecture. The cathedral was restored to its function as a Protestant church.

Politically, after the war, the Free State of Brunswick was dissolved by the Allied occupying authorities, Braunschweig ceased to be a capital, and most of its lands were incorporated in the newly formed state of Lower Saxony.

During the Cold War, Braunschweig, then part of West Germany, suffered economically due to its proximity to the Iron Curtain. The city lost its historically strong economic ties to what was then East Germany; for decades, economic growth remained, on average, below the rest of the country while unemployment was above-average for West Germany.

On 28 February 1974, as part of a district reform in Lower Saxony, the rural district of Braunschweig, which had surrounded the city, was disestablished. The major part of the former district was incorporated into the city of Braunschweig, increasing its population by roughly 52,000 people.

In the 1990s, efforts increased to reconstruct historic buildings that had been destroyed in the air raid. The façade of the Braunschweiger Schloss was rebuilt, and buildings such as the Alte Waage (originally built in 1534) now stand again.

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