Place:Jena, Thüringen, Germany

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

Jena is a German city and the second largest city in Thuringia. Together with the nearby cities of Erfurt and Weimar, it forms the central metropolitan area of Thuringia with approximately 500,000 inhabitants, while the city itself has a population of about 110,000. Jena is a centre of education and research; the Friedrich Schiller University was founded in 1558 and had 18,000 students in 2017 and the Ernst-Abbe-Fachhochschule Jena counts another 5,000 students. Furthermore, there are many institutes of the leading German research societies.

Jena was first mentioned in 1182 and stayed a small town until the 19th century, when industry developed. For most of the 20th century, Jena was a world centre of the optical industry around companies like Carl Zeiss, Schott and Jenoptik (since 1990). As one of only a few medium-sized cities in Germany, it has some high-rise buildings in the city centre, like the JenTower. These also have their origin in the former Carl Zeiss factory. Between 1790 and 1850, Jena was a focal point of the German Vormärz as well as of the student liberal and unification movement and German Romanticism. Notable persons of this period in Jena were Friedrich Schiller, Alexander von Humboldt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Novalis and August Wilhelm Schlegel.

The city's economy is based on the high-technology industry and research. The optical and precision industry is the leading branch to date, while software engineering, other digital businesses and biotechnology are of growing importance. Furthermore, Jena is also a service hub for the surrounding regions.

Jena lies in a hilly landscape in the east of Thuringia, within the wide valley of the Saale river. Due to its rocky landscape, varied substrate and mixed forests, Jena is known in Germany for the wide variety of wild orchids which can be found within walking distance of the town. Local nature reserves are maintained by volunteers and NABU.

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

Middle Ages

Until the High Middle Ages, the Saale was the border between Germanic regions in the west and Slavic regions in the east. Owing to its function as a river crossing, Jena was conveniently located. Nevertheless, there were also some more important Saale crossings like the nearby cities of Naumburg to the north and Saalfeld to the south, so that the relevance of Jena was more local during the Middle Ages. The first unequivocal mention of Jena was in an 1182 document. The first local rulers of the region were the Lords of Lobdeburg with their eponymous castle near Lobeda, roughly south of the city centre on the eastern hillside of the Saale valley.

In the 13th century, the Lords of Lobdeburg founded two towns in the valley: Jena on the west bank and Lobeda – which is one of Jena's constituent communities today – to the south on the east bank. Around 1230, Jena received town rights and a regular city grid was established between today's Fürstengraben, Löbdergraben, Teichgraben and Leutragraben. The city got a marketplace, main church, town hall, council and city walls during the late 13th and early 14th centuries making it into a fully fledged town. In this time, the city's economy was based mainly on wine production on the warm and sunny hillsides of the Saale valley. The two monasteries of the Dominicans (1286) and the Cistercians (1301) rounded out Jena's medieval appearance.

As the political circumstances in Thuringia changed in the middle of the 14th century, the weakened Lords of Lobdeburg sold Jena to the aspiring Wettins in 1331. Jena obtained the Gotha municipal law and the citizens strengthened their rights and wealth during the 14th and 15th centuries. Moreover, the Wettins were more interested in their residence in the nearby city of Weimar, and so Jena could develop itself relatively autonomously.

Early modern period

The Protestant Reformation was brought to the city in 1523. Martin Luther visited the town to reorganize the clerical relations and Jena became an early centre of his doctrine. In the following years, the Dominican and the Carmelite convents were attacked by the townsmen and abolished in 1525 (Carmelite) and 1548 (Dominican).

An important step in Jena's history was the foundation of the university in 1558. Ernestine Elector John Frederick the Magnanimous founded it, because he had lost his old university in Wittenberg to the Albertines after the Schmalkaldic War. During the Little Ice Age, wine-growing declined in the 17th century, so that the new university became one of the most important sources of income for the city. The same century brought a boom in printing business caused by the rising importance of books (and the population's ability to read) in the Lutheran doctrine, and Jena was the second-largest printing location in Germany after Leipzig.

The list of the so-called "Seven Wonders of Jena" was composed by students of the university at this time, supposedly as a test of local knowledge in order to confirm that a person who claimed to have studied in Jena was actually familiar with the city.

Beginning in the 16th century, the Ernestine dynasty saw many territorial partitions. Initially, Jena remained a part of Saxe-Weimar, but in 1672 it became the capital of its own small duchy (Saxe-Jena). In 1692, after two dukes (Bernhard II and Johann Wilhelm), the dukes of Saxe-Jena died out and the duchy became part of Saxe-Eisenach and, in 1741, of the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, to which it belonged until 1809. From 1809 to 1918, Jena was part of the Duchy (from 1815 Grand Duchy) of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, which from 1871 was also part of the German Empire.

19th century

Around 1790, the university became the largest and most famous one among the German states and made Jena the centre of idealist philosophy (with professors like Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Schiller and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling) and of the early Romanticism (with poets like Novalis, the brothers August and Friedrich Schlegel, and Ludwig Tieck). In 1794, the poets Goethe and Schiller met at the university and established a long lasting friendship. Consequently, the reputation of the University and the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach as particularly liberal and open-minded was enhanced.

On 14 October 1806, Napoleon fought and defeated the Prussian army here in the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt, near the district of Vierzehnheiligen. Resistance against the French occupation was strong, especially among the students. Many of the students fought in the Lützow Free Corps in 1813. Two years later, the Urburschenschaft fraternity was founded in the city.

During the later 19th century, the famous biologist Ernst Haeckel was professor at the university. The expansion of science and medicine faculties was closely linked to the industrial boom that Jena saw after 1871. The initial spark of industrialization in Jena was the (relatively late) connection to the railway. The Saal Railway (Saalbahn, opened in 1874) was the connection from Halle and Leipzig along the Saale valley to Nuremberg and the Weimar–Gera railway (opened 1876) connected Jena with Frankfurt and Erfurt in the west as well as Dresden and Gera in the east. Famous pioneers of the Jenaer industry were Carl Zeiss and Ernst Abbe (with their Carl Zeiss AG) as well as Otto Schott (Schott AG). Since that time, production of optical items, precision machinery and laboratory glassware have been the main branches of Jena's economy; Jena glass is even named after the city. Zeiss, Abbe and Schott worked also as social reformers who wanted to improve the living conditions of their workers and the local wealth in general. When Zeiss died in 1889, his company passed to the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung, which uses great amounts of the company's profits for social benefits like research projects at universities etc. This model became an example for other German companies (e.g. the Robert Bosch Stiftung). In 1898 it was agreed on with several personalities from the Jenaer industrial sector that the city was in need of an electricity generator and in the first years of the 1900s an electrified tramway was founded in Jena.^[1]

20th century

Industrialization fundamentally changed the social structure of Jena. The former academic town became a working-class city; the population rose from 8,000 around 1870 up to 71,000 at the beginning of World War II. The city expanded along the Saale valley to the north and the south and its side valleys to the east and the west. In 1901, the tram system started its operation and the university got a new main building (established between 1906 and 1908 on the former castle's site). After the foundation of Thuringia in 1920, Jena was one of the three biggest cities (together with Weimar and Gera, while Erfurt remained part of Prussia) and became an independent city in 1922. The modern optical and glass industry kept booming and the city grew further during Weimar times.

During the Nazi period, conflicts deepened in Jena between the influential left-wing milieus (communists and social democrats) and the right-wing Nazi milieus. On the one hand, the university suffered from new restrictions against its independence, but on the other hand, it consolidated the Nazi ideology, for example with a professorship of social anthropology (which sought to scientifically legitimize the racial policy of Nazi Germany). Kristallnacht in 1938 led to more discrimination against Jews in Jena, many of whom either emigrated or were arrested and murdered by the German government. This weakened the academic milieu, because many academics were Jews (especially in medicine). During World War II, the Germans operated two subcamps of the Buchenwald concentration camp in the city, and a subcamp of the prison in Sieradz in German-occupied Poland.

In 1945, towards the end of World War II, Jena was heavily bombed by the American and British Allies. 709 people were killed, 2,000 injured and most of the medieval town centre was destroyed, but in parts restored after the end of the war. No other Thuringian city suffered worse damage, except Nordhausen, whose destruction was utter. Jena was occupied by American troops on 13 April 1945 and was left to the Red Army on 1 July 1945.

Jena fell within the Soviet zone of occupation in post-World War II Germany. In 1949, it became part of the new German Democratic Republic (GDR). The Soviets dismantled great parts of the Zeiss and Schott factories and took them to the Soviet Union. On the other hand, the GDR government founded a new pharmaceutical factory in 1950, Jenapharm, which is part of Bayer today. In 1953, Jena was a centre of the East German Uprising against GDR policy. The protests with 30,000 participants drew fire from Soviet tanks.

The following decades brought some radical shifts in city planning. During the 1960s, another part of the historic city centre was demolished to build the Jen Tower. The Eichplatz in front of the tower is still unbuilt and its future is still the subject of ongoing heated discussion. Big Plattenbau settlements were developed in the 1970s and 1980s, because the population was still rising and the housing shortage remained a perpetual problem. New districts established in the north (near Rautal) and in the south (around Winzerla and Lobeda). The opposition against the GDR government was reinforced during the late 1980s in Jena, fed by academic and clerical circles. In autumn 1989, the city saw the largest protests in its history before the GDR government was dissolved.

After 1990, Jena became part of the refounded state of Thuringia. Industry came into a heavy crisis during the 1990s, but finally it managed the transition to the market economy and today, it is one of the leading economic centres of eastern Germany. Furthermore, the university was enlarged and many new research institutes were founded.

Especially between 1995 and 1997 several far-right crimes were committed in Jena. The city's far-right scene of the 1990s gave rise to the National Socialist Underground (NSU) terror group. However, the city is no longer considered a far-right hotspot.

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