Augsburg

• 1. Introduction

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  Augsburg was founded in 15 BC by the Romans, making it one of Germany's oldest cities. That founding moment echoes through every layer of the city: in the name Augusta Vindelicorum, borrowed directly from Emperor Augustus; in the medieval canals that still run beneath its streets; in a tiny apartment complex built in 1513 that is still occupied today. What kind of place earns a UNESCO World Heritage designation for the way it manages water? What does it mean that the man who helped shape the Protestant Reformation personally criticised the bankers who lived here? And how did a city in southern Bavaria become, by the accounts of historians, the dominant centre of early capitalism in the sixteenth century? Those are the threads this documentary will follow.

• 2. A Roman Colony on Two Rivers

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  Emperor Augustus ordered the founding of the settlement in 15 BC at the convergence of the Alpine rivers Lech and Wertach. The name the Romans gave it, Augusta Vindelicorum, meant "the Augustan city of the Vindelici", a nod to the indigenous people of the region. By 120 AD, the settlement had grown significant enough to serve as the administrative capital of the Roman province of Raetia. That prominence invited violence. Augsburg was sacked by the Huns in the fifth century, by Charlemagne in the eighth, and by Welf I, Duke of Bavaria in the eleventh. Each assault left the city diminished but not erased. The physical geography that made it attractive to the Romans, that junction of two rivers on the northern foothills of a high terrace, also gave it a resilience rooted in water. The aquifer fed by the Lech and Wertach would, centuries later, become the foundation of one of the most sophisticated water management systems in medieval Europe.

• 3. The Fuggers and the Age of Capital

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  Jakob Fugger, born in 1459 and active into the early sixteenth century, was among the most consequential bankers in European history. The Fugger and Welser families together held what amounted to a near-total monopoly in banking and metal industries during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Contemporary law considered monopolies criminal, and Martin Luther himself attacked their practices by name. Yet when Emperor Charles V needed money, he sided with the bankers: he cancelled the charges against the Fugger and Welser families in the 1530s. Augsburg's position within the Kaiserliche Reichspost, the first modern postal system in the world, gave it an additional structural advantage. Emperor Maximilian I, who conducted much of his work in the city, ensured that Augsburg housed the most important post office in the Holy Roman Empire. As the historian Behringer has written, that combination of banking power and communications infrastructure made the city "the dominant centre of early capitalism" in the sixteenth century. The Fugger family also built the Fuggerei, a housing complex for needy citizens founded in 1513, which has been continuously inhabited since 1523. It remains the oldest social housing estate in the world.

• 4. Confession and Peace

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  On the 9th of March 1276, Augsburg was granted the status of a Free Imperial City, ending its formal subordination to the Prince-Bishop of Augsburg. That independence lasted until 1803, and it gave the city the authority to manage its own tax policies and pursue its own religious direction. Augsburg became Protestant, which brought it into recurring friction with Catholic ecclesiastical authorities. The tension came to a head at the Diet of Augsburg in 1530, when the Augsburg Confession, a foundational document of Lutheran theology, was presented directly to the Holy Roman Emperor. Twenty-five years later, the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 established a legal framework for religious coexistence in imperial cities. The practical result was a mixed Catholic-Protestant city council presiding over a majority Protestant population. Visitors to Augsburg can still see this duality made physical in the neighboring churches of St Ulrich and St Afra: one Roman Catholic, the other Lutheran, standing side by side as a direct consequence of the 1555 agreement.

• 5. War and Catastrophe

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  Religious peace held in Augsburg through mounting tensions until the Thirty Years' War erupted in 1618. In 1629, Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II issued the Edict of Restitution, resetting the legal situation to that of 1552. The edict was revoked in April 1632 when Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden occupied the city. After the Swedish army was defeated at the nearby Battle of Nördlingen in 1634, Catholic troops surrounded Augsburg by October of that year. The Swedish garrison refused to surrender. The siege ran through the winter of 1634-35, and disease compounded starvation. Typhus and the plague spread through the besieged city. The result was devastating: Augsburg's population collapsed from roughly 70,000 to roughly 16,000. Three centuries later, the city again became a military target. The MAN factory in Augsburg was the largest German manufacturer of engines for U-boats in World War II, and on the 17th of April 1942, the RAF sent twelve Avro Lancaster bombers at low level to destroy it in daylight. Enemy fighters intercepted the formation; only five aircraft returned, all of them damaged. Beyond the factory, the war inflicted broader destruction: just under 25% of all homes in the city were lost, and several hundred people were killed.

• 6. Water as World Heritage

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  Augsburg was built on top of an aquifer fed by the Lech and Wertach rivers, and the city's engineers understood what that meant long before modern sanitation existed. The canals threading through the city were first mentioned in records from 1276. By 1416, waterworks, pumps, and water towers had been added to distribute the groundwater. In 1545, Augsburg achieved something rare for its era: it separated drinking water from water used for industrial purposes, a distinction that effectively blocked the spread of waterborne diseases. Waterwheels in the system also generated mechanical power for fountains and food processing. A butcher's hall dating to the seventeenth century that relied on this system still stands today. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, engineers added hydroelectric power plants, among the first in the world to generate electricity from water, and these plants continue to operate. On the 6th of July 2019, UNESCO designated the Water Management System of Augsburg a World Heritage Site, citing both its medieval canals and water towers and its long record of hydraulic innovation.

• 7. Art, Music, and the Augsburg Taste

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  Augsburg's wealth during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries drew artists looking for patrons, and the city became a creative centre of notable range. Hans Holbein the Elder, born in 1460, made Augsburg his base and pioneered the transformation of German art from the Gothic to the Renaissance style. His son Hans Holbein the Younger, born in 1497, followed as a portrait and religious painter. The prolific printing houses of Augsburg made the city the largest producer of German-language books in the Holy Roman Empire. Leopold Mozart, the violinist-composer and father of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, was born in Augsburg in 1719, and the city still maintains the Mozart Haus Augsburg, where visitors can see the room where he was raised. The Rococo decorative style spread through Augsburg so thoroughly that it came to be called "the Augsburg taste" across Europe. Rudolf Diesel, who invented the diesel engine, was born here in 1858. Bertolt Brecht, born in 1898, grew up in Augsburg, and his childhood home is now a visitor site. For the 1972 Olympic Games held in Munich, a diversion channel of the Lech dam was transformed into the Eiskanal, the world's first artificial whitewater slalom course, which has since served as a prototype for more than two dozen similar venues around the world.