Göttingen

• 1. Introduction

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  Göttingen, a city of roughly 124,000 people in central Germany, holds a peculiar distinction: every new doctoral graduate must climb a public fountain and kiss a bronze goose girl named the Gänseliesel. The act is technically illegal. No one enforces the law. The statue has been called the most kissed girl in the world. That small ritual captures something essential about Göttingen: a city where old rules bend for the sake of tradition, where the absurd and the serious coexist, and where scholars have shaped history for centuries. How did a village along a minor stream become one of the great university cities of Europe? What does it mean for a place to be defined, above all else, by knowledge? And what happens when that same city turns its back on the very minds that made it famous?

• 2. From Gutingi to Guild Town

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  A document signed by Holy Roman Emperor Otto I in 953 AD marks the first written mention of a place called Gutingi. In it, Otto handed over some of his holdings in the village to the Moritz monastery in Magdeburg. The name itself likely derives from a small stream called the Gote; the suffix -ing denoted living alongside something, so the settlement was, in the plainest terms, the place along the Gote. Archaeological evidence suggests people had been settling there since at least the 7th century, long before any emperor thought to write it down. Nearby, on a hill to the west across the River Leine, a fortress called Grona had been built by 915 AD. Kings and emperors visited it at least 18 documented times between 941 and 1025 AD, making it the more prominent site in the region. The last Holy Roman Emperor to use Grona, Heinrich II, who reigned from 1002 to 1024, even had a church built in Gutingi dedicated to Saint Alban. That same site is now occupied by the St. Albani Church, built in 1423. Grona lost its royal function in 1025, after Heinrich II died there while ill. Control passed to local lords, and the fortress was eventually destroyed by Göttingen's own citizens between 1323 and 1329. The real city of Göttingen grew not from the fortress hill but from a trading settlement that formed at the river crossing of the Leine, probably between 1150 and 1180. Henry the Lion, Duke of Saxony and Bavaria, is presumed to have founded it. The oldest streets follow a pentagonal layout, suggesting it was planned from the start. By 1247, named members of a city council appear in documents, a sign that Göttingen had already organized itself as a true city. In 1232, Duke Otto the Child formally restored to the citizens rights they had held under earlier lords, covering self-governance, trader protections, and market access. The council eventually bought out a competing settlement the Duke had tried to establish just outside the city walls, paying three hundred Marks in 1319 and extracting a promise that no fortress would be built within a mile of the town.

• 3. Trade, Wool, and the Hanseatic League

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  Wool drove Göttingen's medieval economy in ways that reached far beyond the Leine Valley. Flocks of up to 3,000 sheep and 1,500 lambs grazed in the surrounding land, supplying weavers whose cloth was exported as far as the Netherlands and Lübeck. The linen weavers' guild was joined by a wool weavers' guild, and from 1475 new craftspeople brought techniques that kept Göttingen competitive as a textile exporter for three more generations. Only when cheap English cloth arrived at the end of the 16th century did the local industry finally collapse. Beyond textiles, Göttingen sat astride an important trade corridor between Lübeck and Frankfurt am Main, and traders from other regions came four times a year to its market. Göttingen joined the Hanseatic League in 1351, though it attended only as an observer at first. It did not become a paying member until 1426, and it withdrew as early as 1572. The League's inland city was never fully comfortable with its maritime politics. This commercial prosperity left physical marks on the city. The representative old town hall was built between 1366 and 1444. The Gothic St. Johannis Church was expanded beginning in the first half of the 14th century. St. Nikolai Church was rebuilt in Gothic style from 1330 onward. The fortifications themselves were rebuilt around 1360 to enclose both the new town and the old village, pushing the four city gates outward and expanding the city's footprint to roughly 75 hectares. That expansive rebuilding project coincided with the town's most assertive moment of political independence: in April 1387, Göttingen's citizens stormed and destroyed the fortress inside the city walls. Duke Otto I, known as the Evil for his constant feuding, retaliated by burning surrounding farms. But Göttingen's forces, led by Moritz of Uslar, defeated the Duke's army in battle near the villages of Rosdorf and Grone, forcing Otto to acknowledge the town's independence.

• 4. The University That Changed Europe

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  George II Augustus, who held the titles of king of Great Britain and Ireland, Duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg, and prince-elector of Hanover, founded the University of Göttingen in 1737. It had been established in law three years earlier, in 1734, but teaching began that year. Within decades it became the most visited university in Europe. The Georgia Augusta, as it was formally known, attracted scholars who reshaped modern mathematics and science. Carl Friedrich Gauss, Bernhard Riemann, and David Hilbert all held professorships there. Otto von Bismarck and Gerhard Schröder both attended Göttingen's law school. The Brothers Grimm and Karl Barth passed through as well. In 1837, seven professors took a principled stand against the absolute rule of the kings of Hanover. They protested publicly, lost their positions as a result, and became known to history as the Göttingen Seven. Heinrich Ewald and Georg Gervinus were among them. The university also sustained unusual traditions. Doctoral graduates were drawn by handcart from the Great Hall to the Gänseliesel-Fountain in front of the Old Town Hall, where they were expected to climb the fountain and kiss the stone goose girl. The ritual persisted despite being officially prohibited. A city that once called itself a place of trade had accumulated a second, more durable identity: a place of learning. Its motto plays on the German word Wissenschaft, meaning science or knowledge. Die Stadt, die Wissen schafft sounds identical to Die Stadt der Wissenschaft but means something slightly different: the city that creates knowledge. By 2003-45% of the inner city population was between 18 and 30 years old, a demographic skew that persisted generations after the university's founding.

• 5. The Göttingen Eight and the Manhattan Project

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  During the 1930s, Göttingen housed what was widely considered the finest mathematics and physics faculty in the world. Eight men, almost all Jewish, led that faculty and became known collectively as the Göttingen eight. Among them were Leó Szilárd and Edward Teller. The Nazi regime found this concentration of Jewish intellectual life intolerable, and the faculty was dismantled. The Göttingen eight were expelled and forced to emigrate west in 1938. Both Szilárd and Teller went on to become central figures in the Manhattan Project. The same ideology that expelled them also crippled German physics more broadly. Nazi insistence on what it called German physics prevented German scientists from applying Albert Einstein's breakthroughs to practical research, a policy that stunted the field's development inside Germany for years. After the war ended, the university had to be rebuilt almost from nothing, especially in the physics, mathematics, and chemistry departments. That process, the source notes, continued into the 21st century. The city itself survived the war in comparatively good physical shape. Allied bombing struck Göttingen a total of eight times. Only about 2.1% of the city was destroyed by the time the war ended. The heaviest raids came after July 1944, and the last hit the railway station area on the 7th of April 1945. About 107 people died in those raids, a figure described as comparatively small. U.S. Army troops arrived in Göttingen on the 8th of April 1945. By that point, all Wehrmacht combat units had already left the area, sparing the city from ground fighting. The Junkernschänke, a historic half-timbered house, was destroyed in a 1945 raid, and its exterior was not properly restored until the 1980s.

• 6. Music, Poetry, and a French Singer

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  Between 1772 and 1776, a circle of young German poets who had studied at the Göttingen university formed what they called the Göttinger Hainbund, or circle of poets. Disciples of the poet Klopstock, they revived the folksong form and wrote lyric verse in the style of the Sturm und Drang movement. Their influence on German romanticism and on the broader European folklore tradition was considered essential. Since the 1920s, Göttingen has also been associated with the revival of George Frideric Handel's music. The Göttingen International Handel Festival is held each summer, with performances in the Stadthalle Göttingen and in several of the city's churches. The city is also home to the Göttinger Sinfonie Orchester and the Göttingen Boys' Choir, both of which perform nationally. In the mid-1960s, the French singer Barbara recorded a song named after the city. It became a significant popular catalyst for post-war reconciliation between France and Germany. The city named a street after her: Barbarastraße. Göttingen also sits along the German Fairy Tale Route, a tourist trail connecting sites associated with the Brothers Grimm, who were among the university's notable alumni. Nobel Prize winners with ties to the city include Max Planck, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1918; Otto Hahn, who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1944; and Max Born, who won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1954. Manfred Eigen won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1967. The biochemist Thomas C. Südhof, born in 1955, won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2013.

• 7. Industry and the City Today

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  Göttingen's economy today rests on precision and measurement rather than wool or trade routes. The city is the seat of the light microscopy division of Carl Zeiss, Inc., and a major site for Sartorius AG, which specializes in biotechnology and measurement equipment. The surrounding region markets itself under the name Measurement Valley. Unemployment stood at 12.6% in 2003 and had fallen to 7% by March 2014. The city's railway station lies to the west of the medieval town center and carries ICE high-speed trains on the Hanover-Würzburg high-speed line. The nearest international airport, Hannover Airport, is 136 km to the north. In the 2021 city council elections, the Green Party won the most seats of any party, with 14, but was excluded from the governing coalition. The SPD candidate Petra Broistedt won the race for Lord Mayor that year. The Göttingen Studios operated as a significant center of film production in West Germany from 1948 to 1961. The university maintains three botanical gardens, and the city is home to four intercultural gardens as well as the German Association of International Gardens. In basketball, ASC 1846 Göttingen won the national championship in 1979-80, 1982-83, and 1983-84. BG Göttingen won the EuroChallenge in 2009-10. The population peaked at 132,100 in 1985, and by 2004 had settled at 129,466, of which around 24,000 were students. The inner city, largely untouched by wartime bombing, remains dense with cafes, shops, and bars, and the Junkernschänke, the half-timbered house whose exterior was finally restored in the 1980s after its 1945 destruction, still stands in the old town.