Heidelberg

• 1. Introduction

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  Heidelberg sits in a narrow valley where the Neckar River breaks free of the Odenwald mountains. People lived on this stretch of land long before anyone called it a city. In 1907, workers near the village of Mauer found a jawbone. Scientists dated it to between 600,000 and 200,000 years ago, the earliest evidence of human life anywhere in Europe. They named the find Heidelberg Man. The settlement that grew up nearby would survive wars that leveled its neighbors. It kept one of the continent's oldest universities running through Reformation politics and a world war. A shattered castle became a symbol that pulled in poets, composers and even a fictional Quidditch team. What let this bend of the Neckar keep drawing people back, through sieges, gunpowder explosions and the firebombing that flattened Germany around it?

• 2. A Capital Won and Lost

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  Long before any duke or elector claimed it, the Heiligenberg above the Neckar held a Celtic fortress and place of worship. Historians date it to the 5th century BC. Roman soldiers followed, and in 40 AD the 24th and 2nd Cyrenaican cohorts built a fort on the valley floor. The Emperor Valentinian I strengthened the defenses in 369 AD, raising a signal tower and a wooden bridge on stone pillars across the Neckar. The Romans ran the region from nearby Lopodunum, a town known today as Ladenburg.

  A document held at Schönau Abbey and dated to 1196 contains the first written reference to Heidelberg. Historians treat that year as the town's founding date. By 1156, the House of Hohenstaufen had taken the castle and settlement, and Conrad of Hohenstaufen became Count Palatine of the Rhine. Control passed to the House of Welf by marriage in 1195, then to Ludwig I, Duke of Bavaria, in 1214. In 1356 the Golden Bull granted the Counts Palatine sweeping rights and made them Electors of the Holy Roman Empire.

  In November 1619, the Elector Frederick V accepted the Bohemian crown, becoming king alongside his wife Elizabeth, daughter of England's James VI and I. He held the throne for a single winter before Habsburg forces retook Bohemia, and his 1621 overthrow set off the Thirty Years' War. Johann Tserclaes, Count of Tilly, captured Heidelberg for the Catholic League in 1622 after a two-month siege. He handed the town's Bibliotheca Palatina library to the Pope as a gift. The Catholic House of Wittelsbach took over the Palatinate and its Elector's title.

  French troops overran the town and castle again in 1689. By 1693, repeated invasions during the War of the Palatine Succession had left the area nearly destroyed. Combined with brutal winters, the devastation pushed thousands of German Calvinist Palatines to emigrate in the early 18th century. Many fled to London, where they became known as 'the poor Palatines'. Between 1709 and 1710, Queen Anne's government arranged passage for nearly 6,000 of them to New York. Others settled in Pennsylvania and South Carolina.

  In 1803, the Grand Duchy of Baden absorbed Heidelberg, ending its centuries as a Palatinate capital. A few years later, a French Revolution refugee named Count Charles Graimberg arrived in the town and began preserving what remained of the castle ruins.

• 3. Europe's Oldest University

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  Rupert I, Elector Palatine, founded Heidelberg University in 1386. It became a center of Medieval Scholasticism and Renaissance humanism, then a battleground between Lutheran and Calvinist thought during the Reformation. In April 1518, a few months after nailing up his Ninety-five Theses, Martin Luther traveled to Heidelberg to defend them before the university's scholars.

  Heidelberg's library, founded in 1421, is the oldest public library still operating in Germany. In the 1560s, Elector Frederick III commissioned a new catechism for his territory. He hoped to steer his Lutheran subjects toward his own Reformed convictions inside a mostly Catholic empire. The theologian Zacharius Ursinus is usually credited as its principal author, though the catechism's own introduction names the university's entire theological faculty. Frederick wrote its preface himself and defended the finished text as biblical, not sectarian, when questioned at the 1566 Diet of Augsburg. It became known simply as the Heidelberg Catechism.

  In 1803, Charles Frederick, Grand Duke of Baden, re-founded the university as the 'Ruperto-Carola', honoring both Rupert I and himself as its two founders. Scholars soon gave it a reputation as a 'royal residence of the intellect'. Between 1920 and 1933, its faculty included the physicians Czerny, Erb and Krehl, alongside the humanists Rohde, Weber and Gundolf.

  The university reopened quickly after 1945. A small group of professors drove the effort, among them the anti-Nazi economist Alfred Weber and the philosopher Karl Jaspers. The surgeon Karl Heinrich Bauer was named rector. Prominent thinkers associated with the university over the centuries include Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Jaspers, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, Karl-Otto Apel and Hannah Arendt.

  As of 2014, undergraduate enrollment stood at 30,898, with an acceptance rate of 16.3 percent and no tuition charged to any student. International students follow a different calendar entirely, arriving for five-week blocks rather than a standard semester.

• 4. A City Spared

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  By 1930, the National Socialist German Workers' Party was already the strongest party in Heidelberg's communal elections, taking 30 percent of the vote. In the federal election of March 1933, the NSDAP won 45.9 percent of the city's ballots, well above the 43.9 percent it drew nationally. In 1934 and 1935, the Reichsarbeitsdienst and university students built the Thingstätte, a huge amphitheatre on the Heiligenberg used for Nazi Party and SS gatherings. Soon after, the regime completed the Ehrenfriedhof memorial cemetery on the old town's southern edge, where Wehrmacht soldiers would later be buried.

  On the night of the 9th of November 1938, Kristallnacht, Nazis burned synagogues at two locations in the city. The next day they began deporting Jews, sending 150 people to Dachau concentration camp. On the 22nd of October 1940, during what was called the Wagner-Bürckel action, the Nazis deported 6,000 local Jews to Camp Gurs in France. Among them were 281 people from Heidelberg. Within a few months, as many as 1,000 of the deportees, 201 of them from Heidelberg, died there of hunger and disease. The poet Alfred Mombert escaped Gurs in April 1941 with help from the Swiss poet Hans Reinhart. He died soon after from illness he had contracted in the camp.

  In March 1945, Brigadier General William A. Beiderlinden, artillery commander of the U.S. 44th Infantry Division, made international headlines for a different reason. Ordered to shell Heidelberg, he instead contacted the city's burgomaster, who defied warnings from the local Nazi gauleiter to meet with him. The two negotiated over sparing the university and other historic sites, and the Nazi garrison agreed to withdraw rather than fight. On the 29th of March 1945, retreating German troops still destroyed three arches of the city's old bridge and the newer bridge downstream. The following day, U.S. troops from the 63rd Infantry and 7th Army entered a city that surrendered without a fight.

  Heidelberg escaped the bombing that hit most German cities. It held no industrial or transport targets worth the risk, much like the university towns of Tübingen and Göttingen, which were spared for similar reasons. Allied bombers instead concentrated on nearby Mannheim and Ludwigshafen. The U.S. Army later moved into the city's undamaged Wehrmacht barracks, the Grossdeutschland-Kaserne, and renamed it Campbell Barracks.

• 5. A Circle of Romantic Poets

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  Heidelberg became the heart of a second wave of German Romanticism, a movement historians distinguish from Jena Romanticism by calling it Heidelberg Romanticism. A circle of poets gathered here, among them Joseph von Eichendorff, Johann Joseph von Görres, Ludwig Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Their movement pushed back against the rationalism of the Enlightenment, prizing medieval imagery, folk art and a sense that nature itself shaped language and custom.

  Along the Heiligenberg, on the river's north bank, runs the Philosophenweg, the Philosophers' Walk, where Heidelberg's professors and thinkers traditionally strolled while they talked. Farther up the same slope sit the ruins of the 11th-century Monastery of St Michael and the smaller Monastery of St Stephen. UNESCO later recognized this literary tradition directly, naming Heidelberg a City of Literature within its Creative Cities Network.

• 6. Heidelberg in Fiction and Film

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  In 1901, the playwright Wilhelm Meyer-Förster set his play Old Heidelberg in the city, a story so popular it spawned many film adaptations. Sigmund Romberg turned it into the 1924 operetta The Student Prince, which was itself later filmed. A different work, the 1925 song 'I Lost My Heart in Heidelberg' by composer Fred Raymond, became a major hit. It inspired its own stage musical and two films. It still serves as the city's unofficial theme song.

  Marianne Faithfull's character heads for Heidelberg University at the end of the 1968 film The Girl on a Motorcycle. The city later turned up as a mission setting in Electronic Arts' strategy game Red Alert 3. It also served as the backdrop for the film Morris from America. In the Watchmen television series, Heidelberg becomes the birthplace of Dr. Manhattan, whose real name is given as Jonathan Osterman. The sitcom Hogan's Heroes names Heidelberg as the hometown of Sergeant Schultz, and the Hallmark Channel set a 2023 film, A Heidelberg Holiday, there. In The Big Bang Theory, Sheldon Cooper mentions visiting Heidelberg University as a teenage professor, a detail its spin-off Young Sheldon later dramatizes.

  Mark Twain opened his essay The Awful German Language with a scene at Heidelberg Castle. Somerset Maugham brought his hero through the city in Of Human Bondage. The city is home turf for detectives in German crime novels by Wolfgang Burger and Carlo Schäfer. In the Harry Potter universe, it is home to the Quidditch team the Heidelberg Harriers, described as 'fiercer than a dragon and twice as clever'. Writing later about World War II, the historian Stephen E. Ambrose described one soldier's passage through Heidelberg in Band of Brothers. He recorded how the American paratrooper David K. Webster marveled at its untouched buildings and river promenade. Webster called the city, in effect, 'paradise'.

• 7. Science, Commerce and Sport

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  The European Molecular Biology Laboratory sits alongside Heidelberg University. It is joined by the German Cancer Research Center and four Max Planck Institutes covering medicine, astronomy, nuclear physics and comparative public law. The chemist Robert Bunsen, who developed the burner that carries his name, lived and died in the city. Carl Bosch won the 1931 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Ernst Ruska won the 1986 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on electron optics. The virologist Harald zur Hausen won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine and also died in the city. The physicist Theodor W. Hänsch shared a quarter of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Physics for his work on spectroscopy.

  As of 2004-81.8 percent of Heidelberg's workforce worked in services, including tourism. Tourism draws more than 11.9 million visitors a year and peaks each winter at the city's Christmas market. Industry employs only 18 percent of workers. The pen maker Lamy still runs its headquarters and factory from the Wieblingen district. HeidelbergCement, the world's second-largest cement producer, is headquartered in the city that gave it its name. Nearby, Walldorf hosts the SAP World Headquarters and the factory of Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, while Eppelheim is home to Wild-Werke, maker of the Capri-Sonne soft drink.

  Heidelberg ranks, alongside Hanover, as one of Germany's centres of rugby union. In the 2008-09 season, four of the nine clubs in the Rugby-Bundesliga came from the city. The basketball club USC Heidelberg has won nine German championships, second only to one other team in the sport's history. It still plays in the second-tier ProA league. In July 2019, Heidelberg hosted the WU24 Championships, held from the 13th to the 20th of July, the fifth edition of that ultimate frisbee tournament. It marked only the third time Germany had staged one at all.