Jena

• 1. Introduction

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  Jena sits in a hilly valley carved by the Saale river in eastern Thuringia, and it holds a secret that most visitors miss on the way in: wild orchids grow within walking distance of the city centre, thirty-two native species rooting themselves in the same rocky limestone landscape that made the town hard to farm and easy to defend. That tension between the land's limits and human ambition runs through all of Jena's history. How did a modest market town that barely registered on medieval maps become, within a few centuries, a gathering point for some of the most consequential minds in German philosophy, science, and industry? And how did a city that housed optical factories famous across the world survive division, bombing, and economic collapse to emerge as one of eastern Germany's most dynamic places? Those are the questions Jena forces you to ask.

• 2. From River Crossing to Town

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  An 1182 document contains the first unambiguous mention of Jena, placing it at a convenient ford on the Saale at a time when the river marked the boundary between Germanic regions to the west and Slavic regions to the east. Nearby crossings at Naumburg and Saalfeld drew more long-distance traffic, so Jena's importance stayed local. The Lords of Lobdeburg, whose castle stood roughly six kilometres south of what would become the city centre, controlled this stretch of the valley and in the thirteenth century laid out two towns facing each other across the water: Jena on the west bank and Lobeda on the east.

  Around 1230 Jena received town rights. A regular grid was surveyed between today's Fürstengraben, Löbdergraben, Teichgraben, and Leutragraben, and over the following decades the town acquired a marketplace, a main church, a town hall, and city walls. The economy rested on wine. The warm, south-facing hillsides of the Saale valley were suited to viticulture, and this trade sustained the town through the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries alongside two monasteries, Dominican and Cistercian, that arrived in 1286 and 1301 respectively.

  In 1331, with the Lords of Lobdeburg weakened, Jena passed to the Wettins, an ambitious ruling family who cared more about their residence in nearby Weimar. That relative disinterest turned out to suit Jena. Left to manage its own affairs, the town strengthened its civic rights and accumulated wealth through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Gotha municipal law the Wettins granted gave citizens firmer legal footing than many comparable towns enjoyed.

• 3. The University Changes Everything

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  Martin Luther visited Jena in 1523 and set the Protestant Reformation in motion there, triggering attacks on the Dominican and Carmelite convents within two years. The Carmelites were suppressed in 1525 and the Dominicans in 1548. But the event that most durably transformed the city came in 1558, when Ernestine Elector John Frederick the Magnanimous founded the University of Jena. He had lost his previous university at Wittenberg to the rival Albertine branch of the Wettin family after the Schmalkaldic War, and he needed a new seat of learning for his territory.

  The timing mattered enormously. The Little Ice Age began pressing down on European viticulture during the seventeenth century, and wine-growing on Jena's slopes declined. The university absorbed the economic slack. It generated income, attracted students, and helped make Jena the second-largest centre of the printing trade in Germany after Leipzig. The Lutheran emphasis on reading the Bible directly, and therefore on literacy itself, drove demand for printed books, and Jena printers supplied that demand. Students at the university composed the list of the "Seven Wonders of Jena" during this period, a test supposedly used to verify whether someone who claimed to have studied there was actually familiar with the city.

  Politically, Jena changed hands several times as the Ernestine dynasty divided its territories. In 1672 Jena became the capital of the small duchy of Saxe-Jena, which lasted only two dukes before it was absorbed first into Saxe-Eisenach in 1692 and then in 1741 into the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, which Jena remained part of until 1809.

• 4. Philosophers, Poets, and Romantics

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  Around 1790 the University of Jena ranked as the largest and most celebrated among the German states. The professors it held during this period read like a register of German intellectual history: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Schiller, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling all worked there, defining a strain of idealist philosophy centred on the concept of 'Ich', or the self. Alongside this philosophical movement, Jena simultaneously hosted the first flowering of German Romanticism, drawing poets including Novalis and the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel, as well as Ludwig Tieck.

  In 1794, Goethe and Schiller met at the university and began a friendship grounded in their shared admiration for Shakespeare. The relationship between the two writers reinforced the reputation of the university and of the ruling Duchy of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach as a liberal, intellectually open environment. Alexander von Humboldt and Arthur Schopenhauer also spent time in Jena during this fertile half-century.

  The Schiller Church on the east side of the Saale is where Friedrich Schiller married in 1790, and his former summer house at Schillergässchen still stands in the city, now a small museum. The Romantikerhaus on Unterm Markt street preserves records of the literary circle that gathered in Jena during those decades. The Botanischer Garten at Fürstengraben was established in 1794, the same year Goethe and Schiller met, and it remains one of the oldest botanic gardens in Germany.

• 5. Carl Zeiss and the Optical City

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  On the 14th of October 1806, Napoleon defeated the Prussian army at the Battle of Jena-Auerstedt near the district of Vierzehnheiligen, and French occupation followed. The students resisted; many joined the Lützow Free Corps in 1813, and two years later the Urburschenschaft fraternity was founded in Jena, part of the broader student liberal and unification movement that made the city a focal point of what became known as the Vormärz period.

  Industrialisation came relatively late to Jena. The Saal Railway opened in 1874 and the Weimar-Gera railway in 1876, and those rail connections triggered the economic transformation. Carl Zeiss and the physicist Ernst Abbe, through their Carl Zeiss AG, and Otto Schott through Schott AG, turned Jena into a world centre of precision optical instruments, laboratory glassware, and the specialised glass that came to bear the city's name. All three men were also social reformers. When Zeiss died in 1889, the company passed to the Carl-Zeiss-Stiftung, a foundation that channelled substantial profits into research and social benefit. That model was later adopted by other German institutions, including the Robert Bosch Stiftung.

  The population grew sharply in step with industrial output, rising from around 8,000 in 1870 to roughly 71,000 by the beginning of World War II. In 1898 it was agreed with figures from the industrial sector that the city needed an electricity generator, and an electrified tramway followed in the early 1900s. Germany's first high-rise building, the Bau 15, went up at the Carl Zeiss factory site in 1915. The famous biologist Ernst Haeckel was professor at the university during the later nineteenth century, and the expansion of science and medicine faculties tracked the industrial boom closely.

• 6. War, Division, and Uprising

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  In 1945 Allied bombing raids repeatedly struck Jena. The raids killed 709 people, injured around 2,000, and destroyed most of the medieval city centre. No other Thuringian city suffered comparable destruction except Nordhausen, whose damage was total. American troops occupied Jena on the 13th of April 1945 and handed it over to the Red Army on the 1st of July 1945.

  Jena fell within the Soviet occupation zone and in 1949 became part of the German Democratic Republic. Soviet authorities dismantled large sections of the Zeiss and Schott factories and shipped the machinery to the Soviet Union. The GDR government compensated in part by establishing a pharmaceutical factory called Jenapharm in 1950, which is today part of Bayer. In 1953 Jena became a centre of the East German Uprising: protests involving 30,000 participants drew fire from Soviet tanks.

  The following decades brought disruptive changes to the city's fabric. During the 1960s another section of the historic centre was demolished to build the JenTower, which was constructed between 1969 and 1972 and remains the tallest building in the city. The Eichplatz in front of the tower has never been built on since and remains the subject of ongoing debate. Large Plattenbau housing settlements went up in the 1970s and 1980s in northern districts near Rautal and in southern Winzerla and Lobeda. Opposition to the GDR government grew in the late 1980s, fed by academic and church circles, and in the autumn of 1989 Jena saw the largest protests in its history before the GDR collapsed. Between 1995 and 1997, several far-right crimes were committed in the city, and the far-right scene of that decade gave rise to the National Socialist Underground terror group.

• 7. Jena Today

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  After reunification in 1990, Jena was absorbed into the refounded state of Thuringia. Industry entered a heavy crisis during the 1990s, but the city managed the transition to a market economy and today holds the most stock-market-listed companies of any city in eastern Germany. In 2012 there were 80 companies in industrial production with more than 20 workers, employing 8,300 people and generating a turnover of more than 1.5 billion euros. The traditional anchor firms, Carl Zeiss AG, Schott AG, and Jenoptik, remain, joined by newer companies in e-commerce, biotechnology, and software engineering. Jena-Optronik, a subsidiary of the Airbus Group, builds components for spaceflight and satellites in the city.

  Research institutions cluster here in unusual density for a city of 110,000. Three Max Planck institutes, multiple Leibniz institutes, the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Optics and Precision Engineering, and the Institute of Photonic Technology all operate in Jena alongside the university, which now enrols approximately 21,000 students. The Ernst-Abbe-Hochschule Jena, a University of Applied Sciences founded in 1991, serves roughly another 5,000. In 2008 the Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft awarded Jena the title of "Stadt der Wissenschaft", city of science. A 2013 study by the Kieler Institut für Weltwirtschaft ranked Jena fifth on a list of the most livable cities in Germany.

  The javelin throw world record of 98.48 metres, set by Jan Železný, was achieved in Jena, a detail that sits comfortably alongside the city's tradition of precision and measurement.