Marburg

• 1. Introduction

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  Marburg is a university town in the German state of Hesse, home to about 76,000 people. Today a BioNTech plant there manufactures vaccines against COVID-19. The river Lahn cuts through the valley the town occupies, and the University of Marburg still shapes daily life on its streets.

  What carried a small river crossing into becoming host to a modern vaccine plant? Why does a dangerous virus first identified here carry the town's own name? And how did a widowed medieval princess, two feuding theologians, and two brothers gathering fairy tales all leave their mark here?

• 2. A Crossroads Settlement

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  Marburg grew up where two early medieval trade routes crossed the river Lahn. One highway linked Cologne and Prague. The other ran from the North Sea to the Alps and on into Italy. A document called the Reinhardsbrunner Chronik first mentions the settlement in the year 822.

  Sometime in the ninth or tenth century, the Giso family built a small castle here. It guarded the river crossing and let them collect tolls from passing merchants. Coins struck in the town prove that Marburg already held town status by 1140.

  Around that same time, the Giso lands passed to the Landgraves of Thuringia, who ruled from the Wartburg fortress above Eisenach. One of those Thuringian landgravines would soon turn Marburg into far more than a river crossing.

• 3. Saint of the Sick

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  In 1228, princess-landgravine Elizabeth of Hungary, recently widowed, chose Marburg as her dowager seat. She had fallen out with her brother-in-law, the new landgrave, and preferred distance from his court.

  Elizabeth spent her remaining years caring for the sick. She died in 1231, at only 24 years old. Her short life and her charity toward the ill made her one of the era's most prominent female saints. The church canonized her in 1235, just four years after her death.

  Her daughter would soon fight to keep the family's influence over the wider region of Hessen alive.

• 4. Capital of a Rival Power

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  In 1264, Sophie of Brabant, Elizabeth's daughter, won the Landgraviate of Hessen for her son Henry, separating it from Thuringia. Marburg then ranked as one of Hessen's two capitals, alongside Kassel, from that point until about 1540. After the landgraviate's first division, Marburg served as the seat of Hessen-Marburg from 1485 to 1500, and again from 1567 to 1605.

  Hessen ranked among Germany's more powerful second-tier principalities, with the Archbishopric of Mainz as its long-standing rival. The two powers fought wars and disputes over territory across several centuries.

  After 1605, Marburg slipped into life as an ordinary provincial town, known mainly for its university. The Thirty Years' War, fought from 1618 to 1648 between Hessen-Darmstadt and Hesse-Kassel, turned the region into a virtual backwater for two centuries. The Hessian territory around Marburg lost more than two-thirds of its population, a toll greater than any later war, including both world wars combined.

• 5. A Reformation University

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  The University of Marburg, founded in 1527, is the oldest still-existing university in the world established by Protestants. It ranks among Germany's smaller university towns, alongside Greifswald, Erlangen, Jena, and Tübingen. The city of Gießen, 30 km south of Marburg, belongs to that same group.

  In 1529, Philipp I of Hesse arranged the Marburg Colloquy, bringing together the reformers Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli. He hoped the meeting would reconcile their theological differences.

  Within decades, the very neglect that followed Marburg's fall from prominence would end up preserving its medieval face.

• 6. Preserved by Neglect

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  The entire eighteenth century passed with almost no money spent on new building projects in Marburg. That neglect left the town looking much like Rye or Chartres, an almost untouched medieval Gothic town.

  When Romanticism swept German culture, Marburg became a hub for the movement's leading figures, many of whom lived, taught, or studied there. They formed a close circle whose influence stretched into literature, philology, folklore, and law. Friedrich Carl von Savigny, regarded as the leading jurist of his day, anchored the German revival of Roman law from within that circle. The circle also included the poet Achim von Arnim, the writer Clemens Brentano, and Brentano's sister Bettina von Arnim, who later married Achim.

  Internationally, the circle's best-known members were the Brothers Grimm, who gathered many of their fairy tales in Marburg. Painter Otto Ubbelohde, who lived in and near the town, later drew the best-known illustrations for the Grimms' fairy tale editions. The building that inspired his drawing of Rapunzel's Tower still stands in Amönau, near Marburg. Just across the Lahn hills, in an area called Schwalm, local girls traditionally wore a red hood as part of their dress.

  A nineteenth-century war was about to end Marburg's long quiet spell.

• 7. Prussian Ascent and Wartime Refuge

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  In the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, the prince-elector of Hessen backed the losing side, Austria. Prussia's victory let it invade and annex the Electorate of Hessen, along with Hanover, Frankfurt, and other territories north of the Main River. The neighboring, pro-Austrian Hesse-Darmstadt kept its independence.

  For Marburg, the outcome worked out well. Prussia made it the main administrative center of the new province Hessen-Nassau, and turned its university into the region's academic hub. Since the Prussian university system ranked among the world's best, Marburg drew many respected scholars. Real industry stayed scarce, so students, professors, and civil servants, people with modest income who paid little tax, dominated the town instead.

  In 1934, vice-chancellor Franz von Papen delivered an anti-Nazi speech at the University of Marburg on the 17th of June. World War II left Marburg far less damaged than its neighbors Giessen, Siegen, and Frankfurt. Allied planners never treated it as a target of opportunity, since it had no major industrial sites. Even so, mainly the United States Army Air Forces bombed the city 13 times.

  From 1942 to 1945, the entire town became one giant hospital, with schools and government buildings converted into wards. By the spring of 1945, more than 20,000 patients, most of them wounded German soldiers, filled its beds. The worst destruction struck the city's north side and its marshalling yards, leaving the historic inner town largely intact.

  In May 1945, Monuments Men officer Walker Hancock opened the first Central Collecting Point inside the Marburg State Archives. The archive building proved too small once other collecting points opened elsewhere, including in Munich. Marburg's site closed after just over a year, its work shifting to the Wiesbaden Collecting Point. The project effectively ended in August 1946, when the sarcophagus of Field Marshal and President Paul von Hindenburg moved to the Elisabethkirche. In 1955, writer Milton Mayer published They Thought They Were Free, built on interviews with ten Marburg men he called residents of "Kronenberg." The book tried to gauge how ordinary Germans had felt about Nazi rule.

  Peace brought a new wave of people to Marburg, and with them, a very different kind of industry.

• 8. Virus and Solar Law

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  After 1945, war refugees swelled Marburg's population, and its pharmaceutical industry grew increasingly important. University staff and student numbers rose too; by 2023 the University of Marburg counted about 21,000 students. Renovation work, launched in 1972, rescued the historic town center just as it faced serious decay.

  That same industrial growth had a darker side. In 1967, workers at the Behring-Werke plant were accidentally exposed to infected green monkey tissue. The resulting outbreak infected 31 people and killed seven of them. Behring-Werke had been founded by Marburg citizen Emil Adolf von Behring, the first winner of the Nobel Prize in Medicine. The plant later passed to Hoechst, and today belongs to CSL Behring. Following the usual custom of naming viruses after an outbreak's location, the filovirus took the name Marburg virus, and its hemorrhagic fever resembles Ebola.

  In 2008, the town passed a law requiring solar installations on new buildings and major renovations. It aimed to cover a fifth of new buildings' heating needs with solar energy. Anyone who skipped the requirement faced a fine of €1,000. Approved on the 20th of June 2008, the law was due to take effect that October, but the Regierungspräsidium Giessen blocked it in September.

  High above the town, the Marburger Schloss still looks down over streets lined with medieval Gothic architecture. The Elisabethkirche there ranks among the two or three earliest purely Gothic churches built north of the Alps outside France.