Stuttgart

• 1. Introduction

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  Stuttgart sits in a bowl. Not metaphorically, but literally: the city's medieval core rests inside a natural basin the locals call the Stuttgarter Kessel, the Stuttgart Cauldron, rimmed by vine-covered hills and fed by the Neckar river. With a population of 613,111 as of 2023, it is the sixth largest city in Germany, yet its metropolitan area of nearly 5.5 million people ranks as the fourth largest in the country. That metropolitan area is consistently placed among the top five in Europe by GDP. It is the city where the automobile was born, where Friedrich Schiller studied medicine and wrote his first play, where Red Army Faction terrorists killed themselves in a prison on the city's northern edge, and where the Christmas market swells to more than 3.6 million visitors every year. How did a stud farm founded by a tenth-century duke become one of the wealthiest and most inventive cities on the continent? The answers reach from a Roman castra built around AD 90 to a twenty-first-century infrastructure argument that sent protesters into the streets.

• 2. From Stud Farm to Duchy

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  In AD 950, Duke Liudolf of Swabia, son of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto I, chose a valley on the Nesenbach river, about 5 km south of the old Roman fort at Bad Cannstatt, to breed warhorses for use against the Hungarian invasions then sweeping across Europe. The settlement took its name from the Old High German Stuotgarten, meaning stud farm, a word that eventually compressed and shifted into Stuttgart. Liudolf held the land only briefly; his rebellion against his father was crushed four years later, and the title of Duke of Swabia passed out of his line. But the settlement he planted endured. A gift registry from Hirsau Abbey dated to around 1160 mentions a Hugo de Stuokarten, placing a community here during the High Middle Ages even though the terrain was better suited to horses than to commerce. In 1219 Stuttgart became a possession of Herman V, Margrave of Baden, and in around 1220 he effectively refounded the town we recognise today. In 1251 the city passed to Ulrich I von Württemberg as part of Mechthild von Baden's dowry, and through that exchange the fate of Stuttgart was bound to the House of Württemberg for the next seven centuries. Ulrich's son Eberhard I, called the Illustrious, launched the first of many ambitious expansions, though his military campaigns brought him into direct conflict with Emperor Rudolf I and eventually with the newly elected Emperor Henry VII. Henry's Vogt, Konrad IV von Weinberg, declared war on Eberhard in 1311, and Stuttgart fell; the city was managed by the imperial city of Esslingen from 1312 to 1315. Henry VII's death on the 24th of August 1313 plunged the region into political chaos, and Eberhard seized the opening, recapturing his hometown in 1316 and beginning a period of reconstruction that would reshape the city for generations. By 1371, Eberhard had moved the county seat to Stuttgart and expanded the castle. One year later, in 1320, the collegiate church in Beutelsbach relocated to its current position in Stuttgart, and the town was granted formal city status. By the end of the fifteenth century, the city had grown outward around the Hospitalkirche monastery and the Leonhard Church, and in 1457 it hosted the first Landtag of the Estates of Württemberg.

• 3. The Automobile Is Born Here

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  Robert Bosch opened his first workshop, named the Workshop for Precision Mechanics and Electrical Engineering, in Stuttgart in 1886. That same period saw Karl Benz develop the automobile in the Stuttgart area, and Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach industrialise it in a small workshop in Bad Cannstatt that would become Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft in 1887. Stuttgart claims the title of the cradle of the automobile as a result, and the phrase carries enough weight that the city's tourism apparatus has never felt the need to retire it. Both Mercedes-Benz and Porsche have their world headquarters in Stuttgart today, joined by automotive parts giants Bosch and Mahle. The city has earned the informal title of Autohauptstadt, meaning car capital city, and hosts famous automotive museums: the Mercedes-Benz Museum, which tracks the 125-year history of the automobile and draws around 440,000 visits per year, and the Porsche Museum, which first opened in 1976 and reopened on new premises in 2008. The concentration of automotive industry in a single city has produced unusual side effects. Because Daimler AG maintains several parking lots and factories within the municipal area, the company largely funds weather stations called Hagelflieger positioned near Stuttgart to fight damaging hailstorms, one of which struck the city in July 2013. The automotive sector also helps explain Stuttgart's position as the city with the highest general standard of prosperity of any German city, and it is the reason the Stuttgart Stock Exchange is the second largest in Germany after Frankfurt.

• 4. War, Occupation, and the Stuttgart Crisis

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  The Hotel Silber, previously occupied by other forms of political police, was taken over by the Gestapo in 1933 to detain and torture political dissidents. Among those held and transited through it were Eugen Bolz, Kurt Schumacher, and Lilo Herrmann, sent onward to concentration camps. Participants of the Kristallnacht burned the Old Synagogue to the ground. Between 1941 and 1945, more than 2,000 Jews from all over Württemberg were deported to Theresienstadt, Auschwitz, and the ghettos at Riga and Izbica; of them, only 180 held in internment survived the Shoah. The first deportation train left on the 1st of December 1941, carrying around 1,000 people to Riga. The heaviest air raid came on the 12th of September 1944, when the Royal Air Force dropped over 184,000 bombs, including 75 blockbusters, levelling the city centre and killing 957 people in the resulting firestorm. By the end of the war, Stuttgart had been subjected to 53 bombing raids. They destroyed 57.7% of all buildings, killed 4,477 inhabitants, caused 85 disappearances, and injured 8,908 more. The rubble was gathered and formed into the Birkenkopf, a hill at 511 metres that still marks the western edge of the city. When Allied forces advanced into the city in April 1945, French leader Charles de Gaulle directed General de Lattre to send the French 5th Armored Division, the 2nd Moroccan Infantry Division, and the 3rd Algerian Infantry Division toward Stuttgart rather than allow the American 100th Infantry Division to take it alone. The French 5th Armored Division captured the city on the 21st of April 1945. What followed was grim: French troops forcibly quartered themselves in what housing remained, and there were at least 1,389 recorded incidents of rape of civilians by French soldiers. The resulting diplomatic episode, known as the Stuttgart Crisis, reached the White House. President Harry S. Truman was unable to compel Charles de Gaulle to withdraw until after the final boundaries of the occupation zones were set. The French army finally relented to American demands and withdrew on the 8th of July 1945. Six weeks earlier, on the 6th of September 1946, US Secretary of State James F. Byrnes had delivered a speech at the Stuttgart Opera House laying out an early concept of what became the Marshall Plan, a moment that shaped European recovery policy for the next decade.

• 5. Stammheim and the German Autumn

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  Stammheim Prison, built from 1959 to 1963 in Stuttgart's municipal district of Stammheim, became in the mid-1970s the site of one of the most controversial trials in postwar German history. Ulrike Meinhof, Andreas Baader, Gudrun Ensslin, and Jan-Carl Raspe, members of the communist terrorist organisation known as the Red Army Faction, were incarcerated there during their trial at the Oberlandesgericht Stuttgart in 1975. The organisation responded with a campaign of violence in 1977 during what was called the German Autumn, which included the kidnap and murder of Hanns-Martin Schleyer and the hijacking of Lufthansa Flight 181. After multiple attempts to free the prisoners, including the smuggling of three weapons into the prison by their lawyer, the Faction's leadership concluded escape was impossible and that life sentences were certain. In an event remembered locally as the Todesnacht von Stammheim, the Night of Death at Stammheim, the prisoners killed themselves in April 1977. The trauma of those years gave way with relative speed to a different kind of headline: just three years earlier, in 1974, Stuttgart had hosted the FIFA World Cup, and on the 1st of October 1978 the Stuttgart S-Bahn opened with three scheduled routes, linking the city's dense geography of hills and valleys in a new way.

• 6. A City Shaped by Immigration

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  Dorling Kindersley's Eyewitness Travel Guide to Germany states plainly that in Stuttgart every third inhabitant is a foreigner. The numbers behind that observation are striking: 40% of Stuttgart's residents are of immigrant background, and 64% of the population below the age of five carry that designation. In the rest of Germany the comparable figure stands at 28.7%. The roots of this demographic shift lie in the economic miracle called the Wirtschaftswunder that swept West Germany from the late 1940s onward. Guest workers, known as Gastarbeiter, arrived from Italy first, then from Greece and Turkey, and primarily from Yugoslavia, drawn by employment in the automobile industry. Stuttgart's population, halved by the Second World War, recovered quickly; the city hit a peak of 640,000 residents in 1962. A further wave came in the 1990s as refugees from the Wars in Yugoslavia sought safety. By 2022-47% of the city's population was of foreign background, and the proportion without German citizenship had risen from 22.8% in 2000 to 27.6% in 2022. The largest single group of foreign nationals as of 2018 was Turkish, at 17,900 people, followed by Croats at 15,268, Italians at 14,021, and Greeks at 13,757. Queen Elizabeth II, who visited the city on the 24th of May 1965, had her own connection to this layered heritage: her great-grandfather Duke Francis, who lived from 1837 to 1900, had been a member of the Württemberg royal family.

• 7. Culture, Vineyards, and Green U

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  Stuttgart's State Theatre, the Staatstheater, was named Germany, Austria, and Switzerland's theatre of the year in 2006, and the Stuttgart Opera has won the opera of the year award six times. The Stuttgart Ballet carries the legacy of John Cranko and Marcia Haydee. The Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, whose conductor Sir Roger Norrington developed a recognisable playing style known as the Stuttgart Sound, performs primarily in the Liederhalle concert hall. The Schleyerhalle sports arena stages rock and pop concerts for major international performers on European tour. Alongside these institutions, the city maintains a living connection to viticulture that dates back to the year AD 1108, the earliest documented record in the Holy Roman Empire. Vineyards survive less than 500 metres from the Main Station. Because those vineyards once blanketed the steep hillsides around the basin, more than 400 flights of stairs, called Stäffele in the local dialect and equivalent to roughly 20 km of steps, climb the slopes throughout the city. In the early nineteenth century, as vineyards gave way to housing, the Stäffele were converted into footpaths connecting the new neighbourhoods, some decorated with fountains and plantings. At the centre of the city lies the Green U, a linked chain of parks that begins with the Schlossgarten, first mentioned in records in 1350, continues through the Rosensteinpark, and ends at the Killesbergpark, a former garden show ground that was used during the Nazi era as a collection point for Jews awaiting deportation and was later reclaimed for public use. The Wilhelma, Germany's only combined zoological and botanical garden, sits on the northern edge of the Rosensteinpark; built around 1850 as a Moorish-style summer palace for King Wilhelm I, it currently houses around 8,000 animals and some 5,000 plant species, and contains the largest magnolia grove in Europe. Stuttgart's Christmas market, running from late November to the 23rd of December, drew more than 3.6 million visitors in 2007 alone across more than 200 stands, making it one of the largest and oldest traditional Christmas markets in Europe.

• 8. Urban Climate Science

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  Stuttgart's location inside a basin surrounded by hills creates conditions that trap warm, stagnant air in summer and concentrate pollution at street level. Beginning in the late twentieth century, municipal planners responded by developing a detailed Climate Atlas, the Klimaanalyse, which maps local wind patterns, cold-air drainage flows, and areas of heat accumulation across the city. The atlas became the basis for zoning regulations that preserve open spaces and prohibit construction in designated ventilation corridors, allowing cooler night-time air from surrounding forests and vineyards to flow into the urban core. Studies in urban climatology have cited Stuttgart's approach as an early example of integrating microclimatic analysis directly into statutory planning, and the model has influenced similar efforts in other European and Asian cities. Those same corridors also function as green belts with ecological and recreational value. The Stuttgart 21 project, a massive infrastructure plan to improve transport links and partly reroute the city's rail connections underground, generated large-scale protests in 2010, with the inner city becoming the focal point of public opposition. The project reflects a continuing tension in Stuttgart between the inherited physical geography of the Kessel and the ambitions of a city that has twice hosted the FIFA World Cup, in 1974 and again in 2006, and that applied, unsuccessfully, for the 2012 Summer Olympics.