History of the city of Dessau
This article deals with the history of the city of Dessau in Saxony-Anhalt .
From the beginnings to the residence (until the end of the 15th century)
Stone Age finds indicate early settlements in the region. A continuous history of the settlement can only be written from the High Middle Ages , whereby individual districts or suburbs of Dessau, which emerged around the year 1000, are older than the actual city.
Dessau itself emerged as a trading center west of the Mulde at the intersection of an east-west running trade route, where a bridge over the Mulde and a mill have been documented since 1180, with north-south running trade routes on the last flood-proof elevation before crossing the Elbe. The first known documentary mention is from 1213 as Dissowe . The derivation of the name is controversial and can be interpreted both Slavic (from tis = yew tree) and Germanic as a rushing floodplain . Dessau was surrounded by several Slavic and Sorbian villages. Due to its location on an Elbe crossing, Dessau developed into a regional center and since 1471 has been the permanent residence of a line of the Princes of Anhalt , starting with Prince Ernst, and thus the capital of the prince and later duchy of Anhalt-Dessau and Anhalt . Due to the small spatial extent of Anhalt-Dessau and the dominant position of the princes, the history of the city in the next few centuries can hardly be separated from the history of Anhalt-Dessau.
The royal seat (end of the 15th century until the Thirty Years War)
In 1488 the council was able to buy the prince's jurisdiction for what was then the city. However, the city was unable to achieve any further sovereignty over the princes. Lively construction activity by Prince Ernst and his successor Johann (new construction of the Marienkirche from 1506, new construction of the castle from 1530), stacking rights for goods transported on the Elbe, the expansion of the Elbe crossing with a ferry, the bridge since 1580 as well as construction activities and court rulings led to an economic boom, so that the city was expanded to the east and south beyond its fortifications as early as the 16th century.
The Princely House was initially hostile to the Reformation . A princes' convention in Dessau in 1526 led to the Dessau Association of Catholic Princes. But as early as 1534, the Lord's Supper was served for the first time in the Protestant rite in St. Mary's Church, and in 1540 the municipality finally converted to Protestantism.
The Thirty Years War stopped the economic upturn. Dessau was repeatedly passed through by all warring parties, as the Roßlauer Elbe Bridge in the north of Dessau, unlike the bridges in Wittenberg and Magdeburg, was the only bridge on the Middle Elbe that was not protected by a fortress. In 1626 imperial troops under Wallenstein and Protestant troops under Mansfeld clash at the Elbe bridge , which ended with a victory for the imperial. Imperial forces held the bridge until the capture of Magdeburg in 1631 and then had it destroyed. Continuous billeting, requisitions and catering for the troops, contributions , and obligations for fortification work impoverished town and country, even demarches by the prince to the emperor could not change that. Added to this was the drying up of trade flows and a plague epidemic at the end of the 1620s.
The time of absolutism
Dessau was only able to recover from these events towards the end of the 17th century. Through his marriage to Henriette Catharina von Nassau-Oranien, Prince Johann Georg II had created a direct connection to the then rich Netherlands, through which economic impulses also radiated to Dessau. Active recruitment from settlers makes the population rise again. The first Jews also came to the city and settled in the Sandvorstadt. For the first time in over 100 years, the city was expanded again, this time to the north ( Neustadt ), and a new church, St. Johannis (construction started in 1690), was built. As early as 1682, the destroyed Elbe bridge was replaced by a yaw ferry . In addition, the first manufactories emerged.
The son of Johann Georg II, Prince Leopold I , often called the Old Dessauer , who ruled from 1698, continued his father's construction work. The Johanniskirche was completed and consecrated in 1702, and in 1706 the water town Dessau was expanded for the first time across the Mulde to the east. The old city wall, over which the city had long since grown, was torn down and replaced by a new city wall that led far outside the city. But this did not serve more defensive purposes, but to secure the revenue of 1704 introduced by Leopold excise duty , which was collected at five city gates, she is a role model who later erected in Berlin Akzisemauer .
Following the example of the Berliner Strasse Unter den Linden , Leopold had a boulevard west of the city, the Kavalierstrasse, built and built with a city palace for some of his sons in order to promote the development of the street. Further palaces for the children of the princes were built in the city ( Palais Dietrich , completed in 1752, Palais Waldersee , completed in 1795), and from 1752 to 1757 by a daughter of Leopold, Anna-Wilhelmine , Mosigkau Castle in what is now a district. Leopold had the north wing of the city palace demolished, opening it up towards the city in a U-shape.
In order to intensify trade, the Leopoldshafen harbor on the Elbe, which is still in use today, and a granary on the Elbe were built at the location of today's Kornhaus excursion restaurant , which go back to Leopold. The Elbe bridge was first restored as a pontoon bridge and then again as a permanent bridge in 1739.
After the death of the old Dessauer in 1747, he was followed by his son Leopold Maximilian , who built the Leopolddankstift in 1748, the tower of which, based on the model of the Santo Spirito Hospital in Rome, is one of Dessau's landmarks (today: Museum of Natural History).
The time of enlightenment
As the guardian of the underage Prince Leopold III. , later also called Father Franz , his uncle Dietrich initially administered the principality. Dietrich began with the first school reforms. In 1758 Franz took over the reign after he had resigned from the Prussian army - in the middle of the Seven Years' War - and had declared Anhalt-Dessau to be neutral. The contributions imposed and the marching through of foreign troops strained the reserves of the principality (and also of the princely house) to the utmost.
After the end of the war, Franz embarked on extensive gentlemanly journeys, the impressions of which he implemented in the form of far-reaching reforms. In addition to external redesign with the design of numerous parks, such as the Lustgarten, the Luisium in 1774, the Georgium by the younger brother Johann Georg in 1780 and the Kühnauer Park , infrastructure measures such as the strengthening of the dykes after a severe flood in 1771, the paving of roads and the introduction were made a street lighting (from 1779) the most important results of these activities.
An educational reform made school education possible for all children, even if Franz was not yet able to bring himself to compulsory schooling. The Philanthropinum by Johann Bernhard Basedow , opened in 1774, became a much-noticed experiment in new forms of teaching. The secondary school on Kavalierstraße later became the backbone of school education in Dessau.
Franz promoted start-ups in the media industry. An official gazette and news paper appeared from 1763. The Allgemeine Buchhandlung der Schehrten was founded in 1781 in order to make scientific authors independent from publishers. The Chalcographic Society made copperplate engravings affordable for a large number of people. The first German-language Jewish newspaper Sulamith has been published in Dessau since 1806.
A permanent theater ensemble had existed in Dessau since 1794, which from 1797 was given a permanent house on Kavalierstrasse in the court theater built by Erdmannsdorff with over 1,000 seats and established the theater tradition in Dessau, which is continued today by the Anhaltisches Theater .
Construction work, which was mainly carried out by Erdmannsdorff, included the extension of Kavalierstrasse to the south, modifications to the city palace, new buildings for the main guard house and orangery, the Luisium and Georgium country houses and numerous buildings in the city. The first municipal cemetery in Germany, the historic cemetery, was built just outside the city gates .
Even if Franz did not achieve lasting success for all of Franz's reform projects, there was lively educational tourism to Dessau. Many great minds of the time wanted to see the "model state of Anhalt" (as Karl Marx said 70 years later) with their own eyes, whose reputation radiated far into Europe.
Franz also maintained neutrality during the Napoleonic Wars . On his advance to Berlin in 1806, after the battle of Jena and Auerstedt, Napoleon chose the route via Dessau and stopped there. Franz was able to avert contributions from the country, but had to tolerate frequent billeting of French troops. Street names and house numbers in Dessau date from this time in order to logistically manage the billeting. In 1809 the irregular Ferdinand von Schill traveled through Dessau and had his appeal to the Germans printed there.
Franz died at an advanced age in 1817, and his work still has an impact today as a UNESCO World Heritage Site Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm .
From the residential to the industrial city
In 1832, Duke Leopold Friedrich issued a new town code for Anhalt-Dessau, which also granted Dessau limited rights of self-government. The wealthy middle classes were then allowed to elect city councilors.
Dessau was still predominantly characterized by agriculture. The main export items were wool and grain. Customs barriers to Prussia and Saxony and the small domestic market of Anhalt prevented the emergence of larger manufactories and industrial companies. The connection to the Anhalter Bahn railway network in 1840 to Köthen and a year later to Berlin did not change much, just like the establishment of Anhalt-Dessauische Landesbank AG in 1847, the first central bank in Germany as a stock corporation. The first larger companies were established in the food (breweries), textile and mechanical engineering industries.
Harvest failures at the end of the 1840s led to famines which, together with heightened political demands by the bourgeoisie, culminated in the March Revolution of 1848. The newly elected state parliament for Anhalt-Dessau met in the concert hall of the court theater, on October 29, 1848 a constitution was passed that aims to combine the sentence “All powers come from the people” with a constitutional monarchy. Prussian troops reinstated the rule of the grace of God in November 1850.
In 1855, the Deutsche Continental Gasgesellschaft was founded in Dessau with a share capital of 500,000 Thaler. The first member of the board was Victor von Unruh . The company built the company premises near the train station, which is the first time the city grew outside the 150-year-old excise wall.
This was the starting signal for industrialization, followed by other companies such as the mechanical engineering company BAMAG, the plant manufacturer Polysius , a sugar refinery, large breweries and others. The trading house Seiler successfully operates a mail order company for fabrics and cloths. Inventors such as the automotive pioneer Friedrich Lutzmann and Hugo Junkers worked in Dessau. Junkers founded his first company for the production of gas calorimeters in 1892, Hugo Junkers, civil engineer , which later became a group with the manufacture of u. a. Bath stoves, water heaters, and, world-famous, airplanes grew.
In 1886 Contigas built a power station on Wallstrasse, the second in Germany after Berlin. The first buildings in the city with electricity were the court theater and the ducal palace .
The population increased accordingly. It took Dessau 600 years to have 10,000 inhabitants, but the population has now quintupled within 50 years to 50,000 inhabitants at the turn of the century. New residential areas emerged in the north, west and south of the city. Both a central water supply and the sewer system were built. In 1894 the first tram, initially as a gas train , was electric since 1900.
With the expiry of the ducal lines in Köthen (1847) and Bernburg (Saale) , the duchies of Anhalt-Bernburg , Anhalt-Dessau and Anhalt-Köthen merged to form a unified duchy of Anhalt with Dessau as the capital. For the administration of the country which has grown authorities House , a four-storey building built with the footprint of a football field. The station was relocated and got a new, more representative building in 1876 (architect Franz Schwechten ). Kaiserstraße (today's Fritz-Hesse-Straße) is the new entrance to the city with hotels and generously proportioned apartments in the Wilhelminian style, soon popularly known as the “million quarter”, between the train station and the official building. In 1901 the new, greatly expanded town hall was built in the neo-Romanesque style.
On the edge of the Georgium, Schwechten built a mausoleum with an aluminum dome for the ducal family in 1898. Only the name of the Resurrection Chapel is modest on the building, with which the 500-year construction activity of the Askanians in Dessau ended.
The 20th century
With the end of the First World War in 1918, the existence of the duchy also ceased, and Dessau became the capital of the Free State of Anhalt that had emerged from the duchy.
An important milestone in the history of the city was the arrival of the Bauhaus art college from Weimar in 1925 ( Walter Gropius , Ludwig Mies van der Rohe , Wassily Kandinsky , Paul Klee ). The move from Thuringia was already under political pressure. In 1931 the NSDAP won 15 of the 36 seats in Dessau in the municipal elections. The four votes of the members of the magistrate also counted in the city council. As in Anhalt and in the Reichstag, the NSDAP did not have an absolute majority and was dependent on other right-wing parties. On January 21, 1932, the NSDAP submitted a motion to “demolish the building”, which was rejected by 25 to 15 votes; a decision to “cancel the funds” was postponed by just under 20 to 19 votes. By replacing two members of the magistrate, the National Socialists got a majority in the city council that summer. Accompanied by the liberal mayor Fritz Hesse , the architect visited on July 8, 1932 Paul Schultze-Naumburg , who on May 21, 1932. Prime Minister of the Free State of Anhalt elected Alfred Freyberg , the city council, Hofmann and the city council summer (all NSDAP), the Bauhaus dessau . On August 22, 1932, at the request of the NSDAP parliamentary group, the Dessau municipal council passed a resolution to dissolve it, with the SPD abstaining and the mayor voting against and the four votes from the KPD, on October 1, 1932. Mies van der Rohe then led it for a short time private institution in Berlin.
On April 1, 1935, the city of Roßlau (Elbe) was incorporated into the city of Dessau in order to help Dessau as the Gau capital to the required population of at least 100,000.
In the November pogrom of 1938 the Dessau synagogue was destroyed and the ruins later removed.
The Zyklon B produced in Dessau's Zuckerraffinerie GmbH was used for killing purposes between 1942 and 1945 in the gas chambers of the Majdanek, Mauthausen, Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück, Stutthof and Neuengamme concentration camps .
→ Main article: Air raids on Dessau
Dessau suffered severe damage during World War II from a total of 20 Allied bombing attacks as part of the Area bombing directive from 1940 to April 1945. The production facilities of the Junkers works and other armaments companies, such as Berlin-Anhaltische Maschinenbau AG ( BAMAG ), suffered serious damage as early as 1944 as a result of which, among other things, the production of the Junkers factories was largely outsourced. A bombing on May 28, 1944, and especially a night attack by British bombers on the night of March 7, 1945, destroyed the city on a large scale. In this attack, 1,700 tons of incendiary and high-explosive bombs were dropped from 520 heavy, four-engined Lancaster bombers, including many air mines. 700 people died. Even today this is remembered annually by the church bells ringing at night. At the end of the war, 88 percent of the city center was destroyed (information from the administration at the time; many buildings were only partially destroyed). Except for the surrounding walls, the following churches were destroyed : the castle and town church of St. Mary, the Johanniskirche (formerly Neustädter church), the parish church of St. George and the St. James church, the St. Paul church was badly damaged. The ducal buildings fell victim to the attacks: the castle (east and south wings destroyed, west wings burned out), the pleasure garden, the pavilions, the riding arena and stables, the orangery, the Neue Hauptwache and the guest house (except for the surrounding walls). Public buildings were destroyed: the main train station and the old theater , at the state theater the stage and the interior. The Bauhaus was badly hit, the Bauhaus director's house destroyed, the Masters' Houses damaged. The Schlossplatz development and the “booths” were lost, along with countless architecturally and historically valuable buildings by the nobility and citizens in the city.
The districts west of the Mulde and south of the Elbe were taken by the US Army at the end of April 1945. Due to the agreements made between the Allies, the US Army stopped its advance on the Mulde, or the Elbe, the suburbs east of the Mulde and north of the Elbe (Rosslau) were captured by the Red Army in early May 1945. Until the US Army withdrew from Central Germany in early July 1945, Dessau was a divided city. Rosslau was spun off again after the end of the war (April 1, 1946).
After the Second World War, Dessau came with the entire state of Anhalt and the Prussian province of Saxony to the new state of Saxony-Anhalt , which became part of the GDR in 1949 . The state of Saxony-Anhalt only existed until 1952. Dessau then belonged to the Halle district as the second largest independent city .
The old town, which was destroyed in the war, was largely rebuilt after the demolition of most of the war ruins in the 1950s / 60s, initially with buildings in the neo-baroque style, then later in panel construction. Only a few historical buildings, such as the town hall , were restored, so that the character and aura of the baroque royal seat was finally lost.
In the course of the reunification of the two German states, the state of Saxony-Anhalt was re-established in 1990 and Dessau was the capital of the administrative district of Dessau, which was dissolved again on January 1, 2004 .
After the collapse of the GDR, many industrial plants in Dessau had to close. Some of them were unprofitable or markets and business foundations were withdrawn from them due to the collapse of the Comecon (e.g. Waggonbau Dessau). However, some were also bought up and closed by competitors for the purpose of adjusting the market . As a result, unemployment in and around Dessau rose to more than 20%. As a result of the migration, especially of the younger population, Dessau has lost around 25% of its population since 1990.
After 1990, the preserved wing of the former residential palace and St. Mary's Church, the external shape of which has once again shaped the cityscape, were restored and used culturally. Throughout the city, buildings were renovated, industrial wasteland revitalized, roads built and other infrastructure measures pushed ahead.
In 2000, Dessau was the location for correspondence at EXPO 2000 in Hanover . For this purpose, various structures were erected or renovated and an expo path was laid out. This EXPO 2000 path with its 25 stations connects objects from different epochs that are important in terms of urban development history.
The 21st century
In 2002 Dessau was hit hard by the flood of the century , despite the number of 4,000 organized and 4,000 volunteer helpers. The entire district of Waldersee was flooded up to two meters high - millions of euros in damage.
In 2004, the Dutch queen visited Beatrix attended by the then Federal President Horst Köhler , the Bauhaus , the granary and the Dessau-Wörlitz . She then paid a visit to the nearby Oranienbaum, which is associated with her royal family Oranien-Nassau .
On January 1, 2005, the communities of Brambach and Rodleben from the Anhalt-Zerbst district were incorporated into the city of Dessau. Further incorporations ( Quellendorf , Vockerode , Wörlitz ) were sought in accordance with the corresponding votes of the population.
In January 2005, the death of an asylum seeker Oury Jalloh caused a sensation at home and abroad. The man from Sierra Leone was handcuffed and burned in a police prison cell. In December 2008, two police officers charged with this were acquitted as they could not be proven guilty.
Between 2005 and 2007, Dessau came into the focus of the judiciary and the media because of allegations against its police force, of having prematurely stopped investigations into right-wing extremist crimes and the Oury Jalloh case.
On July 1, 2007, the city of Dessau merged with the city of Roßlau to form the joint twin city of Dessau-Roßlau in order to be able to maintain the city's status as the third regional center in Saxony-Anhalt.
In February 2010, the Dessau funding affair became known, which led to the establishment of a committee of inquiry in the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt , which presented its final report in December 2015.
In May 2016, the murder of Chinese student Li Yangjie occurred .
Language development (dialect)
A regionally colored High German is spoken in Dessau nowadays . The dialects in Saxony-Anhalt , however, have a characteristic dialect in the region around the former residential cities of Dessau , Köthen (Anhalt) and Bernburg (Saale) and in some cases also Zerbst . A typical regiolect is the Anhalt dialect ("Das Anhaltische"), which is cultivated here in book literature as prose and also as poetry up to the present day . This dialect encompasses a settlement area of the former principalities and later duchies of Anhalt-Dessau , Anhalt-Köthen , Anhalt-Bernburg with temporarily Anhalt-Plötzkau and partly to the north of Anhalt-Zerbst .
Others
On March 13, 1695, the wife of a bricklayer gave birth to twins after only five months of pregnancy. The girls - grown together at the front ribs - were not viable. Although they had their own limbs, kidneys and bladders, they shared important internal organs such as the heart, liver, lungs, stomach and spleen.
References
literature
- Franz Brückner : House Book of the City of Dessau , Volumes 1 to 25, published by the Dessau City Archives, 1971 to 1997
- Worthy / Heese: The Dessau Chronicle 1924 , reprinted by Funk-Verlag Hein Dessau, 2000
- Dessau calendar , 1957 ff., Published by the Dessau City Archives
- Hermann Laundry : History of the City of Dessau , 1901 (Reprint 1988)
- Dessau - A small chronicle of the city with company portraits , ETRO-Verlag Bad Soden, 1998
- Renate Kroll: Dessau (Stadtkreis Dessau) in the fate of German monuments in the Second World War . Volume 2. Ed. Götz Eckardt. Berlin, Henschel-Verlag 1978
Footnotes
- ^ Renate Kroll in Fate of German Architectural Monuments in World War II . Edited by Götz Eckardt, Henschel-Verlag Berlin 1978. Volume 2, pp. 305–323
- ↑ n-tv.de, acquittal for police officers - "Verdict a shame" , Dec. 8, 2008 ( Memento from December 11, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Mitteldeutscher Rundfunk, tumults at the Dessau-Roßlau Regional Court - acquittals in the Oury-Jalloh trial , December 8, 2008 ( Memento of December 8, 2008 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Mitteldeutsche Zeitung, Dessau-Roßlau - Police acquitted after Oury Jalloh's death , Dec. 8, 2008
- ^ Nico Wingert, Dessau: Police affair: Why three successful neo-Nazi fighters lost their jobs. In: Spiegel Online . July 7, 2007, accessed June 10, 2018 .
- ↑ Georg Müller: Mei Anhalt, where I am. Dialect stories and poems. Compiled and edited by Gunnar Müller-Waldeck . Anhalt Edition, Dessau 2009, ISBN 978-3-936383-15-7 .
- ↑ Heribert Pistor: De Rickfahrkoarte or: Nochwas uff Aanhalt'sch. Hundreds of dialect poems in Anhalt dialect. Anhalt Edition Dessau, Dessau-Roßlau 2018, ISBN 978-3-936383-29-4 .
- ^ Johann Christoph Bekmann : Historie des Fürstenthums Anhalt, volume 1, p. 54, reprint of the Zerbst 1710 edition as Anhaltina reprint no. 1, Anhaltische Landesbücherei Dessau, Dessau, 1993, ISBN 3-930386-00-3