History of the city of Giessen

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View of Giessen

founding

In 1152 Wilhelm von Gleiberg , who shared the county of Gleiberg with his nephew Otto, founded the Wasserburg Gießen . He then moved his seat from Gleiberg Castle to the valley five kilometers away. This marks the beginning of the settlement of Gießen. The first documented mention of the name "Giezzen" comes from the year 1197. The document contains an exchange of goods between the Arnsburg monastery and the Schiffenberg monastery . This was testified by Wilhelm's widow, Countess Salomon von Giezzen . However, it remains unclear in the document still preserved whether Giezzen was a moated castle or even a county of Gießen , which included the eastern part of the former county of Gleiberg.

On the way to the city

The first reliable documented sign of a Gießen settlement dates from 1231/32. 1248 casting was first attested as a town, but probably it received its town charter already in 1236 or 1237. mayor was in 1248 the tübingische Konrad, are receiving any more precise information about him. The first craftsman, a blacksmith, can be identified in 1255.

Between August 15, 1264 and September 29, 1265, Landgrave Heinrich I of Hesse acquired the city by purchase. He probably visited Giessen during this time too; However, there is no evidence of this. Only his visit on September 15, 1273 is documented. During the period from 1273 to 1280 the Landgrave had military conflicts with the Archbishopric of Mainz , with Giessen being of strategic importance to him. The number of castellans in the castle was increased to 16 to 19.

Presumably at the end of the 13th century a curtain wall was built around the settlement. A first public inn ( hospicium aliquod publicum ) was mentioned in 1288. Around 1300 the Hessian landgraves had the so-called old castle built. The new town was also laid out around 1300; It was first mentioned in a document in 1307, and a few years later, in 1325, Landgrave Otto I gave the settlers there the same rights as the inhabitants of the old settlement. 1307 was also reported for the first time by a city council; however, more precise information on these consules is not available.

There was a mayor from 1367 at the latest. This was on an equal footing with the lordly castle men. With the issue of a bond in June 1371 the mayor, the council and the aldermen of the city appear for the first time as issuers of a certificate. In 1430, Landgrave Ludwig I granted Giessen new city rights. In 1442 the city received the right to hold two annual markets , each of which should last one week.

The old town hall (destroyed in 1944) on the market square as a symbol of bourgeois power was built around 1450, the town church until 1484.

The first guild of the town was founded with the guild of wool weavers . The guild letter dates from June 15, 1460. On July 10, 1469, with a new edition on December 29, 1469, the tailors received a guild letter.

Modern times: until the university was founded and the French occupied it

At the beginning of the 16th century there were 54 craftsmen in the city; It is noticeable that there were seven hosts. The relatively high number for the time is probably explained by the trade route from Frankfurt to Kassel, which ran via Gießen. Otherwise Gießen was strongly influenced by agriculture. In the course of the Peasants' War , there were minor unrest in Gießen from the spring of 1525. The old city wall was removed by 1533 and a new wall was built around the now enlarged city. The construction of the old cemetery and the new castle also fell during this period . At the beginning of the 16th century, Gießen Castle was expanded at the behest of Landgrave Philip I , which meant an additional burden for the city of Gießen. So travelers could only enter Giessen during the day when the city gates were open, and the economy suffered as a result. The citizens had to provide security services and of course the fortifications had to be regularly repaired. On May 27, 1560, a major fire destroyed the northern part of the city around the Walltor . In 1573 the town was again granted the privilege of wine tavern.

With the division of the Landgraviate through Philip's death in 1567, Gießen became part of Hesse-Marburg . Because, in the opinion of Landgrave Ludwig IV of Hessen-Marburg, the guard duty at the fortifications of the city was insufficiently provided, a soldiers tax was introduced in 1575 , with which eight soldiers provided the duties of the citizens.

In 1586 Ludwig IV had an armory built, which was completed four years later. With the death of the Landgrave in 1604, Gießen became part of the Landgraviate of Hessen-Darmstadt .

City and fortress of Giessen around 1612
City view from the Topographia Hessiae 1655

In 1605, the Ludovicianum grammar school was founded as a Latin school by Landgrave Ludwig V.

On May 19, 1607, a privilege granted by Emperor Rudolf II enabled the establishment of the Protestant state university . Two years later, the Botanical Garden opened , one of the oldest in Germany, which is still in place.

In 1634/35 a severe plague epidemic decimated the city's population by around 1,200 people, 1/3 of the population of all strata of the population. In order to be able to gain more influence over the city, the sovereign issued an ordinance in 1740, according to which the XVIer Council would in future be made up of a third of government advocates . This hope was not to be fulfilled in later disputes. In 1722 a new city ordinance was issued, which regulated the relationship between the organs of the city, i.e. aldermen, XVIer and middle council. The middle council was effectively abolished, the 16th council had to accept the greater influence of the guilds for its decisions and was reduced to eight people. This reduction was later followed by a division into eight sixteenth for life, eight sixteenth councilors and eight deputies , who were elected by the citizens initially for life and later for three years.

In 1725 a bookshop was opened in Giessen, which was later taken over by Johann Christian Konrad Krieger . The Gießener Wochenblatt was founded in 1760, although it had to cease publication in 1776. In 1791 Georg Friedrich Heyer and four years later Heinrich Gottfried Stamm opened a bookshop in Giessen. This was a sign of increasing interest in literature. 1792 appeared Giessen weekly again and two years later in Giessen Intelligenzblatt renamed. At the end of the 18th century, Gießen was still heavily influenced by agriculture , although the seat of administration and justice, a garrison ( Hessen-Darmstädtisches Kreisregiment ) and the university.

The effects of the French Revolution and the subsequent coalition wars were only indirect in Giessen at first. The government in Darmstadt tightened censorship , the publisher JCK Krieger was sentenced to a fine for distributing the anti-religious scripture De tribus impostoribus and the philosophy professor Karl Christian Erhard Schmid lost his professorship. Continued to rise, the inflation and some buildings were seized by the military. Cartridges were manufactured in the theological auditorium and filled with powder in the legal lecture halls.

Upper Hesse, around Giessen . From an atlas from 1759

In July 1796, Giessen was also included in the fighting. The Austrian troops had to withdraw and so on July 8, 1796 the French marched into the city. On September 11th, Austrian soldiers, probably with the support of citizens of Giessen, managed to penetrate the city and capture a French company. Until September 18, there was fighting for the city, in which it was also shot at with artillery, but this caused only minor damage. After the Austrians were victorious, they set up their winter camp in the city, which resulted in a high burden of contributions for the population. The following year the Austrians withdrew, and so the city was handed over to the French general Michel Ney without resistance . For a short time before he moved to Wetzlar , the commander-in-chief of the French army, Lazare Hoche , set up his quarters in Giessen. Under threat of shooting two citizens, he demanded a fine of 100,000  francs for the treason of 1796. The occupation ended on December 19, 1798. Through the cooperation of the rector August Friedrich Wilhelm Crome and the later King Karl XIV. The complete sacking of the university library by the French are prevented. Despite everything, the war had been an immense burden on the city. In 1796, war-related costs of 29,500 guilders were incurred and in the first four months of 1797 another 8,500. There are no documents for the remainder of the occupation.

19th century

In 1803 Gießen became the administrative seat of the principality and later province of Upper Hesse in the Grand Duchy of Hesse . In 1806 the fortifications of Giessen were razed and the fortification trenches were filled. The resulting areas ( ramparts ?) Were given to the citizens as garden land .

At the beginning of the 19th century, the reform of the administrative structures began. For example, equality before the law was introduced for all residents. In 1811 a new mayor ordinance was introduced. This subordinated the mayor to the state, so that it was now primarily obliged to this and only secondarily to the municipality. However, it is not scientifically proven whether these arrangements could also be fully implemented in Gießen. Presumably, the state administration was due to insufficient assertiveness, z. B. due to tight budgets, forced to make compromises with previous leaders.

From 1824 to 1852 Justus von Liebig taught at the University of Giessen. In the revolutionary year of 1848 riots broke out in Giessen, too, and a student was killed. A year later, the city was connected to the German rail network with the opening of the Main-Weser Railway ( Frankfurt - Kassel ). The railway to Cologne followed in 1862, followed by the connection to the Lahn Valley Railway from Wetzlar to Koblenz in 1864 . From around 1860 the city grew beyond the ramparts.

From 1867 Gießen became a garrison town. The Vogelsbergbahn to Fulda opened in 1870 and the railway to Gelnhausen in 1872 . From 1879 to 1888 Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen taught at the University of Giessen. In 1893 what is now the largest church in the city, the Protestant St. John's Church on the southern complex, was inaugurated. The city ​​theater opened in 1907 . From 1894, there was public transport in Gießen , initially with horse-drawn buses, and since 1909 with an electric tram .

20th century

View of the city of Giessen (1919)

In 1925, the Volkshalle on Grünberger Strasse and Giessen Airport , which later became the US depot, opened.

With effect from November 1, 1938, the Nazi Reichsstatthalter in Hesse, in his function as leader of the state government, not only decreed the spin-off of the cities of Darmstadt, Mainz, Offenbach and Worms, but also of the city of Gießen from their previous district. Giessen became an independent city . By incorporating Wieseck , Klein-Linden and Schiffenberg, the population rose to 42,000 in 1939.

The more than 1,000 Jews from Giessen were deported to the Nazi extermination camps by the end of 1942 .

Air raids in World War II

Two devastating air raids by the British Air Force on December 2nd and (above all) December 6th 1944 destroyed almost the entire historic city center of Giessen, and hundreds of civilians were killed. The "war-important" railway systems and the numerous military installations, however, remained largely intact. In the months that followed, many more people died from low-flying attacks . On March 27, 1945, the entry of the American army ended the war for the destroyed city and freed the people of Giessen from the reign of terror. The city was 67% destroyed, the inner city 90%.

Emergency reception center after 1946

Family in the Gießen transit camp (1950)

At the end of October 1945, the military government of the USA informed the state government of Greater Hesse that in 1946 the country had to take in 600,000 displaced persons and refugees . At the beginning of February 1946, the first 1,200 people reached the city in freight cars. The transit camp , initially provisional, was not far from the train station. Since Gießen was an important rail hub, on May 7, 1947, the State Commissioner for Refugees turned it into a government transit camp for all refugees in Greater Hesse. In 1948, Lord Mayor Otto-Heinz Egler asked the regional council in Darmstadt to relocate the camp due to the high burden placed on the city's social budget by the refugees. Mayor Hugo Lotz later achieved financial compensation for the city through the country.

On September 1, 1950, the camp was renamed Gießen emergency reception center and was given nationwide competence. At that time, the proportion of displaced persons was already 20% of the total population of Giessen.

The Gießen emergency reception center was also a transit camp for refugees from the Eastern Zone who wanted to stay in the American occupation zone. Since the 1960s, it was the first stop for many be traveled DDR Nationals. In 1989 it experienced first the onslaught of East Germans who fled via Hungary and in autumn that of those who crossed the now open border legally.

In 1986 it was renamed the Federal Admission Office, today the Central Admission Office of the State of Hesse.

reconstruction

Architecture from the 1950s and remaining buildings from the Wilhelminian era shape the cityscape.

The reconstruction in progressive-minded Giessen was based on the teachings of modern urban planning : Old town plots were combined into large units, streets and plazas were expanded and public space was largely adapted to the interests of car traffic . In 1953 the last (previously extensively rebuilt) line of the Giessen tram was shut down, and trolleybuses ran instead (until 1968). The few streets in the city center that had been spared from the bombing raids were torn down, as well as partially preserved ruins such as the 500-year-old town hall. New buildings in the style of the 1950s and 1960s emerged, including the two city administration buildings (high-rise office building and town hall) on Berliner Platz (both of which have already been demolished due to dilapidation) and the congress hall . The arterial roads, the ramparts and the most important axes in the city center have been expanded into multi-lane roads. By 1975, many developed around casting highway including the part pieces, Giessen ring road (some highway).

Reorganization

On October 1, 1971, the population rose to 78,000 through the incorporation of Allendorf and Rödgen . On 1 January 1977. arose from Gießen, Wetzlar and 14 surrounding municipalities, the new city Lahn with 156,000 inhabitants as a regional center agents Hesse. Lahn-Gießen formed the larger of the two city centers. The Lahnstadt was dissolved on August 1, 1979 after only 31 months of existence. Gießen received the new district Lützellinden .

Territorial history and administration

The following list gives an overview of the territories in which Gießen was located and the administrative units to which it was subject:

Courts since 1803

In the Landgraviate of Hesse-Darmstadt , the judicial system was reorganized in an executive order of December 9, 1803. The “Hofgericht Gießen” was set up as a court of second instance for the province of Upper Hesse . The jurisdiction of the first instance was carried out by the offices or registry lords and thus the "Stadtamt Gießen" was responsible for Gießen. The court court was the second instance court for normal civil disputes, and the first instance for civil family law cases and criminal cases. The superior court of appeal in Darmstadt was superordinate .

With the establishment of the Grand Duchy of Hesse in 1806, this function was retained, while the tasks of the first instance were transferred to the newly created regional and city courts in 1821 as part of the separation of jurisdiction and administration. " Stadtgericht Gießen " was therefore the name of the court of first instance that was responsible for Gießen from 1821 to 1879.

On the occasion of the introduction of the Courts Constitution Act on October 1, 1879, the previous regional and city courts in the Grand Duchy of Hesse were repealed and replaced by local courts in the same place, as was the case with the higher courts, whose function was now taken over by the newly established regional courts. The districts of the city and regional court of Gießen were merged and now, together with the towns of Allertshausen and Climbach , which previously belonged to the district court of Grünberg , formed the district of the newly created district court of Gießen, which has since been part of the district of the newly established regional court of Gießen . Between January 1, 1977 and August 1, 1979, the court was called "District Court Lahn-Gießen", which was renamed "District Court Gießen" when the city of Lahn was dissolved. In the Federal Republic of Germany, the superordinate instances of the District Court of Gießen, the Regional Court of Gießen , the Higher Regional Court of Frankfurt am Main and the Federal Court of Justice are the last instance.

Population development

In 1495 there were 240 houses in Gießen with an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 inhabitants. There is a soul table from 1782 . After that there were 402 people in the princely governmental jurisdiction, 202 employees of the University, 3,198 citizens, 31 sojourners and 93 Jews. This does not include the soldiers, who are likely to have been under 400, and the students, who presumably provided fewer than 300 people.

year 1495 1577 1675 1782 1805
population 1,000-1,200 3,000 4,450 <5,000 5,174

 Source: Historical local dictionary

  • 1502: 273 men
  • 1577: 605 house seats
  • 1630: 636 house seats (313 over 30 years, 178 under 30 years), 121 widows, 116 guardians
  • 1669: 3531 souls
  • 1742: 14 clergymen / civil servants, 677 subjects, 85 young men, 46 bystanders / Jews
  • 1939: 46,557 inhabitants (together with the incorporations of Kleinlinden and Wieseck)
  • 1961: 66,292 inhabitants, of which 48,068 Protestant (= 72.51%), 14,381 Catholic (= 21.69%)
  • 2011: 76,838 inhabitants, 51.9% of them women
  • 2016: 85,216 inhabitants, 50.9% of them women
Giessen: Population from 1669 to 1981
year     Residents
1669
  
 3,531
1804
  
 4,946
1834
  
 7,878
1840
  
 8,473
1846
  
 8,696
1852
  
 9,065
1858
  
 8,992
1864
  
 9,484
1871
  
 12,245
1875
  
 13,985
1885
  
 19.002
1895
  
 22,924
1905
  
 28,769
1910
  
 31,153
1925
  
 33,600
1939
  
 46,557
1946
  
 39,709
1950
  
 46,709
1956
  
 58,178
1961
  
 66,178
1967
  
 73.061
1970
  
 80.208
1981
  
 76.092
Data source: Historical municipality register for Hesse: The population of the municipalities from 1834 to 1967. Wiesbaden: Hessisches Statistisches Landesamt, 1968.
Other sources:

literature

  • Ludwig Brake, Heinrich Brinkmann (Ed.): 800 years of Giessen history, 1197-1997. Gießener Anzeiger, Gießen 1997, ISBN 3-922300-55-3
  • Ludwig Brake (Ed.): From the castle to the modern city - 800 years of Gießen urban development 1197-1997. Gießener Anzeiger, Gießen 1998, ISBN 3-922300-56-1

Web links

Footnotes

  1. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history , p. 98
  2. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history , p. 97
  3. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history , p. 122
  4. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history , p. 101
  5. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history , pp. 105-106
  6. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history , p. 131
  7. ↑ a b 800 years of Giessen history , p. 132
  8. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history , p. 106
  9. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history, p. 132
  10. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history, p. 133
  11. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history, p. 134
  12. ↑ a b c Giessen, District of Giessen. Historical local dictionary for Hessen. (As of November 3, 2016). In: Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen (LAGIS).
  13. ^ Michael Rademacher: German administrative history from the unification of the empire in 1871 to the reunification in 1990. State of Hesse. (Online material for the dissertation, Osnabrück 2006).
  14. ^ Grand Ducal Central Office for State Statistics (ed.): Contributions to the statistics of the Grand Duchy of Hesse . tape 13 . G. Jonghause's Hofbuchhandlung, Darmstadt 1872, DNB  013163434 , OCLC 162730471 , p. 12 ff . ( Online at google books ).
  15. ↑ The affiliation of the Gießen office based on maps from the Historical Atlas of Hesse : Hessen-Marburg 1567–1604 . , Hessen-Kassel and Hessen-Darmstadt 1604–1638 . and Hessen-Darmstadt 1567–1866 .
  16. ↑ Hessen-Darmstadt state and address calendar 1791 . In the publishing house of the Invaliden-Anstalt, Darmstadt 1791, p.  169, 267 ( online at HathiTrust's digital library ).
  17. ↑ Wilhelm von der Nahmer: Handbuch des Rheinischen Particular-Rechts: Development of the territorial and constitutional relations of the German states on both banks of the Rhine: from the first beginning of the French Revolution up to the most recent times . tape 3 . Sauerländer, Frankfurt am Main 1832, OCLC 165696316 , p. 6 ( online at google books ).
  18. ↑ Latest countries and ethnology. A geographical reader for all stands. Kur-Hessen, Hessen-Darmstadt and the free cities. tape  22 . Weimar 1821, p. 413 ( online at Google Books ).
  19. ^ Ordinance on the implementation of the German Courts Constitution Act and the Introductory Act to the Courts Constitution Act of May 14, 1879 . In: Grand Duke of Hesse and the Rhine (ed.): Grand Ducal Hessian Government Gazette. 1879 no. 15 , p. 197–211 ( online at the information system of the Hessian state parliament [PDF; 17.8 MB ]).
  20. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history, p. 120
  21. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history, p. 119
  22. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history, p. 120
  23. ↑ 800 years of Giessen history, p. 119
  24. ↑ https://www.giessen.de/media/custom/684_17785_1.PDF?1517997994
  25. ↑ https://www.giessen.de/media/custom/684_17785_1.PDF?1517997994