City Portrait Jena
June 8, 2007
Wherever you happen to be in Jena, the "Keksrolle" ("cookie roll") is always in sight. This is the nickname the inhabitants have given the 122-meter (400-foot) high university tower that looms above all the rooftops and church steeples.
Also referred to as the "lange Elend" ("long misery"), it is among the few successful construction experiments from the communist era and appears modern even today.
The renown the city now enjoys has its roots in the university. The success story of Carl Zeiss, the university innovator who had a keen sense for business is one example of the city's claim to fame.
Optical pioneer and city patron
The age of modern industry began in Jena in the mid-1800s when Carl Zeiss, together with researchers Ernst Abbe and Otto Schott, laid the foundation for precision optical engineering. Their pioneering inventions -- astronomical instruments, microscopes and the first planetarium -- have since spread to every corner of the world.
To the advantage of their city, the scientists were also far-sighted in terms of financial matters. The companies they founded -- Zeiss precision optics and Schott and Gen. chemical plant -- boosted Jena's economy and attracted thousands of workers to the central German town.
With a part of his profits, Zeiss financed the construction of Jena's "Volkshaus," a large concert hall, as well as the reconstruction of the university's new main building.
A model city
The GDR used the Zeiss name with great pride. After the Second World War the Zeiss factories were nationalized and continued production.
Jena was regarded as a model socialist city, and the city was crowned with the ultra-modern research tower, a symbol of socialistic architecture. Originally intended to house the Zeiss enterprises, the building later became home to university scientists.
Star GDR architect Herbert Henselmann designed the tower in the form of a huge telescope. One of the most beautiful old squares in town was sacrificed to make room for the building. After Germany was reunified in 1990, the newly renovated building was bought by a software company.
Goethe and gingko
Even before Carl Zeiss, Jena was recognized as a scientific center. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe often traveled from Weimar to Jena to encourage the natural science studies there. The poet's discovery of the intermaxillary bone in the human mandible is still regarded as a medical sensation.
It is also said that Goethe was the first to have planted a gingko tree in Europe. Also called a "maidenhair tree," it can be seen along with 12,000 other cultivated plants from all of the earth's climate zones at Jena's Botanical Garden.
Jena -- the "storehouse of knowledge and science," as Goethe referred to the city -- attracted top minds in the 18th century. Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling, as well as Schiller and the Schlegel brothers, taught at the university, and Hölderlin, Novalis and Brentano sat in their lectures. Their names represent the glorious epochs of the German classical age and Romanticism.
Science meets money
As was the case in Zeiss' time, science and the economy are again forming alliances in Jena. In just a short time, the "boomtown of Thuringia" registered more listed start-ups than the western German financial metropolis of Frankfurt am Main.
According to McKinsey, consulting companies regard Jena as the second most important center of innovation in Germany, with Munich taking first place and Dresden third.