Erotic Island Marburg (D)

Marburg

Name origin

mar(c) (border designation between the territories of the Landgraves of Thuringia and the Archbishops of Mainz); burg refers to the castle complex, the beginnings of which date back to the 9th century AD

First documented mention

1138 AD

Population

77,000

Area

123.92 km²

Federal state

Hessen

Administrative region

Gießen

District

Marburg-Biedenkopf

Vehicle registration

MR, BID

River

Lahn

The club Erotic Island is located in Marburg-Wehrda.

Marburg is the eighth-largest city in Hessen and lies in the Lahn valley in the Marburger Bergland. Within the city area there are considerable differences in altitude. The highest hill within Marburg's city territory is the Störner, at 412 m above sea level, west of the actual town, northwest of the small district of Dilschhausen. The lowest point lies in the south of the city on the Lahn (173 m above sea level).

Marburg is an important university town; the Philipps-Universität, founded in 1527, is the oldest still-existing Protestant-founded university in the world and, through its buildings and students, decisively shapes the townscape. The Brothers Grimm, Otto Hahn, Hannah Arendt and Margot Käßmann studied here, and Martin Heidegger taught here. The town owes its name Marburg to the fact that the border ("mar(c)") between the territories of the Landgraves of Thuringia and the Archbishops of Mainz once ran through here. Marburg holds an outstanding significance for the course of Hessian history in particular, which is astonishing given the town's relatively compact dimensions.

The earliest beginnings of the castle complex go back to the 9th/10th century. The first documented mention of Marburg is recorded for 1138/39; as a town in the year 1222. Between 1248 and 1604 Marburg was — with a few interruptions — the residence of the Landgraves of Hessen-Marburg. In the age of the Reformation, the Landgraviate of Hessen was divided, according to the old inheritance rules within the Hessian princely house, among the four sons of the then-dominant Prince Philipp I: Wilhelm received the northern part, now called Hessen-Kassel, Ludwig received Hessen-Marburg, Philipp received Hessen-Rheinfels, and Georg received the southern part of the land, now called Hessen-Darmstadt. Since Philipp and Ludwig died childless in 1583 and 1604 respectively, these territories fell to the Kassel and Darmstadt lines. Marburg became part of the Landgraviate of Hessen-Kassel.

Darmstadt and Kassel waged war against each other over the Marburg inheritance for decades, partly within the larger context of the Thirty Years' War, in which Kassel fought alongside Sweden while Darmstadt fought on the side of the Emperor. The Kassel Landgravine Amalie Elisabeth began the Hessian War in 1645 with the siege of Marburg, which she was able to bring to a victorious conclusion three years later. Oberhessen was permanently divided: Marburg fell to Kassel, while Gießen and the Hessisches Hinterland with Biedenkopf fell to Darmstadt.

From 1807, the fortifications of the castle were razed in the course of the Napoleonic Wars. Later, Marburg became the capital of the Département de la Werra as part of the Kingdom of Westphalia under Jérôme Bonaparte, Napoleon's brother. At the Congress of Vienna in 1814/15, the Electorate of Hessen, to which Marburg was to belong from then on, was restored and was then a member of the German Confederation until its annexation by Prussia in 1866. After the annexation of Kurhessen by Prussia in 1866, the university experienced a boom, which led to rapid growth of the town. Within a few decades, the number of inhabitants tripled, while the number of students increased tenfold.

Many sights in Marburg recall the town's rich traditional past, including the Elisabethkirche, the Alte Universität, the Landgrafenschloss, and, below it, the old town, called "Oberstadt" in Marburg, which enchants with countless half-timbered buildings and historic buildings around the Rathaus. The historic old town core lies west of today's town centre, below the Landgrafenschloss (Marburg Castle); the bridge suburb, the former tanners' village of Weidenhausen on the other side of the Lahn, also has an old-town character.

For centuries, Marburg was also a garrison town. Its history as a garrison goes back to the time the town was founded. With the entry of Prussian troops into Kurhessen in 1866, Marburg became the base of the 11th Prussian Jäger Battalion; in the 20th century, units of the Reichswehr and the Wehrmacht followed, after the war troops of the Americans and the French, and finally the Bundeswehr, which, after reunification and the restructuring of the Bundeswehr in the mid-to-late 1990s, gave up the two barracks Jägerbergkaserne and Tannenbergkaserne.

Economically, too, Marburg is entirely shaped by its university. The three largest employers in the town are the Philipps-Universität Marburg, the privatised Universitätsklinikum Gießen und Marburg, which belongs to the Rhön-Klinikum group, and the former Behringwerke (pharmaceutical and medical technology industry), parts of which belong to the international companies CSL Behring, Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics and Novartis Behring (formerly Chiron Behring).

Among the town's well-known sons and daughters are the Saint and Landgravine Elisabeth von Thüringen, the town's patroness, Philipp I. von Hessen, Margot Käßmann, Nina Kronjäger and Lena Gercke.