Offenbach am Main


Offenbach am Main is a city in Hesse, Germany, on the left bank of the river Main. It borders Frankfurt and is part of the Frankfurt urban area and the larger Frankfurt Rhein-Main urban area. It has a population of 138,335.
In the 20th century, the city's economy was built on machine-building, leather-making, typography and design, and the automobile and pharmaceutical industries.

History

The first documented reference to a suburb of Offenbach appears in 770. In a document of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto II dating to 977 exists the first mention of the place of Offenbach. During the Middle Ages Offenbach passed through many hands. Only in 1486 could the Count Ludwig of Isenburg finally take control of city for his family, and 1556 Count Reinhard of Isenburg relocated his Residence to Offenbach, building a palace, the Isenburger Schloß, which was completed in 1559. It was destroyed by fire in 1564 and rebuilt in 1578.
In 1635, Offenbach was given to the Landgraves of Hesse-Darmstadt, but it was returned to the Isenburg-Birstein Count in 1642. It remained in that principality until 1815, when the Congress of Vienna gave the city to the Austrian Emperor, Francis I. A year later it was given to the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt.
Always very close to the city centre of Frankfurt, Offenbach was a popular location for business. The town has its own trade fair, and many companies have opened facilities here because there are fewer restrictions and no closed businesses. French Protestants came in the 17th century and settled in Offenbach and contributed to making Offenbach a prosperous city, e.g., bringing knowledge of tobacco with them and turning Offenbach into a centre for rolling cigars. The town was more cosmopolitan than Frankfurt; famous people such as Goethe and Mozart visited it several times.
The Rumpenheim Palace and its park were a popular destination for monarchs in the 19th century. The city was thereafter ruled by Grand Dukes of Hesse and by Rhine until the monarchy was abolished in 1918. Offenbach became the center of the traditional design with figures such as the architect Hugo Eberhardt, the typographer Rudolf Koch, the bookbinder and designer Ignatz Wiemeler and Ernst Engel and the painter Karl Friedrich Lippmann.
During the Second World War, a third of the city was destroyed by Allied bombing, which claimed 467 lives. With the new district Lauterborn the city was expanded to the south in the 1960s. On the border with Frankfurt, the office district Kaiserlei was built. Offenbach is a so-called "Sozialer Brennpunkt" because of unemployment, poverty, gang related crime and migration.
Before its eradication in the Holocaust, the city had a Jewish population. Jews settled in the city as late as the late 16th century, and it is believed that out of the 871 residents of the town as of 1829, the 40 Jewish families accounted for nearly a quarter of the town's population. They also established their own cemetery.

Geography

Subdivision

The inner city area of Offenbach is quite large and consists of the historic center of the city and its expansions of the 1800s. Three formerly independent suburbs were incorporated in the first half of the 20th century: Bürgel being the first in 1908, then Bieber and Rumpenheim in 1938 and 1942.
South of the inner city area are the suburbs Lauterborn, Rosenhöhe and Tempelsee. Kaiserlei is a commercial district in the far west of the city bordering Frankfurt. In the west Waldheim is a residential neighborhood on the city limits with Mühlheim am Main. In 2010 the eastern part of the city center was officially named Mathildenviertel, as the area was already unofficially called by the locals.
Unlike most larger cities in Germany, Offenbach was not completely divided into districts. Only the nine neighborhoods mentioned above were officially districts, leaving the largest parts of the city officially unnamed. Although specific names for neighborhoods and areas were already in use among the locals and residents.
In June 2019, the city council approved a new act that subdivides the city's area entirely into 21 districts. The nine existing districts largely remained the same, most of them were even expanded. The new districts were laid out after the already by locals commonly known neighborhoods, such as the Westend, the Nordend or Buchhügel. A completely new name was only needed to be found for one neighborhood south of the city center, which never had commonly used name before: Lindenfeld. The name derived from an old name of a land lot in this area, when it was still fields in agricultural use prior to the 1800s.
As of July 2019, there are the following 21 districts:
  • Bieber
  • Bieberer Berg
  • Buchhügel
  • Buchrain
  • Bürgel
  • Carl-Ulrich-Siedlung
  • Hafen
  • Kaiserlei
  • Lauterborn
  • Lindenfeld
  • Mathildenviertel
  • Musikerviertel
  • Nordend
  • Offenbach-Ost
  • Rosenhöhe
  • Rumpenheim
  • Senefelderquartier
  • Tempelsee
  • Waldheim
  • Westend
  • Zentrum

    Climate

Offenbach experiences a temperate oceanic climate. Due to its location in the Upper Rhine Plain, the whole Rhein-Main Metropolitan Region generally experiences one of the warmest climates in Germany, making it possible to grow plants such as vineyards, palm trees and olive trees.

Governance

Mayor

The current mayor of Offenbach is Felix Schwenke of the Social Democratic Party. He was first elected in 2017, and was re-elected for a second term in 2023.
The following is a list of mayors since 1824:
  • 1824–1826: Peter Georg d'Orville
  • 1826–1834: Heinrich Philipp Schwaner
  • 1834–1837: Peter Georg d'Orville
  • 1837–1849: Jonas Budden
  • 1849–1859: Friedrich August Schäfer
  • 1859–1867: Johann Heinrich Dick
  • 1867–1874: Johann Martin Hirschmann
  • 1874–1882: Hermann Stölting
  • 1883–1907: Wilhelm Brink
  • 1907–1919: Andreas Dullo
  • 1919–1933: Max Granzin
  • 1947–1949: Johannes Rebholz
  • 1950–1957: Hans Klüber
  • 1957–1974: Georg Dietrich
  • 1974–1980: Walter Buckpesch
  • 1980–1986: Walter Suermann
  • 1986–1994: Wolfgang Reuter
  • 1994–2006: Gerhard Grandtke
  • 2006–2018: Horst Schneider
  • 2018–: Felix Schwenke

    City council

The Offenbach city council governs the city alongside the mayor. The most recent city council election was held on 14 March 2021, and the results were as follows:
! colspan=2| Party
! Lead candidate
! Votes
! %
! +/-
! Seats
! +/-
! colspan=3| Valid votes
! 32,424
! 96.1
!
!
!
! colspan=3| Invalid votes
! 1,308
! 3.9
!
!
!
! colspan=3| Total
! 33,732
! 100.0
!
! 71
! ±0
! colspan=3| Electorate/voter turnout
! 94,827
! 35.6
! 2.7
!
!

Twin towns – sister cities

Offenbach am Main is twinned with:
Offenbach has a large non-German population. In 2016, foreign nationals made up 37% of the population. The largest communities are, in that order, from Turkey, Greece, Romania, Poland and Italy.
As of 2019, residents with a migration background enumerated 88,608, or 63.4% of the population, while Germans without a migration background enumerated 51,241 residents. Nearly one-in-three, 29.5%, of foreign residents originate from Europe, particularly from countries like Romania, Greece, Bulgaria, Poland, Croatia and Italy.
According to census data, Offenbach and Duisburg had the highest share of Muslim migrants of all German districts in 2011. Muslims were between 14% and 17% of the city's population as of 2011. Turks made up 11% of the city's population in 2019.

Population history

Until the end of the 17th century, Offenbach remained a small town with less than a thousand inhabitants. With the coming into power of the count Johann Philipp in 1685, the city began to develop and the population rose steadily. In the 19th century the city became industrialized and the population increased even tenfold.
Offenbach is one of the German cities where Germans without migrant background make up a minority of the population. As of 31 December 2012, approx. 44.3% of residents or 55,047 people had no foreign background. In contrast to that, there were 55.7% or 69,214 people with at least one non-German grandparent. The largest of those groups are:
CountryPopulation
Turkey

Economy

Until the early 1970s, Offenbach was dominated by the machine-building and leather industries. The city hosts the German Association for Electrical, Electronic and Information Technologies to this day. The Deutscher Wetterdienst, commonly abbreviated as DWD,, residing in the Westend district.
Offenbach was also the European center of typography, with Gebr. Klingspor and Linotype moving to nearby Eschborn in the 1970s and MAN Roland printing machines still a major employer today. Typography and design still remain important with a cluster of graphic design and industrial design companies, as well as the university level Hochschule für Gestaltung Offenbach am Main design school and the Klingspor Museum.
In recent years Offenbach has become a popular location for a wide array of services, especially from the transport sectors. Offenbach is the host to the European headquarters of Honda, Hyundai Motors and Kumho Tires.

Arts and culture

Attractions

In Offenbach there is no specific Old Town, but there are several buildings which survived bombing during the war and have been restored. One of them is the Neo-baroque palace Büsingpalais with the Büsingpark, reconstructed in the 1980s. Today it is used as a congress center close to the Sheraton hotel. Between the shopping area and the Main, is the Lilipark and the Lilitemple, named after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's fiancée Lili Schönemann. The most important building is the Isenburger Schloss, a renaissance palace from 1576. It is today used by the Offenbach Design University which is next to it. There is also a neoclassic palace in the borough Rumpenheim, the Rumpenheimer Schloss it now serves exclusively as domestic dwellings but the park is public.
  • Isenburger Schloss, a Renaissance building, now used by the Offenbach Design University
  • Büsingpalais with Büsingpark
  • Wilhelmsplatz a square with coffee houses and three times a week a market.
  • Buildings of the French Protestant Church and the French Protestant Community.
  • Rumpenheim Palace.
  • Former Synagogue "Capitol".
  • The Westend Quarter.
  • Several art deco apartment houses.
  • Buildings by early 20th century architect Hugo Eberhardt: "Heyne" Factory, main building of the Design University, AOK Insurance building.
  • Prefabricated houses by Egon Eiermann in Lauterborn