Tübingen


Tübingen is a traditional university city in central Baden-Württemberg, Germany, south of the state capital, Stuttgart. With students accounting for almost one in three of Tübingen's 90,000 residents, the city has one of the youngest profiles in Germany, with an average age of just under 40.
Founded in 1477, Eberhard Karl University is one of the oldest universities north of the Alps. The university associated Tübingen in the 19th century with the German-patriotic student Burschenschaften, whose large fraternity houses are still a notable feature of the town; in the years between the World Wars, with the rise of National Socialism; and in the German Federal Republic with the emergence of the liberal-left Greens, currently the largest tendency in local government.
Exceptionally, Tübingen survived the Second World War with its historic fabric almost wholly intact. It has since experienced two major expansions: in the 1960s the construction of university institutes and new housing on the high ground to the north, and following the end of the Cold War, and the evacuation of extensive military bases by the French, the new mixed-use Loretto and French Quarter to the south.
WWW Official SiteFB tuebingen.de

Location

Tübingen developed around the base of the fortress Schloss Hohentübingen and of the Stiftskirche zu St. Georg, the collegiate church, and on both sides of the Neckar and Ammer rivers.
Immediately north of the city lies the Schönbuch, a densely wooded nature park. The Swabian Alb mountains rise about to the southeast of Tübingen. The Ammer and Steinlach rivers are tributaries of the Neckar river, which flows in an easterly direction through the city, just south of the medieval old town. Large parts of the city are hilly, with the Schlossberg and the Österberg in the city centre and the Schnarrenberg and Herrlesberg, among others, rising immediately adjacent to the inner city.
The highest point is at about above sea level near Bebenhausen in the Schönbuch forest, while the lowest point is in the city's eastern Neckar valley. The geographical centre of the state of Baden-Württemberg is in a small forest called Elysium, near the Botanical Gardens of the city's university.

History

The area was probably first settled in the 12th millennium BC. The Romans left some traces here in AD 85, when, in confrontation with the local Alamanni, they built a limes frontier wall at the Neckar River. The local castle, Hohentübingen, has records going back to 1078, when it was besieged by Henry IV, King of Germany.
In the middle of the 12th century, the local the Counts of Zollern were raised to Imperial Counts Palatine, with their seat in Tübingen. By 1231, Tübingen was a civitas, indicating recognition by the Crown of civil liberties, a market and a court system. In the later decades of the 13th century, the town saw the establishment an Augustinian, and a Franciscan, monastery, and a Latin school. In 1342, the town and castle passed to the Counts of Württemberg.
The Stiftskirche was built between 1430 and 1470. Its collegiate offices contributed to the founding in 1477 of the university by Count Eberhard V, later the first Duke of Württemberg. It was to develop as one of the most influential places of learning in the Holy Roman Empire, particularly in theology. Today, the Eberhard Karl University is still the largest source of income for the residents of the city and one of the biggest universities in Germany with more than 26,000 students.
Faced with a popular rebellion, in the Treaty of Tübingen 1514, Eberhard's successor, Duke Ulrich, was obliged to submit to co-governance with the assembled Estates and to concede freedom of movement, profession, and enterprise, achievements that were still being fought for in other German states in 1848. In recognition of the treaty, the town assumed the right to bear the Ducal stag antlers above its blazon on its coat of arms.
In 1535, after recovering his bankrupted Duchy from a prolonged imperial-Hapsburg occupation, Duke Ulrich declared for the [Lutheranism|reformed Lutheran faith] and seized church property. The religious division in Germany contributed to the Thirty Years' War during which the town was successively occupied by the Catholic League, by the Swedes in 1638, and by the French, and was devastated by plague.
In 1789, parts of the old town burned down, but were later rebuilt in the original style. In 1798 the Allgemeine Zeitung, a leading newspaper in early 19th-century Germany, was founded in Tübingen by Johann Friedrich Cotta. At his residence, the Cottahaus, a sign commemorates Goethe's stay of a few weeks while visiting his publisher: "Hier kotzte Goethe".
From the beginning of the 19th century, the town grew significantly beyond its medieval borders for the first time with the rectangular Wilhelmsvorstadt at the Neue Aula and the old Botanical Garden.
In the so-called Gôgenaufstand of 1831, journeymen and winegrowers marched through the town in protest against police brutality, singing singing a hymn to freedom from Friedrich Schiller's drama Die Räuber. The local authorities appealed for help to the officially banned Burschenschaften, and armed student security guards were deployed against the insurgents. They relied on students once more during the Tübinger Brotkrawall of 1847.
In 1861, with the opening on the right bank of the Neckar of today's main train station, Tübingen was connected to the Royal Württemberg State Railways network.
In 1873, the 10th Württemberg Infantry Regiment was quartered in barracks erected behind the station, the later Thiepval Kaserne so named for the village where the regiment suffered heavy losses during the First World War Battle of the Somme in 1916. A second barracks, later named the Loretto Kaserne, was built in 1913, and a third, the Hindenburg Kaserne was constructed in the course of National Socialist rearmament in the 1930s.
Tübingen had been a regional stronghold of National Socialism before Hitler's ascent to power in January 1933. The university became a leading centre for research on the "Jewish question", with faculty in both the sciences and humanities contributing to the notions of "racial hygiene" that informed the genocidal policies of the new regime. On Kristallnacht, November 9, 1938, the Nazi Stormtroopers burned down the Tübingen Synagogue. Of the 23 members of synagogue who remained in Tübingen at the outbreak of war, only two survived the Shoah.
In 1934, in a rare instance of resistance to the new order, Corps Suevia, one of the university's typically nationalist and conservative student Burschenschaften, refused an order to exclude Jewish students and was dissolved.
There were three bombing raids on the town during Second World War, but damage was comparatively slight: the Neckar Bridge and some 85 houses. In April 1945, the town was surrendered to the French who were to remain as occupiers until the creation of the German Federal Republic in 1949, and as an allied garrison until the end of the Cold War in 1991.
Consistent with the role of the Marshall Plan in post-war reconstruction, the United States also had a presence in the town. Originally the Amerika Haus, the German-American Institute, at the Neckar Bridge continues to promote English-language classes and "cultural exchange".
In 1946, under the French, Tübingen served as the capital of the consolidated state of Württemberg-Hohenzollern, but in 1952, in a further amalgamation, it was absorbed in the federal state of Baden-Württemberg with its capital in Stuttgart.
In the second half of the 20th century, Tübingen's administrative area was extended beyond what is now called the "core city" to include several outlying small towns and villages. Most notable among these is Bebenhausen, a village clustered around a castle and Bebenhausen Abbey, a Cistercian cloister about north of Tübingen. The enlargement accommodated a 1958 general development plan for hills overlooking the town from the north, which included, a new botanical gardens, natural sciences institute and contemporary art museum.
Following the departure of the French in 1992, the vacated Thiepval Barracks served as a hostel for asylum seekers and German immigrants from Eastern Europe, and the Loretto and Hindenburg barracks were redeveloped as the new mixed-use French Quarter. Success in developing the new district has been followed up, more recently, by a car-free, courtyard-cluster project in the Derendingen district, and an extensive renovation of the Waldhäuser Ost district featuring timber-hybrid construction methods.
In the 1960s, Tübingen was one of the centres of the German student movement and of the protests of 1968, which made an issue of perceived continuities between the Federal Republic and the Hitler regime. In a town in which neither of the major federal parties, the SPD and the CDU, could command majorities, in 1980 the generation of '68 helped promote a new electoral force. Since 2004, the Greens have been the largest party in the local council. In the 2024 local elections, they commanded over a third of the vote.

Overview

, the city had 90,000 inhabitants. Life in the city is dominated by its roughly 28,000 students. Tübingen is best described as a mixture of old and distinguished academic flair, including liberal and green politics on one hand and traditional German-style student fraternities on the other, with rural-agricultural environs and shaped by typical Lutheran-Pietist characteristics, such as austerity and a Protestant work ethic, and traditional Swabian elements, such as frugality, order, and tidiness. The city is home to many picturesque buildings from previous centuries and lies on the River Neckar.
, the German weekly magazine Focus published a national survey, according to which Tübingen had the highest quality of life of all cities in Germany. Factors taken into consideration included the infrastructure, the integration of bicycle lanes into the road system, a bus system connecting surrounding hills and valleys, late-night services, areas of the city that can be reached on foot, the pedestrianised old town, and other amenities and cultural events offered by the university. Tübingen is the city with the youngest average population in Germany.

Main sights

In central Tübingen, the Neckar divides briefly into two streams, forming the elongated Neckarinsel, famous for its Platanenallee with high plane trees, which are around 200 years old, and for the National Socialist-themed memorial to the composer and Volkslied collector, Friedrich Silcher.
Pedestrians can reach the island via stairs on the narrow ends leading down from a bridge spanning the Neckar, and by a smaller foot bridge nearer the middle of the island. During the summer, the Neckarinsel is occasionally the venue for concerts, plays, and literary readings. The row of historical houses across one side of the elongated Neckarinsel is called the Neckarfront and includes the house with adjoining tower where poet and philosopher Friedrich Hölderlin spent the last 36 years of his life, as he struggled with mental instability.
Tübingen's Altstadt survived World War II due to the city's lack of heavy industry. The result is a growing domestic tourism business as visitors come to wander through one of the few completely intact historic Altstädte in Germany. The highlights of Tübingen include its crooked cobblestone lanes, narrow-stair alleyways picking their way through the hilly terrain, streets lined with canals, and well-maintained traditional half-timbered houses.
Old city landmarks include the city hall on Markt Square and the Hohentübingen Castle, now part of the University of Tübingen. The central landmark is the Stiftskirche. Along with the rest of the city, the Stiftskirche was one of the first to convert to Martin Luther's protestant church. As such, it maintains several "Roman Catholic" features, such as patron saints. Below the Rathaus is a quiet, residential street called the Judengasse, the former Jewish neighborhood of Tübingen until the city's Jews were expelled in 1477. On the street corner is a plaque commemorating the fate of Tübingen's Jews.
The centre of Tübingen is the site of weekly and seasonal events, including regular market days on the Holzmarkt by the Stiftskirche and the Marktplatz by the Rathaus, an outdoor cinema in winter and summer, festive autumn and Christmas markets and Europe's largest Afro-Brazilian festival.
Students and tourists also come to the Neckar River in the summer to visit beer gardens or go boating in Stocherkähne, the Tübingen equivalent of Oxford and Cambridge punts, only slimmer. A Stocherkahn carries up to 20 people. On the second Thursday of June, all Stocherkahn punts take part in a major race, the Stocherkahnrennen.
Bebenhausen Abbey lies in the village of Bebenhausen, a district of Tübingen. A subdivision of the pilgrimage route known as the Way of St. James starts here and runs through Tübingen.

Government

Tübingen is governed by the mayor, elected by citizens every eight years, and by the municipal council, elected by citizens every five years. The current mayor is Boris Palmer, first elected in 2007 and, after the relatively conservative positions he had taken on a number of issues, including immigration, caused him to be dismissed by the Green Party, to a third term in 2022 with 52% of the vote as an independent
Tübingen's council decided that the city should be climate-neutral by 2030. In 2022, the city was the first in Germany to tax disposable food packaging. Restaurants in Tübingen are charged 50 cents per disposable cup and cardboard bowl, and 20 cents per piece of cutlery.

Regional structure

Tübingen is the capital of an eponymous district and an eponymous administrative region (Regierungsbezirk), before 1973 called Südwürttemberg-Hohenzollern.
Tübingen and Reutlingen with a population of over 100,000 form a large centre of the Neckar-Alb region. Both cities are based on a different heritage and always belonged to different administrative entities. While they both had a long lasting rivalry they also complement each other. Reutlingen is more business oriented and industrialized and is successful in engineering and trade, while Tübingen excels in education and science, specialized health care and arts. The double centre is surrounded by smaller cities and connected to Albstadt, Balingen, Hechingen, Metzingen, Münsingen, Rottenburg, that each form middle centres and contribute to the high population density of the region.
Administratively, it is not part of the Stuttgart Region, bordering it to the north and west. However, the city and northern parts of its district can be regarded as belonging to that region in a wider regional and cultural context.

Districts

Tübingen is divided into 22 districts, the city core of twelve districts and ten outer districts :
Core city districts:
  • Französisches Viertel
  • Österberg
  • Schönblick/Winkelwiese
  • Lustnau
  • Südstadt
  • Universität
  • Waldhäuser Ost
  • Wanne
  • Weststadt
  • Zentrum
Outer districts:

Culture

Tübingen has a notable arts culture as well as nightlife. In addition to the full roster of official and unofficial university events that range from presentations by the university's official poet in residence to parties hosted by the student associations of each faculty, the city can boast of several choirs, theatre companies and nightclubs. Also, Tübingen's Kunsthalle, on the "Wanne", houses two or three exhibits of international note each year.

Events

There are several festivals, open air markets and other events on a regular basis:
  • January
  • * Arab Movie Festival Arabisches Filmfestival
  • April
  • * Latin American Movie Festival CineLatino
  • May
  • * Internationales Pianisten-Festival
  • * Rock Festival Rock im Tunnel
  • June
  • * Poled boat race, second Thursday of June, 2pm, around the Neckar Island
  • * Ract!festival, an alternative open air festival for free with music performances and workshops
  • * Tübinger Wassermusik: concerts on Stocherkahn boats
  • July
  • * Stadtfest: gastronomy and performances in the streets of the old town
  • * Tübinger Sommerinsel festival: various restaurants serving special meals and associations offering activities on the Neckar Island
  • August
  • * Tübinger Orgelsommer: organ concerts in the Stiftskirche
  • * Sommerkonzerte in the former monastery of Bebenhausen
  • * Kennen Sie Tübingen? : special guided tours on Mondays July–September
  • September
  • * Vielklang: classic music concerts at several locations
  • * Umbrisch-Provenzalischer Markt, open air market for Italian and French products from Umbria and Provence
  • * Tübinger Stadtlauf the city 10 km race
  • * Retromotor oldtimer festival
  • October
  • * Jazz- und Klassiktage: jazz and classic music festival
  • * Kite festival Drachenfest on the Österberg hill
  • * French movie festival Französische Filmtage
  • November
  • * Terre de femmes movie festival FrauenWelten
  • December
  • * Nikolauslauf half marathon outside Tübingen in the forest
  • * Die Feuerzangenbowle film and large amount of Feuerzangenbowle drink made in a public square
  • * Chocolate festival chocolART
  • * Christmas market

Population

Population development

Since World War II, Tübingen's population has almost doubled from about 45,000 to the current 88,000, also due to the incorporation of formerly independent villages into the city in the 1970s.
Currently, Lord Mayor Boris Palmer has set the ambitious goal of increasing the population of Tübingen to 100,000 within the next several years. To achieve this, the city is closing gaps between buildings within the city proper by allowing new houses to be built there; this is also to counter the tendency of urban sprawl and land consumption that has been endangering the preservation of rural landscapes of Southern Germany.

Climate

Tübingen has an oceanic climate, Cfb in the Köppen climate classification.

Twin towns – sister cities

Tübingen is twinned with:
For their commitment to their international partnership, the Council of Europe awarded the Europe Prize to Tübingen and Aix-en-Provence in 1965. The city's dedication to European understanding is also reflected in the naming of several streets and squares, including the large Europaplatz outside the railway station.

Infrastructure

By plane: Tübingen is about from the Baden-Württemberg state airport.
By automobile: Tübingen is on the Bundesstraße 27 that crosses through Baden-Württemberg, connecting the city with Würzburg, Heilbronn, Stuttgart and the Landesflughafen to the north and Rottweil and Donaueschingen to the south.
By rail: Tübingen Hauptbahnhof is the terminus of several train lines and a major railway hub. There is the regional train line Neckar-Alb Railway-Bahn from Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof via Esslingen and Reutlingen to Tübingen. The average time of travel to Stuttgart is 1:01 hrs., with some trains taking only 45 mins. Other regional lines are the Hohenzollerische Landesbahn, connecting the city with Hechingen and Sigmaringen, Zollernalbbahn and connections to Herrenberg and Horb. Since 2009, there is also a daily direct Intercity link to Mannheim, Cologne and Düsseldorf as well as to Berlin.
Local public transport: The city, due to its high student population, features an extensive public bus network with more than 20 lines connecting the city districts and places outside of Tübingen such as Ammerbuch, Gomaringen and Nagold. There are also several night bus lines in the early hours every day. A direct bus is available to Stuttgart Airport as well as to Böblingen and Reutlingen.

Sport

Tigers Tübingen are the city's only professional sports team, playing basketball. They play in the Paul Horn-Arena. Women's Handball-Bundesliga team TuS Metzingen hosts its home games at the Paul Horn-Arena.

Education

Higher education and research

The Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen dates from 1477, making it one of the oldest in Germany. Including the university hospitals, it is also the city's largest employer. The town is also host to several research institutes including the Max Planck Institutes for Biological Cybernetics, Developmental Biology, Intelligent Systems, The Friedrich Miescher Laboratory of the MPG, and the Max Planck Institute for Biology, the Hertie Institute for Clinical Brain Research, the Werner Reichardt Centre for Integrative Neuroscience and many others. A modern technology park is growing in the northern part of the city, where science, industrial companies and start-ups are conducting joint research, primarily on biotechnology and artificial intelligence. The university also maintains a botanical garden, the Botanischer Garten der Universität Tübingen. Furthermore, there is a Protestant College of Church Music.

Schools

More than 10,000 children and young adults in Tübingen regularly attend school. There are 30 schools in the city, some of which consist of more than one type of school. Of these, 17 are primary schools while the others are for secondary education: four schools are of the lowest rank, Hauptschule, three of the middle rank, Realschule, and six are Gymnasien. There also are four vocational schools and three special needs schools.
Primary schools
  • Freie Aktive Schule Tübingen
  • Grundschule Innenstadt / Silcherschule
  • Grundschule Weilheim
  • Ludwig-Krapf-Schule
  • Grundschule Hügelstraße
  • Französische Schule
  • Dorfackerschule Lustnau
  • Grundschule Hirschau
  • Grundschule Hechinger Eck
  • Grundschule auf der Wanne
  • Grundschule Aischbach
  • Grundschule Bühl
  • Grundschule Bühl
  • Grundschule Kilchberg
  • Grundschule Hagelloch
  • Grundschule Pfrondorf
  • Grundschule Unterjesingen
Hauptschulen
Realschulen
Gymnasien
  • Carlo-Schmid-Gymnasium
  • Geschwister-Scholl-Schule
  • Kepler-Gymnasium
  • Uhland-Gymnasium
  • Wildermuth-Gymnasium
  • Freie Waldorfschule
Vocational schools
  • Gewerbliche Schule
  • Wilhelm-Schickard-Schule
  • Mathilde-Weber-Schule
  • Bildungs- und Technologiezentrum

People

Sport

Alumni from the university