10 largest cities in Germany
Berlin
Hamburg
Munich
Cologne
Frankfurt am Main
Hanover
Dusseldorf
Leipzig
Bremen
Dresden
The city of Merseburg, with around 34,000 inhabitants and a
former imperial palace, is located in the south of the state of
Saxony-Anhalt, around 10 km south of Halle. In addition to Halle and
Bitterfeld-Wolfen, it is a center of the “chemistry triangle”.
Merseburg is heavily industrialized by the chemical plants Buna
(north), Leuna (south) and the former open-cast lignite mine
(Geiseltal) and coal refining to the west.
Although one of
the oldest cities in the region (first documented mention in the 9th
century) and a former bishop's seat, Merseburg today has a rather
torn townscape with little due to the war damage in World War II and
the reconstruction in the GDR times that was not based on historical
models coherent old building fabric. The two most important
buildings (cathedral and castle), located on a hill, protrude from
this.
The neighboring towns of Leuna and Schkopau, which have
grown together with Merseburg, are dealt with in this article.
In the early and high Middle Ages, Merseburg was one of the most
important cities in what is now Central Germany. It was first
mentioned in a document around 890. History connoisseurs associate
it above all with the so-called “Merseburg magic spells”, a
collection of pagan incantations written in Old High German from the
9th or 10th century. In 968, Emperor Otto I founded the Merseburg
diocese. The city, which at that time was still near the eastern
border of Germany, remained an important religious center with its
Benedictine abbey and Romanesque cathedral until the 16th century.
Merseburg was one of the preferred palatinates of Emperor Heinrich
II. The diocese of Merseburg was comparatively small, but included
such important cities as Leipzig.
In the middle of the 16th
century the Reformation found its way into Merseburg. The
Benedictine abbey was dissolved and the territory of the diocese was
annexed by the secular electorate of Saxony. From the middle of the
17th to the 18th century Merseburg was the residence of a branch of
the Saxon dukes. After the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the city came
under Prussian rule and became the administrative seat of a
government district to which the south of the province of Saxony
(corresponds roughly to today's southern Saxony-Anhalt, including
the much larger city of Halle) belonged.
In the beginning of
the 20th century, Merseburg and especially its suburb of Schkopau
became locations for the chemical industry. The Buna Works in
Schkopau were founded in 1936 as part of the National Socialists'
self-sufficiency policy (i.e. independence from raw material
imports) and were the first place where rubber was synthesized on a
large scale. During the division of Germany, plastic and elastane
from Schkopau in the GDR was a well-known term for plastics. Large
parts of the historic old town were replaced by "socialist" new
buildings. After reunification, many workers lost their jobs because
the factories, which were now largely unprofitable, had to close or
massively change their production. Merseburg lost around a third of
its population compared to the 1980s, and in 2015 the city still had
around 34,000 inhabitants. The Buna works are now a subsidiary of
the US group Dow Chemical.