“Jena, that’s that prefab city,” is what the motorists speeding along the motorway past the huge, concrete apartment buildings from the GDR era say. If, however, you choose to travel to the Thuringian city on the River Saale by train, you will find yourself in the middle of a verdant paradise. Jena is ambivalent and utterly imperfect. Which is precisely why our author Nancy Droese finds her city so appealing.
By Nancy Droese
My telescope is from there
Built for the ZEISS company in the 1970s, today the Jentower is home to offices and a luxury hotel complete with gourmet restaurant on the top floors. | Photo (detail): Adobe
Anyone from Jena knows the situation all too well: Someone asks, “Where are you from?” and the answer “Jena” generally results in bemused silence. Then you try to explain: “Have you heard of the Zeiss company?” Response: “Ah yes, of course, they made my camera lens!” Jena is considered the heart of the German optics and precision mechanics industry. It was home to Carl Zeiss, Ernst Abbe and Otto Schott – the ultimate triumvirate in optics and glass. Accordingly, the city is still closely intertwined with the industry today. Jena’s most visible landmark – the 144.5-meter-high, round Jentower – was built for the Zeiss company in the 1970s. Ultimately though, Zeiss never moved in because the high, glass, slightly undulating tower proved less than suitable for housing high-precision technology. Today, a number of companies have office space here, and visitors can stay in the luxury hotel complete with gourmet restaurant that occupies the upper floors. The public viewing platform on the 28th floor offers a fantastic view. You will sound like a knowledgeable insider if you refer to the building in the middle of downtown as the “biscuit roll”. Just a few minutes’ walk away is another spectacular 360° panoramic view in Germany’s longest-serving planetarium.
The city next door to Weimar
“O, who rides by night thro’ the woodland so wild?” Jena commemorated the Erl-King from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s eponymous poem with a statue. | Photo (detail): Adobe
It takes a trained eye to see the signs that Jena was once a stronghold of poets and thinkers as you walk through the city. It has long since ceded the “city of the classics” title to neighbouring Weimar. But the list of commemorative plaques is long, as the true “Who’s Who” of the intellectual scene enjoyed hanging out here in the 1800s. Goethe spent a lot of free time in Jena – in part, wicked tongues would have it, to escape staid Weimar and his wife – and invited Schiller to join him. Today, countless white enamel signs on the walls of Jena’s buildings indicate who else was around then, such as Romantics Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Christoph Wilhelm Hufeland and from the circle of early Romantics Ludwig Tieck, the Schlegel brothers, Caroline Schlegel, Dorothea Veit and many more. The “Göhre” city museum is a good place to learn more. The Romantics also have their own museum in the “Romantikerhaus”, as does Schiller, whose garden house bears witness to the life and work of the poet the university was named after. The imposing statue of the “Erlkönig” (Erl-King) at the edge of a romantic pond a bit outside the Ostviertel in the east is another reminder of grandmaster Goethe.