Salzburg, Austria


Salzburg, capital of the federal state of Salzburg, Austria, on the border with Germany, 65.6 km 2, (2019) 154 200 residents.

According to ehistorylib, Salzburg is located on the Salzach, to the north of its exit from the Salzburg Limestone Alps into the wide Salzburg Basin, 424 m above sea level. The city with its own statute is the administrative seat of the Salzburg-Umgebung district, the seat of a regional court and a Catholic archbishop.

The city is home to the Paris Lodron University (founded in 1622, closed 1810–1962), the Mozarteum University of Music and Performing Arts (1970–98 University), the Paracelsus Medical Private University (founded in 2003), and US study centers Universities (University of Portland Center, University of Redlands), University of Applied Sciences, Pontifical Philosophical Institute, International Research Center for Basic Questions in Science, Institute for Molecular Biology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences, European Academy of Science and Arts, Academy of Education, Academy of Religious Education and Institute of the Archdiocese, Institute for Spatial Research and numerous other public and private institutes, scientific institutions,International Mozarteum Foundation, which, in addition to the Bibliotheca Mozartiana, also houses the Mozart Archive (in Mozart’s birthplace).

There are several museums in Salzburg, including the Salzburg Museum Carolino Augusteum (with several branches, including musical instruments, toys, folklore), Salzburg State Collections Rupertinum (Museum of Modern Art), Baroque, Cathedral, Mozart Museum, House of Nature (80 showrooms, including Aquarium, space hall, dinosaur hall, world of the sea and human biology; also seat of the Austrian Nature Conservation Union), several archives and galleries. The large and small festival halls are famous for the Salzburg Festival (over 230,000 visitors annually), as is the state theater, among others. Theaters and cultural sites.

Salzburg is primarily a tourist attraction as well as a congress and trade fair city (exhibition halls built in 1973, expanded in 1976). Around four fifths of all employed people are employed in the service sector, especially in tourism and trade, the rest in industry and trade, especially in the food and luxury goods industry, metal processing (vehicles, metal goods, fittings), electrical and textile industries, in the Construction and wood processing (especially furniture construction).

Salzburg is also an important traffic junction on the border with Germany (Bavaria) and has an airport in the Maxglan district in the southwest of the city. Ten kilometers east of Salzburg is the automotive and motorcycle racing circuit Salzburgring.

History

On the site of the Roman Iuvavum (municipality since Claudius), which was laid out in the 1st century AD and fell into disrepair in the 5th century, St. Rupert founded the St. Peter monastery and the Nonnberg Benedictine monastery around 700 in a remaining settlement that became the seat of a bishop in 739 on the elevation of the same name. In addition to the monasteries and the cathedral, built by Bishop Virgil (745–784) in 767–774, a merchant settlement was built (name Salzburg first became 774), which was granted market and minting rights in 996.

In 1077 the first complex of the Hohensalzburg Fortress was built and the city expanded, which in the 12th century expanded to the right bank of the river and was connected to the episcopal city by a bridge. In the middle of the 13th century, the town under the rule of the bishop (town charter since 1368) was walled and received a council constitution. In 1511 and 1523 there were unsuccessful attempts to free themselves from episcopal rule.

In the 15th century, but especially from 1600 onwards, Salzburg experienced an economic boom due to its trade. It developed into a baroque city under Archbishop Wolf Dietrich von Raitenau (1587–1612) and his successors Markus Sittikus(1612–19) and Paris von Lodron (1619–53). The city, which was heavily fortified and expanded during the Thirty Years’ War, received a university in 1622.

At the beginning of the 19th century, due to the French and Bavarian occupation, the annexation to Austria and the abolition of the university, Salzburg largely lost its economic and cultural importance, which it only after 1860 (railway junction), but especially after the First World War, with the festival and the associated tourism and as the capital of the federal state of Salzburg and as an industrial location.

Salzburg, Austria

Salzburg after the First World War

From Stefan Zweig’s memories “The World of Yesterday” (1942)

Of all the small towns in Austria, Salzburg seemed to me the most ideal, not only because of its scenic location, but also because of its geographical location, because it was on the edge of Austria, two and a half hours by train from Munich, five hours to Vienna, ten hours to Zurich or Venice and twenty to Paris, that is a real repulsion point to Europe. Of course, it was not the rendezvous city of the ‘celebrities’ (otherwise I would not have chosen it as my place of work), famous for its festival (and in the summer it was snobbish), but an antiquarian, sleepy, romantic town on the last slope of the Alps, which gently merge there with mountains and hills into the German lowlands. The small, wooded hill on which I lived was, as it were, the last subsiding wave of this mighty mountain range; Inaccessible to cars and only to be climbed on a three-century-old Calvary path with more than a hundred steps, in exchange for this hardship, he offered a magical view of the roofs and gables of the multi-towered city from his terrace. Behind it the panorama widened over the glorious chain of the Alps (of course also to the Salzberg near Berchtesgaden, where a then completely unknown man named Adolf Hitler was soon to live across from me). The house [on the Kapuzinerberg] turned out to be as romantic as it was impractical. In the seventeenth century an archbishop’s hunting lodge and leaned against the mighty fortress wall, at the end of the eighteenth century it was enlarged by one room on the right and one on the left; a splendid old wallpaper and a painted cone ball,

Stefan Zweig lived in Salzburg from 1919 until his emigration in 1934; During these years he achieved world fame, his house on the Kapuzinerberg was a popular meeting place, among other things. by Hermann Bahr, James Joyce, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler, H. G. Wells, Franz Werfel and Carl Zuckmayr.

Zweig: Yesterday’s World. Memories of a European (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 31990), page 329 f.

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