Jena Walking Tour

You are standing on the market square by the Hanfried. First look across at the town hall: two houses under two steep roofs, with an eight-sided Baroque tower between them since 1755. The clock is home to the Schnapphans, the snapping head. Every full hour the wooden head snaps at a golden ball held out by a pilgrim, while an angel rings a bell. The head is painted oak from around 1500. The one on the tower today is a copy; the original is in the town museum here on the square. The saying goes that if he ever catches the ball, Jena will perish. The Schnapphans is the Caput, one of the Seven Wonders of Jena. The bronze man behind you is Elector John Frederick the Magnanimous, whom Jena calls the Hanfried. He raises a sword and holds an open Bible. Johann Friedrich Drake made the statue, and it was unveiled in 1858 for the university's three hundredth anniversary. The elector led the Protestant princes of the Schmalkaldic League and lost the Battle of Mühlberg on April 24, 1547. With it he lost Wittenberg and its university. While still a prisoner, he founded a school of higher learning in Jena in 1548. Now walk north through the Marktgässchen, about one hundred metres, to the town church.

You are standing on the south side of St Michael's, Jena's town church. The town council began this late Gothic hall church around 1380, and it was finished in the sixteenth century. Inside is Martin Luther's original bronze grave plate. Lucas Cranach the Elder designed it, and it was cast in Erfurt. It was meant for Luther's grave in Wittenberg, but because of the Schmalkaldic War it never got there. In 1571 the Duke of Weimar gave the plate to the University of Jena, and it has been in this church ever since. Walk round the east end of the church in a moment. A vaulted passage runs right under the high altar there: the Ara, another of the Seven Wonders. It was the way into the convent of Cistercian nuns founded behind the church in 1301. Not far from here stood the house of the mathematician Erhard Weigel, a professor in Jena. He fitted it with a lift and with devices for watching the sky. His house is one of the Seven Wonders too. It was pulled down in 1898. Now follow the street Hinter der Kirche, then Weigelstrasse and Jenergasse north, just over four hundred metres, to the planetarium. On the way you pass the Botanical Garden.

You are standing in front of the Zeiss Planetarium. The idea came from Oskar von Miller of the Deutsches Museum in Munich, who asked Carl Zeiss in Jena in 1913 whether the night sky could be shown artificially. From 1919 the engineer Walther Bauersfeld developed a projector that throws the stars onto a dome. This building opened on July 18, 1926, with a dome about twenty-five metres across. Today it is the oldest planetarium in the world that is still running. Right next door is the university's Botanical Garden. It goes back to a garden of medicinal herbs that the university laid out in 1586 to teach its medical students, and it is counted as the second oldest botanical garden in Germany. It moved to its present site in 1794, after years of effort by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, then in the service of the Duke of Weimar. A large ginkgo from Goethe's time, more than two hundred years old, still grows in the garden. Now walk south-west along the street Am Pulverturm, just under five hundred metres. You reach the Powder Tower first, then St John's Gate.

You are standing on Johannisplatz in front of St John's Gate. The gate is first recorded in 1304, and it is the only gate left from the medieval town wall. Between this gate and the Powder Tower, which you just passed, a stretch of that wall still stands. Behind it rises the JenTower. Hermann Henselmann designed it as a round tower in the shape of a telescope, and it was finished in 1972. It was planned as a research building for the state-owned Carl Zeiss Jena works. Then the university moved in and stayed until the mid-1990s, and locals called it the university tower or the biscuit roll. With its antenna it is almost one hundred and sixty metres tall, and the viewing platform is more than one hundred and twenty metres above the town. To make room for it, the old quarter around the Eichplatz, which had largely survived the Second World War, was demolished in 1969. Now walk past the foot of the JenTower south to Kollegiengasse, just over two hundred metres, to the Collegium Jenense.

You are standing in front of the Collegium Jenense, a former monastery. This is where the university was founded. In 1548 the school that the Hanfried on the market square had set up as a prisoner began teaching in this monastery. In 1557 Emperor Ferdinand the First granted the privilege that turned the school into a university, and it was formally opened on February 2, 1558. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the Collegium was the centre of the university. The rector and the deans had their seats here, there were lectures and ceremonies, and members of the university were buried here too. In the early eighteenth century Jena was among the largest universities in Germany. The Latin rhyme of the Seven Wonders of Jena comes from this student world. Anyone who could recite it and explain each wonder showed that he had really studied in Jena. You have already seen two of them: the snapping head on the town hall and the Ara under the altar of the town church. Now walk west across the campus on Ernst-Abbe-Platz to Carl Zeiss Square, just under four hundred metres.

You are standing on Carl Zeiss Square in front of an eight-sided building that looks like a small temple. It is the memorial to Ernst Abbe, designed by Henry van de Velde and built from 1909 to 1911. Inside are bronze reliefs by Constantin Meunier and a marble bust of Abbe by Max Klinger. Most of the cost was paid by donations from the people of Jena. Abbe was born in Eisenach in 1840. Carl Zeiss had opened a workshop in Jena in 1846, and from 1866 Abbe worked with him. He calculated the microscopes that had been built by trial and error before. In 1889 Abbe set up the Carl Zeiss Foundation, which soon owned the works. The staff got paid holidays, a share of the profits, pensions and, around 1900, the eight-hour day. During the Second World War, Carl Zeiss forced more than eight thousand people to work in its Jena plants, prisoners of war and civilians deported from many European countries; those from the Soviet Union were held in fenced camps. Now cross the square to the south and walk down the Schillergässchen, just under five hundred metres, to Schiller's garden house.

You are standing at Friedrich Schiller's garden house. Schiller had come to Jena in 1789 as a professor of history. In the spring of 1797 he bought this house and garden, then outside the town, and spent his summers here until 1799. Here he finished Wallenstein, worked on Mary Stuart and wrote many of his ballads. When Goethe was in Jena, the two often sat in the garden at an oval stone table that is still there. Later Ernst Abbe lived here, from 1878 to 1886, as director of the observatory. In 1881 he met the glass chemist Otto Schott for the first time in this house. The university has carried Schiller's name since November 10, 1934, his one hundred and seventy-fifth birthday, when the Nazi regime was celebrating him as a "national poet". This is the end of the tour. Jena Paradies station is just under five hundred metres away, and Jena West, with trains to Weimar and Erfurt, is just over six hundred metres.