Jena Audioguides

In 1794, Goethe and Schiller met at the University of Jena and began one of German literature's defining friendships. Fichte lectured here. Hegel finished his Phenomenology of Spirit in a house near the market square in 1806, the night before Napoleon's army marched through. The early German Romantic movement - Novalis, the Schlegel brothers, Tieck - made Jena their gathering place for a decade that changed European thought. For a city of 110,000 people in a river valley in Thuringia, that is an unusual inheritance.

Carl Zeiss opened his optical workshop here in 1846, and with Ernst Abbe and glassmaker Otto Schott, turned Jena into a world center for precision optics.

Zeiss lenses went into microscopes, telescopes, and cameras that changed what scientists and photographers could see. The company is still headquartered here, alongside multiple Max Planck Institutes, and Jena consistently ranks among Germany's most research-intensive cities. Germany's first high-rise building, Bau 15, rose here in 1915.