Leverkusen Audioguides

Leverkusen exists because of a chemist. In 1861, Carl Leverkus built a dye factory in the rural lowland between Cologne and Dusseldorf and named the resulting settlement after his family home in Lennep. Bayer AG took over the factory in 1891, moved its headquarters here in 1912, and never really left. The company shaped the city so thoroughly that when Leverkusen was formally incorporated in 1930 by merging four surrounding communities, it was posthumously named for the same man who had brought industry to the fields.

Aspirin was developed here in 1897 by Felix Hoffmann at the Bayer laboratories.

So was heroin, synthesized the same year by the same chemist, a detail the corporate museum presents with more forthrightness than you might expect. The Bayer Kulturhaus and the Erholungshaus theater, which the company has run for its workers since 1908, give the city a cultural infrastructure that most cities its size cannot afford independently. The Leverkusen Jazz Days, held since 1980, have drawn Miles Davis, Ray Charles, and Chick Corea to a city that, on paper, has no obvious reason to be a jazz capital.