LEIPZIG IN THE 19TH CENTURY

Monument to the Battle of the Nations in Leipzig

After the Battle of Leipzig (Völkerschlacht) and the Congress of Vienna great political and social as well as technical and industrial revolutions started.

Nearly no other period brought greater changes for Leipzig than the 19th century.

With the construction of a Saxon-German railway, which started 1839 with the first German long-distance railway line from Leipzig to Dresden, an active industrialization began in the middle of the 19th century.

By the incorporation of former independent country communities Leipzig spread out step by step nearly to its size of today.

The New City Hall in Leipzig

The expansion of the town was accompanied by a construction boom. A height of the building boom was the new town hall, built from 1899 - 1905 on the area of an old castle (Pleißenburg) in the southwester part of the city.

An imposing architecture, reflecting the self-confidence of the citizens of Leipzig, not only at that time.

Today Leipzig is the capital of historicism, a result of the construction boom during the second half of the 19th century.

During the 'Gründerzeit' architects borrowed elements from many different periods, as from the Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance or Baroque, to combine and interpret them in a new way, just to find out their own style. Most of the 15000 cultural monuments in Leipzig are built during that time.

The main station in Leipzig