Eisenach

Eisenach, city in central Germany, in the state of Thüringen, at the junction of the Nesse and Hörsel rivers, near Erfurt. Industries include worsted spinning, woodworking and cabinetmaking, brewing, granite quarrying, lumbering, and the manufacture of pigments, pottery, alabaster ware, and shoes. The city is noted as a summer resort. A commanding position on a hill is occupied by the 11th-century Wartburg castle of the landgraves of Thüringen. Here, the landgrave Hermann presided over the Sängerkrieg, or “minstrels' contest” (1207), upon which the German composer Richard Wagner based his opera Tannhäuser (1845). It was at this castle that Martin Luther began his translation of the New Testament from the Greek in 1521. In the city are the Lutherhaus, in which Luther stayed as a youth; the house in which composer Johann Sebastian Bach was born in 1685; and the Gymnasium, a school Luther and Bach attended. Eisenach also has a Wagner museum and the museum of Thüringen that is housed in the 18th-century former ducal palace. Other notable structures are the 12th-century Romanesque Saint Nicholas's Church; the Klemda, a small castle dating from 1260; and the late-Gothic Saint George's Church, which contains a statue of Bach.

Eisenach was founded in the 12th century near the older town of Isenach or Isenacum. It was the seat of a principality until 1498, and of a Saxon duchy at various times between 1596 and 1741, when it fell to the house of Saxe-Weimar. In 1869 the German Social Democratic Party was founded here. Population (2005 estimate) 43,900.