A couple of posts involving Darmstadt are coming. Here’s the briefest of intros so we’re on the same, well, “page.”
Darmstadt is known regionally for the “Long Louis” statue in the center of town, the Kranichstein hunting lodge (today a 5-star hotel), the Palace Museum, etc. But I’m leaving those to the travel blogs, which will acquit themselves on that kind of thing more ably.
Darmstadt is a city of about 160,000 that sits on the upper Rhine plain between the big towns of Frankfurt and Mannheim and between the Rhine River and the Odenwald (Odin’s wood) forest. It has been an astonishing 50 years since I was first here, and the suburbs of each city have grown so much that the sprawl makes the area look like a single urban spread.
I lived and worked in Darmstadt for five years during the 1970s and ‘80s and never grew excited about it. To see what was new in the 2020s, I navigated to Trip Advisor in a browser and clicked on “The 10 Best Sites to See in Darmstadt.” Every item in the list was in a “Nearby Town.”
So, what’s new?
Science City
Branding to the rescue! Today Darmstadt, found in historical records for at least 10 centuries, calls itself officially “Wissenschaftstadt Darmstadt” (science city Darmstadt). That’s new from when I was there.
The tag line “science city” shows up across all the city’s media outlets. Darmstadt is “Houston” for European-owned space shots, as home to the European Space Operations Center of the European Space Agency (ESA).
Down the street is EUMETSAT (European Organization for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites), which controls weather satellites endlessly circling the globe. They take incoming data from satellites in different orbits, patch it together to get a global view and help forecast the weather on land and sea. Darmstadt even has a heavy-iron research center that runs a particle accelerator.
Pharma
Darmstadt is even better known as a center of the giant pharma industry. Merck, the world’s oldest pharmaceutical company, has headquarters here, and its name shows up as a chief sponsor of arts events all over the city and across the calendar.
Bayer, the aspirin folks, are here, too. They’re backing a national soccer team whose winning record seems to be a lot stronger than the company’s financials.
High tech
Darmstadt is also a centre of IT and telecommunications, and companies such as market leader Deutsche Telecom have labs in Darmstadt. The city’s ATHENE is the national research center for IT security and privacy in Germany and the largest research center for IT security in Europe.
The national AI center has a lab here, and the state AI center has headquarters here, as well. Since last spring, a new AI supercomputer at GSI Helmholtz Centre has been available to entrepreneurs and established companies. It’s one of the 300 most powerful in the world, and the state of Hesse is backing it with €10 million. Big Pharma is betting on AI to create new drugs.
Year after year, Berlin and Munich are the German centers of high tech entrepreneurship. But last year, their hold on the title slipped, and “start-ups per 100,000 inhabitants” rose higher around research centers such as Darmstadt.
While the giants were slipping in a difficult financing environment, Darmstadt rose from No. 13 to No. 3 for start-ups in Germany. One reason: Local sourcing.
The city boasts one technical and two applied-arts universities. The TU Darmstadt is one of the important technical institutes in Germany and is well known for research and teaching in electrical, mechanical and civil engineering. The TU brings a large part of the more than 33,000 students in town.
Stars and Stripes
To me, Darmstadt means The Stars and Stripes. I was a reporter or editor for the newspaper that had been publishing in the contiguous suburb of Griesheim since the end of WWII. The tabloid had as much “news hole” as many broadsheet U.S. papers, and the European edition circulated for American service members and diplomats and their families across half the globe outside the U.S.
Stars and Stripes had a split personality, serving the military (with access to its bases and personnel) but staying editorially independent of it. It was under constant financial pressure to come up with some $30 million a year for its operation, and during the last decade, it survived a couple of attempts to budget it out of existence.
I’ve been out of touch, but today it appears to have shrunk to a mostly digital version. Its former offices sit shuttered behind locks and wire fences.
Morning pint
Darmstadt did have a charming side. I remember joining some TU students at Frühschoppen (morning pint) Sunday mornings in the foyer of the Staatstheater (state theater). We’d sit on wide stone steps and listen to light jazz piano. The region enjoys a mild climate that encourages wine growing, and I sipped a local semi-dry Reisling and began a love affair with small-group jazz.
Darmstadt knows something about jazz. It boasts a noted music college, and it’s home to the Jazz-Institut, Europe’s largest publicly accessible archive of jazz recordings and sheet music.
Live jazz, though, usually meant a half-hour drive north to Frankfurt’s Sachsenhausen district. There one could invade the best clubs, “off limits” of course to American service personnel.
Next: DARMSTADT: Thanks, Bud
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