Chemnitz spent 37 years named after Karl Marx, then voted to change back
On 10 May 1953 the East German government renamed the Saxon industrial city of Chemnitz as Karl-Marx-Stadt, marking 135 years since Marx's birth. In a referendum held in April 1990, 76 percent of voters chose the old name, and a giant bronze head of Marx, nicknamed the Nischel, still stands in town.
The original name is Slavic. It comes from the river Chemnitz and ultimately from a word for stone, kamjen in Upper Sorbian, so the river was the stony brook. Dozens of places from Ukraine to Croatia share that root, and Chemnitz is the most populous of them. The river is recorded by 1012/18, and the town itself first appears in 1143, when King Conrad III confirmed a Benedictine monastery's right to hold a royal market; a settlement grew up around it, and around 1170 Frederick I made it a free imperial city.
Textiles made it rich. A bleaching privilege granted in 1357 turned it into a centre of weaving and linen, with over a third of residents working in cloth. The geologist Georgius Agricola, author of De re metallica, served as town physician and several times as burgomaster, yet on his death in 1555 the Protestant duke refused him burial in the cathedral because he stayed Catholic. By the nineteenth century Chemnitz was nicknamed the Saxon Manchester, and it peaked at 360,250 people in 1930. Auto Union was founded there in 1932; its executives fled west after the war, and the company grew into Audi.
Bombing in the Second World War wrecked 41 percent of the built-up area. The socialist rebuilding favoured prefabricated Plattenbau blocks and let old quarters decay, and after reunification many residents left for the West. Chemnitz then became the only major German city to re-plan its centre from scratch after 1990, with designs by architects such as Helmut Jahn, a process that levelled more than 250 buildings between 1990 and 2007.
The ground underneath holds an older surprise. In the Chemnitz Petrified Forest, an early Permian woodland buried by volcanic ash, 53 fossil trunks still stand upright where they grew. In 2025 the city served as a European Capital of Culture.
Source: Chemnitz
