Düsseldorf grew from a Düssel-mouth village after 1288
Düsseldorf is capital of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany’s most populous state, and second only to Cologne inside it. The name joins the little Düssel River to Dorf, “village,” at the Rhine confluence. City rights came in 1288 after the Battle of Worringen; today it ranks as a GaWC Alpha world city of fashion and finance.
Farming and fishing hamlets stood where the Düssel meets the Rhine by the seventh and eighth centuries. The place is first mentioned between 1135 and 1159 and appears as Thusseldorp in 1162. It passed to the County of Berg in 1186, won ferry rights in 1263, and on 14 August 1288 Count Adolf VIII granted it town privileges after the Battle of Worringen, beginning a rivalry with Cologne that survives mostly as carnival and sporting banter. Duke William II, from 1380, expanded it to about 22.5 hectares.
Johann Wilhelm II, who ruled from 1690 to 1716, amassed a great art collection in the city palace, later carried off to Munich when the electoral court moved. Napoleon made Düsseldorf capital of a Grand Duchy of Berg and visited in November 1811. Prussia absorbed it after 1815, and during the first half of the nineteenth century painters, Mendelssohn and Schumann earned it the nickname City of Art and Gardens. From the 1850s iron, steel and chemical firms poured in.
British naval aircraft bombed its Zeppelin sheds on 22 September 1914, among the first Allied strategic raids. Belgian, British and French troops occupied it after 1918, and in April 1920 the Freikorps murdered 45 miners’ union delegates. In 1943 one RAF raid used more than 700 bombers, and the US 97th Infantry Division took the city on 18 April 1945.
Named capital of North Rhine-Westphalia in 1946, it boomed in the economic miracle, and a Japanese Club founded in 1964 marks a large Japanese business community. Uniper, Metro, Henkel and Rheinmetall are based here, Messe Düsseldorf runs nearly a fifth of premier trade shows, and the art academy counts Beuys and Gerhard Richter among its members.
Source: Düsseldorf
