LINZ - AUSTRIA

Linz (population 200,000) is a city in northeast Austria, on the Danube river. It is the capital of the state Upper Austria (Ober�sterreich).

The city was founded by the Romans, who called it Lentia.

The city most of the times only was a provincial and local government city of the German Roman Empire and an important waypoint between several trade routes, spanning the river Danube from the west to the east and Czechoslovakia and Poland from north to the Balkans and Italy to the south.

Being the city where the Hapsburg Emperor Friedrich III spend his last years. It was for a short period of time the most important city of the empire. It lost its status, however after the death of the emperor 1493 back to Vienna and Prague.

Another important milestone of the city before the second world war was Johannes Kepler, who spent several years of his life as a local mathematician in this city. There he discovered on May 15, 1618 the distance-cubed-over-time-squared (or 'third') law of planetary motion (he first made the discovery on March 8 but rejected the idea for a while) Kepler is the namesake of the local university, the only one in Austria that embraces the campus system.

The third milestone of the city was Anton Bruckner, who spent the years of 1855-1868 working as a local composer and church organist in this city. The local concert hall and a local private music and arts university is named after him.

Near Linz, in the town of Leonding, the parents of Adolf Hitler were buried. Adolf Hitler himself went to school ("Fadingergymnasium") in Linz, but left before finishing it, and instead went to a school in Steyr (Upper Austria).

During World War II, Linz became a major industrial area, manufacturing chemicals and steel for the Nazi war machine. Many of these factories had been dismantled in the newly acquired Czechoslovakia, and reassembled in Linz. After the war, the river Danube that runs through the eastern most portion of Linz, separating the Urfahr district in the north from the rest of Linz, served as the border between the American and Russian occupation troops.

The Mauthausen-Gusen camp complex, the last Nazi concentration camp to close, is located mostly around Linz, with the main camp in Mauthausen just 30 kilometres away.

Linz today is still an industrial city. The VOEST ALPINE a rather large steel mill (Founded as "Hermann G�ring Werke" during WW2, famous for the LD- ("Linz- Donawitz") procedure for the production of steel) and the former "Chemie Linz" a chemical group, now split up in several companies, made Linz to one of Austria's most important economical centers. The city itself is not signed by these heavy industries. The city is home to a vibrant music and arts scene that is well-funded by the city and the state of Upper Austria.

The main street "Landstrasse" leads from the "Blumauerplatz" to the main square. In the middle of this square the high "Pests�ule" ("plaque monument", also known as "Dreifaltigkeitss�ule") was built to remember the people who died in the plague epidemics.

The composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote his Symphony No. 36 (1783) in Linz for a concert to be given there, and the work is today known as the Linz Symphony. The first version of Anton Bruckner's Symphony No. 1 in C minor is known as the Linz version.

Ars Electronica Center on the north bank of the Danube (in the Urfahr district), across from the Alt Stadt is home to one of the few public 3D CAVEs in Europe (the very first 3D CAVE world-wide that was publicly accessible) and attracts a large gathering of technologically oriented artists every year for the Ars Electronica Festival.

Recently built (2003) was the new modern art gallery called "Lentos". It is situated on the banks of the river Danube. The building can be enlighted in blue, pink and violet at night.

At the norther outskirts of Linz, the local public university can be found (The Johannes Kepler University), which hosts law, business and technical faculties. A spinoff of the university can be found 20 miles north of linz in the small town of Hagenberg/Upper Austria.

Near the castle, which is located at the same place as the old roman fortress Lentia once was built, being the former seat of Friedrich the III, the oldest Austrian church is located - the Martins church. It was built during the early medieval carolingian times.