Dachau.

Title

Dachau.

Description

Decorative total view of the city Dachau near Munich in Bavaria. In the foreground the river Amper and inhabitants. Description of important places and buildings at the bottom.

ca. 1640

Artist

Merian (1593-1650)

Matthäus Merian (1593 – 1650) , born in Basel, learned the art of copperplate engraving in Zurich and subsequently worked and studied in Strasbourg, Nancy, and Paris, before returning to Basel in 1615. The following year he moved to Frankfurt, Germany where he worked for the publisher Johann Theodor de Bry. He married his daughter, Maria Magdalena 1617. In 1620 they moved back to Basel, only to return three years later to Frankfurt, where Merian took over the publishing house of his father-in-law after de Bry's death in 1623. In 1626 he became a citizen of Frankfurt and could henceforth work as an independent publisher. He is the father of Maria Sibylla Merian, who later published her the famous and wellknown studies of flowers, insects and butterflies.

Historical Description

The foothills of the Alps were conquered by the Romans in 15 BC. The Romans incorporated the area into the province of Raetia. Three Roman roads intersected at the Ambra road station near the Würmmühle district on the Amper River and partly led through the present-day city area. The first documentary mention of Dachau is found in a medieval deed of gift from the noble Erchana of Dahauua to the Bishop of Freising, both of whom came from the noble family of the Aribones. With this document, she signed over her five colony farms together with the associated serfs to the Bishop of Freising after her death in 805 AD. Originally, a castle of the Counts of Dachau from the early Middle Ages stood on the approximately 500 meter high Schlossberg. Between 1546 and 1577, Dachau Castle was rebuilt in the Renaissance style by the Wittelsbach dynasty, Duke Wilhelm IV and later by his son Duke Albrecht V. From about the middle of the 16th century, a cobblestone toll was levied for the use of the inner-city streets. The Zollhäusl (18sqm) in Dachau's old town was built around 1820 especially for this purpose. Dachau became under elector Max II. Emanuel, Dachau again became a preferred country residence of the Munich court for some time. In the course of the 18th century, however, the buildings fell into disrepair because the court came to Dachau less and less frequently. Elector Max III Joseph, however, still had the court garden redesigned. From about 1840, industrialization, railroad construction and the draining of the Dachauer Moos brought about a profound change in Dachau. New population groups settled in the moss. One seed was the Paun'sche paper mill in Brunngartenstraße, which was bought by the Munich paper manufacturer Gustav Medicus in 1859. In 1862, he founded the München-Dachauer Actiengesellschaft für Maschinenpapierfabrikation (MD), which for a time became the largest paper mill in Germany and was the region's largest employer until 2007. In 1867, the Munich-Ingolstadt railroad line was opened with the Dachau station.