History

Recent History

Aachen culture is prey to the standardisation of experience that makes much-marketed destinations both successful and same-ish. Having returned to tourism in a big way in the 1970s (Charlemagne's chapel within the cathedral is a major lure), Aachen's attractions are gradually being packaged into readily digestible, homogenous experiences. Traditionally log-shaped, Aachen's crunchy spiced Printen cookies are now churned out in various shapes, from the Easter Bunny to Santa Claus. Carolus Thermen Bad Aachen outshone older spas when it opened in 2001, wowing bathers with un-Rhine-like palm trees, Mediterranean eateries and exotic-themed saunas.

Modern Day History

At the western border of the German Empire as the century began, Aachen was occupied by Belgium for 11 years after WWI.

An internal 'occupation' began in 1933 when Aachen's city council was dissolved and senior bureaucratic posts given to members of the Nazi party. The Heiligtumsfahrt (Aachen Pilgrimage) went ahead in 1937 all the same - as it had every seven years since 1258. But on this occasion 800,000 devotees made the event a 'silent' protest against the Nazi regime.

Aachen's border-hugging location meant it was in the thick of WWII. Two thirds of the city's homes were flattened by bombing and by the war's end only 11,139 people remained in residence - less than 10% of the population 80 years earlier.

In 1944, Aachen was the first German city to fall to Allied forces. American liberators were replaced by the British, who helped get the city back on its feet. Belgians returned in 1946, this time as post-war administrators. By this stage, returning evacuees had restored the population to roughly 100,000.

No doubt wartime suffering influenced Aachen resident Kurt Pfeiffer when he initiated the International Charlemagne Prize - a citizens award for services to 'humanity and world peace'. Pfeiffer saw Aachen's architect Charlemagne as the founder of western culture and thought it was time for the once-imperial capital to act on 'its natural responsibility as an old border city, seeking to mediate and transcend borders'. The prize, first awarded in 1950, is now a distinguished award for services to European unification.

Aachen took Pfeiffer's spur to unification and peace seriously on levels both symbolic and concrete. The Aachen Peace Prize was created in 1988 and, a decade later, the foundation stone for Europe's first transnational industrial estate was laid. The Avantis estate straddles the border between Aachen and the Netherlands.

Pre 20th Century History

The Romans nursed their war wounds and stiff joints in the steaming waters of Aachen's mineral springs, but it was Charlemagne who put the city firmly on the European map. The emperor's father, King Pippin the Younger, liked to spend Christmas at the springs - he called the place Aquis villa. Charlemagne also enjoyed a dip now and then, but strategy probably motivated him when, in 794, he made Aachen the geographical and political capital of his vast Frankish Empire.

Aachen, at the intersection of present-day Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands, was smack in the middle of Charlemagne's domain. A western empire on a scale unknown since the fall of Rome, Charlemagne's territories clustered around modern Germany and France. Aachen was to be his 'new Rome' and, in the year his Byzantine-inspired court chapel was completed in the city, the pope crowned Charlemagne Kaiser.

Charlemagne died only 14 years later and was buried in his grandiose chapel - his later canonisation made Aachen an even stronger magnet to medieval pilgrims drawn by the chapel's relic stash.

Aachen long remained a protected favourite of German kings, even though Ferdinand I was the last to be crowned there in 1531. Walled and modestly successful in the rag trade (woollen cloth a speciality), Aachen prospered as a market town in the Middle Ages.

Almost wiped out by fire in 1656, Aachen recovered to become a fashionable spa town for Europe's leisured classes. Medicinal baths added gloss to the glamour of historical legend and Aachen became the destination of choice, even for statesmen negotiating the big peace congresses of the 17th to 19th centuries.

Decline hit fin de siècle Aachen. The city had already been savaged by Napoleonic occupation and shaken by a workers' revolt, when inner-city conditions became too much for tourists. Things improved slightly when congested Aachen eventually pushed beyond its medieval city limits. Even so, cure-seekers wandered -Baden.