Linz

Linz is a city and Statutarstadt in northeast Austria, on the Danube river. It is the capital of the state Upper Austria (Oberösterreich). Linz is located at 48° 18′11″N, 14° 17′26″E. Area ca. 96 km², population of the town is 188,118, of the agglomeration about 271,000 (March 2005), .

History

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

The city was most of the times only a provincial and local government city of the Holy 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 Habsburg Emperor Friedrich III spent his last years, it was for a short period of time the most important city of the empire. It lost its status, however back to Vienna and Prague, after the death of the emperor in 1493.

Another important milestone of the city was Johannes Kepler, who spent several years of his life as a local mathematician. 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 public 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 are named after him.

Near Linz, in the town of Leonding, the parents of Adolf Hitler were buried. Adolf Hitler lived in the area and was enrolled in the same Linz school as the famous philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein.

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.

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linz