→ Main article: History of the town of Eilenburg
Origin of the city name
Like most place names in the region, the name Eilenburg is of Slavic origin. It is derived from the castle Eilenburg, which was first mentioned in 961 as Ilburg. After this castle the Eulenburg (noble family) carry their name of origin. In the course of the centuries it was handed down many times modified (Hilburg, Ilburg, Hilburch, Ilburc, Ileborch, Ylenburg, Jilburg, Yllenburck, Eylburg, Eylenburg, Eylenberg, Eyleburg, Illeburg, Eilenburgk, Eulenburg, Eulenburgk) and thus experienced also different interpretations. It is most likely that Ilburg can be traced back to the Slavic term il as a place with clay or loam deposits (Jilow, Jilobor). The field adjoining the castle was once called Ilenfeld, and the steep hillside is still called Lehmberg today. Through phonetic change Ilburg became the present name of the village.
City history
prehistory and early history
The oldest human remains in the present-day town of Eilenburg date back to the Palaeolithic Age. Of supra-regional importance in prehistoric and early historical research are the sites from the Magdalenian period in neighbouring Groitzsch near Eilenburg, around 4 kilometres south of the town, from which, among other things, a small clay slate slab with horse depictions engraved on both sides was found. Beginning with the Linear Pottery Culture, the high terraces of the Mulde were among the preferred settlement areas in Central Germany for several millennia. It was not until the Roman Empire and the Migration Period that settlement ceased for a longer period.
Medieval
In the areas between the rivers Saale and Elbe with a residual population of mostly Germanic tribes, which became largely vacant during the Migration Period, Slavic population groups settled from the late 6th century onwards, initially along the Elbe, and in the course of the 7th and 8th centuries also along the Mulde. Eilenburg was situated in the centre of a naturally limited settlement area of about 270 square kilometres on the middle Mulde, in which about 100 smaller hamlet-like settlements developed. Its inhabitants probably called themselves Siusli. The Slavs between the Saale and Mulde rivers belonged to the Sorbs (lat. sorabi sclavi) tribe at the end of the 8th century at the latest. Presumably in the 9th century they built Eilenburg Castle, a ring-like fortress as a refuge on a hilltop-like edge of the Mulde valley, which encompassed a plateau about 220 by 150 metres in size. Remnants of this fortification can be seen in the up to ten-metre-high earthen ramparts on the castle hill. With the incorporation of the areas between the Saale and the Elbe into the East Franconian Empire under the kings Henry I and Otto I, the castle became the centre of a Burgward and thus the centre of a landlordship in the region, which also included a church dedicated to St. Peter.
A civitas Ilburg in the Suisile area is mentioned for the first time in a document of Otto I dated 29 July 961. In the year 1000, the Burgward, which was originally directly subordinate to the king, i.e. the entire area with Eilenburg Castle in the centre, was in the county of Count Friedrich I from the Wettin dynasty. Even after his death, the pagus Siusili and thus also Eilenburg remained in the hands of the Wettins, who held the castle, town and surrounding area until their abdication as kings of Saxony in 1918.
As in other castles in the Mulde region, such as Wurzen or Rochlitz, a merchant's settlement may have developed in front of the castle as early as the 11th century, which formed the root of the later town. In a document issued on April 30, 1161, a parrochia in Ilburch, a parish, is mentioned for the first time. At the end of the 12th and beginning of the 13th century, the castle underwent a representative expansion with a circular wall and at least two towers made of brick. The so-called Sorbenturm (around 1200) and the south-west tower of the castle (after 1230) were residential towers which may have served as the residence of the Burgmannen crew of the important Wettin castle. Also in the decades around 1200, a planned oval town complex 600 metres long and 300 metres wide with a grid-like street network was built on the terrain east of the castle facing the Mulde river.
The town experienced a further rise in the second half of the 14th century under Margrave Wilhelm I.
Modern Times
At the beginning of the 16th century, the incipient Reformation movement reached Eilenburg. Martin Luther stayed in the town a total of seven times and described it as a "blessed lard pit".
The Thirty Years' War also left its mark on Eilenburg. Although the town was initially spared from hostilities, it nevertheless had to accept the catastrophic economic effects of the war. From the year 1631 the town was directly involved in the war. In 1632 the Swedish King Gustav II Adolf was laid to rest in the inn "Zum Roten Hirsch" after he had fallen in the battle of Lützen on 16 November 1632. In 1639 Eilenburg was captured by Georg von Derfflinger's troops. In 1646 further peace negotiations between Saxony and Sweden began in Eilenburg to extend the expiring armistice of Kötzschenbroda until a general peace agreement (Peace of Westphalia) was reached. The Peace of Eilenburg, concluded on September 14, 1648, marked the end of the Thirty Years' War for Electoral Saxony. Subsequently, the city recovered.
The slowly beginning economic improvement was brought to an abrupt end by the Seven Years' War. Almost every man in Eilenburg was called up for military service. The city was alternately occupied by the Austrians and Prussians. With the end of the war Eilenburg was again an impoverished and plundered town. At the end of the 18th century the economy stagnated. Due to the loss of income from road mandates, according to which commercial traffic passed through the town, Eilenburg had become an insignificant country town.
Although the French Revolution provided a slight economic upswing, this was neutralised by the French rule which lasted from 1806 to 1813. During the Coalition Wars, Napoleon took up quarters in Eilenburg in 1813 shortly before the Battle of the Nations near Leipzig and held the last military review of his allied Saxon troops in front of Kültzschau, today's Eilenburg-Ost. After Napoleon's defeat, Eilenburg and the Amt Eilenburg belonged to the area which Saxony had to cede to Prussia according to the provisions of the Congress of Vienna in 1816. Due to the affiliation to the extremely modern state as a result of the Prussian reforms, the transition of Eilenburg from a rural to an industrial town was significantly advanced.
Due to the foundation of numerous textile manufactories in the suburbs, Eilenburg became an important centre of Prussian textile production. The rise to an important industrial town came mainly from nearby Saxony. Saxon industrialists settled in Eilenburg in order to gain duty-free access to the Prussian market. The incipient rural exodus caused the population of Eilenburg to increase by leaps and bounds. The social tensions resulting from industrialisation and the enormous population growth associated with it fostered a strong workers' movement, of which the town became the centre. Thus, in 1849 the Krankenkassenunterstützungsverein was founded, in 1850 the Eilenburger Lebensmittelassociation (Konsumgenossenschaft Sachsen Nord) as the first food cooperative in Germany as well as the Darlehnskassenverein, the first credit cooperative in Germany. The Eilenburg calico printing works owner Carl Degenkolb, a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly, voluntarily set up the first works councils in Germany in his factory.
With the concession document for the Halle-Sorau-Guben railway company, the town received its first railway connection at the end of the 19th century. On 30 June 1872 the Halle-Eilenburg-Falkenberg line was opened, and on 1 November 1874 the Eilenburg-Leipzig line. With the connection to the railway network and the associated access to the brown coal fields, the economy of Eilenburg developed further. Mainly chemical and wood and metal processing industries settled here. With the settlement of the Leipzig company Mey & Co. the later Deutsche Celluloid-Fabrik (German Celluloid Factory), a company settled in the town which shaped the town for over a hundred years. With the piano factory of the Zimmermann brothers, founded in 1904, Eilenburg was the main location of the largest piano manufacturer in Europe.
During the First World War, hundreds of people from Eilenburg were drafted for military service. At the Eilenburg train station on October 21, 1917, the later president of the GDR Wilhelm Pieck is said to have escaped from a military transport. In total, the First World War cost 800 Eilenburgers their lives.
In the early days of the Nazi dictatorship, Eilenburg was a stronghold of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Its influence extended so far that there was collusion between members of the SA and communists. This was "an expression of the discontent of disappointed petty-bourgeois Nazi supporters". Later, the Gestapo focused its attention particularly on Eilenburg. About two weeks before the end of World War II, the town was almost completely destroyed. On April 17, 1945, a tank alarm was sounded in Eilenburg, the town was declared a fortress, and defense to the utmost was ordered. For three days and three nights the town was under heavy artillery fire, during which a large part of the town's building fabric was destroyed. Two hundred lives were lost in the senseless defense, 90 percent of the town center (65% of all the town's buildings) was destroyed, while the American units suffered hardly any casualties. Eilenburg was one of the most heavily destroyed cities in Germany.
In 1947, 237 Eilenburg residents returned from captivity. Three years later, Eilenburg was the scene of the first major event after the war. The one hundredth anniversary of the first German consumer cooperative was celebrated in the town. The town centre was rebuilt in the 1950s. With the administrative reform of 1952 in the GDR, the town became the seat of the newly formed district of Eilenburg. Especially in Eilenburg-East some new housing estates were built since the beginning of the 1960s. In the 1970s, the eleven-storey Eilenburg high-rise building was also erected using the then new tunnel formwork method. In 1989, the mood of change was also evident in Eilenburg through peaceful demonstrations in which up to seven thousand people took part.
After reunification, many traditional companies went out of business; the remaining employers also drastically reduced their workforces in some cases. The lost jobs could only be partially compensated by new settlements on newly created industrial areas outside the town, such as Stora Enso. In 1994, the district of Eilenburg was incorporated into the old district of Delitzsch in the course of the district reform and the town lost its district seat. In return, Eilenburg was granted the status of "Große Kreisstadt" (large district town) under municipal law in 1997.
Eilenburg was also badly hit by the flood of the century in the summer of 2002 when the Mulde River flooded. The damage amounted to around 135 million euros in the centre alone. The construction of flood protection facilities, which was intensified after the flood, was officially completed on 19 September 2008 after investments amounting to 35 million euros. Eilenburg is the first completely flood-protected town in Saxony. The flood protection proved its worth during the strong Mulde flood in June 2013.
With the second Saxon district reform after 1990, which came into force on 1 August 2008, Eilenburg belongs to the newly formed district of North Saxony and is one of four district administrative locations.
Religions
In Eilenburg there are exclusively Christian church congregations. These are:
- Protestant parish Martin Rinckart Eilenburg. This includes the mountain church Sankt Marien and the city church Sankt Nikolai.
- Catholic Parish. The place of worship of this parish is the church of Saint Francis Xaverius.
- Evangelical Free Church congregation Eilenburg, since 2006 with a new place of worship, the Friedenskirche.
- New Apostolic Church
- The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Incorporations
The former town area of Eilenburg only extended from today's Nordring to the Dr.-Külz-Ring and Wallstraße respectively, where the town walls were located. When industrialization began in the middle of the 19th century, the city walls were first torn down and then the Eilenburg suburban communities, where numerous factories had already settled, were incorporated. In 1856 the communities of Torgauer Steinweg, Hinterstadt, Sand-Gemeinde, Leipziger Steinweg, Zscheppelende and Tal-Gemeinde were incorporated. In 1859 Hintersteinweg followed and on August 2, 1864 Kültzschau, the core of today's Eilenburg-Ost. The new districts grew together with the historical town area in a short time. On 1 January 1974 Wedelwitz and Hainichen southwest of Eilenburg were incorporated and on 1 January 1997 the municipality of Kospa-Pressen with four districts.
Population development
→ Main article: Population development of Eilenburg
In 1806, Eilenburg, as a country town, had only slightly more than 2000 inhabitants. The onset of industrialisation and the affiliation to Prussia determined by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 ensured that the number of inhabitants doubled by 1816. The economy continued to grow in the coming decades, so that the number of inhabitants doubled again by 1871. The First World War did not mean a slump in the population of Eilenburg - it grew to over 20,000 during the Weimar Republic and until the outbreak of the Second World War. The influx of refugees and expellees from the eastern territories of the German Reich at the end of the Second World War and the expulsion of Germans from Czechoslovakia caused the population to rise briefly to an estimated 30,000; the devastating destruction of the town in April 1945 caused the number to fall sharply again, and ultimately the town lost 2,000 inhabitants compared to its pre-war level. During the time of the GDR, the city and thus the number of inhabitants grew again. It reached its historic peak in 1986 with just under 22,000 inhabitants.
With the fall of communism and the decline of industry, this development was reversed. Between 1990 and 2008, the population declined by more than twelve percent, with the number of inhabitants decreasing by up to 2.4 percent p.a. in the first years after reunification. From 1999 onwards, a slight weakening of the shrinkage can be observed - the reduction was up to 1.3 percent p.a., whereby in 2002, due to the severe Mulde flood, a rash of departures was recorded. The decline in the number of inhabitants is due, on the one hand, to the difference between births and deaths. Since 1990, the number of births has been significantly lower than the number of deaths each year; on average, there have been about 100 more deaths than births each year. On the other hand, there is an evident discrepancy between in-migration and out-migration; especially in the years 1991, 1995, 1996, 2002 and 2010 there was a strong out-migration. Only in 1992, 1993, 2003, 2012 and 2013 did in-migration outweigh out-migration.
Although the birth rate increased noticeably in 2007, so that in that year there were the most births per thousand inhabitants since 1990 and the most total births since 1995, a trend reversal in the population development is not in sight. Since 2012, the population figures have been rising again.
Population forecast
Due to the generally weaker economic structure in the new federal states, Eilenburg is more affected by demographic change than comparable municipalities in western Germany. According to the Bertelsmann Stiftung's Guide to Demographic Change 2025, the town belongs to the category of towns and municipalities - category 4. This category includes towns with a sharply declining population and an ageing society. Both result from an exodus of the young population - especially those with higher educational qualifications - and low birth rates. Other characteristics for this category are high unemployment and low economic potential.
In 2025, the forecast for Eilenburg indicates a population of just over 15,000 people. This is a minus of about 25 percent compared to 1990, and a minus of 12.4 percent compared to 2006. Eilenburg is expected to lose more than 2000 inhabitants between 2006 and 2025. The average age will then be 50.5 years, the proportion of the 0 to 18 year olds will be exactly 14 percent, that of the over 80 year olds about 11 percent. The largest proportion of the population will then be in the 45-64 age group.
Eilenburg launched a campaign in 2016 to benefit from Leipzig's population growth: "Lieblingsstadt Eilenburg - Das Beste an Leipzig" (Eilenburg's favourite city - the best of Leipzig) particularly emphasises the rapid accessibility of the big city by S-Bahn.
