The settlement grew up around a Benedictine monastery and was granted the rights of a free imperial city around 1170. Sitting at the foot of the Erzgebirge — the ore mountains — it became a trading town in the sixteenth century on the back of what came out of those mountains, then something much larger. The expansion of Saxon coal mining through the eighteenth century turned Chemnitz into one of the central places of German textile and machine-building industry, and Johann von Zimmermann built the European continent's first machine-tool factory here. By the early nineteenth century the nickname had stuck: Sächsisches Manchester, Saxon Manchester. The money that industry generated built whole districts at once. Kaßberg and Sonnenberg went up in the last third of the nineteenth century, and Kaßberg survives largely intact — street after street of stucco Gründerzeit façades, built in a hurry for a city that was filling up with people who worked in mills.

The same industry made the city a target. Allied bombing destroyed 41 per cent of the built-up area over the course of the war, but the raid of 5 March 1945 was aimed squarely at the centre, and roughly 80 per cent of the historic inner city was gone by the time it ended. About 3,700 people were killed in the air war here. They were mill workers and toolmakers and their families, in a city whose skill at making machinery had put them on a target list, and the ones who came out of the cellars afterwards found the streets they had grown up in reduced to a plan drawing. Almost nothing medieval survived. What Chemnitz has of its own deep past is largely what was rebuilt or dug up later — which is why a stone forest in a courtyard carries more weight here than it would elsewhere.

On 10 May 1953 the city and its district were renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt, in honour of a man who had never visited Chemnitz and had no connection to it whatever. The name lasted thirty-seven years. A great deal of building went on during them, and much of it is still standing — wide boulevards, prefabricated housing blocks, the socialist-modern civic architecture of the centre. On 1 June 1990 the residents voted to take the old name back. What they did not do was erase the intervening decades from the streets, and the result is one of the most legible East German cityscapes left in Germany. Unlike Berlin or Leipzig, Chemnitz saw comparatively little demolition after reunification, so a GDR apartment slab, a nineteenth-century tenement and a glass retail box can sit within a few minutes' walk of each other without anyone finding it strange.

The first wave of post-reunification money went to out-of-town shopping malls, and the middle of Chemnitz stayed a gap. Serious building in the centre did not begin until 1999, which is why the city has been described, not unkindly, as having Germany's most recent city centre — a whole quarter reconstructed in one go, on a scale comparable in German terms only to Potsdamer Platz. Helmut Jahn designed the Kaufhof department store. Hans Kollhoff supplied the façade for the Galerie Roter Turm. Ingenhoven and Partner did the Peek & Cloppenburg building. All of it clusters around the Roter Turm itself, the Red Tower, built in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century as part of the city wall and still the most conspicuous landmark in town: the oldest structure in Chemnitz, standing in the newest part of it.

Chemnitz won the title of European Capital of Culture for 2025 on 28 October 2020, and opened its year on 18 January 2025 — a city of about 247,000 people, more used to being written about for its industry or its politics, spending twelve months asking visitors to look at it directly. The material was always there. Villa Esche, built in 1902 to designs by Henry van de Velde, is one of the finest Art Nouveau houses in Germany. The petrified forest sits in the Tietz. The Erzgebirge begins on the southern edge of town and runs up to 1,215 metres at the Fichtelberg, with centuries of mining tunnels, wood-carving villages and Christmas traditions along the way. Freiberg is 35 km northeast, Zwickau 40 km southwest, Colditz 50 km north, Dresden and Leipzig each about an hour. Chemnitz is not a place most people arrive at by accident, which is roughly the point.