Qualla: Jena

Jena: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Photo: Andreas Praefcke, CC BY 3.0. To prove you had really studied at Jena, you had to be able to name the seven wonders in the correct order. Not the wonders of the ancient world - the wonders of Jena, a fixed local canon that every student was expected to have visited and memorised: Ara, Caput, Draco, Mons, Pons, Vulpecula Turris, Weigeliana Domus. Reciting them in sequence counted as evidence of a Jena education. One of the seven was a dragon with seven heads, assembled from animal bones and papier-mâché as a student prank. That combination - real intellectual seriousness and outright absurdity, held together without any apparent strain - is still more or less what the city is like.

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Image: Photo: Andreas Praefcke | CC BY 3.0

Jena: Ara, Caput, Draco

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit will nicht genannt werden, Public domain. The list is worth having. Ara, the arch, is the underpass beneath the altar of St Michael's church. Caput, the head, is the mechanically moving figurehead above the astronomical clock on the town hall. Draco is the fabricated dragon, which survives in the Göhre museum of local hi...

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Image: will nicht genannt werden | Public domain

Jena: Idealists, Romantics and a Doctorate by Post

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Tomukas - Thomas Holbach, CC BY-SA 3.0. Around 1800 this small town was briefly one of the most consequential intellectual addresses in Europe. German idealist philosophy was worked out here by Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Early Romantic literature was invented in the same streets by N...

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Image: Tomukas - Thomas Holbach | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jena: Abbe's Eight Hours

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vitold Muratov, CC BY-SA 3.0. Carl Zeiss opened a workshop for optical instruments in 1846. The physicist Ernst Abbe joined him and turned a trade into a science, deriving the sine condition that governs how a lens must behave to form a sharp image, and the resolution limit that says no microscope can outrun ...

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Image: Vitold Muratov | CC BY-SA 3.0

Jena: Nationalised, Split, Reassembled

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vereinigte Fabriken für Laboratoriumsbedarf (Berlin), Public domain. After 1945 both Zeiss and Schott were nationalised in the Soviet zone while their corporate identities moved west, setting up under the same names in Mainz and the Swabian Mountains - two companies, one set of names, on opposite sides of a border. Reunification put the halves bac...

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Image: Vereinigte Fabriken für Laboratoriumsbedarf (Berlin) | Public domain

Jena: A Bowl of Hills and a Swiss Roll

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Vitold Muratov, CC BY-SA 3.0. Jena sits in a bowl. The Saale runs through it and steep wooded slopes climb on both sides, so the town is small on a map and considerably larger in the legs, and the standard local advice is to climb something and look down - the Fuchsturm, the Jenzig, or one of the hillside res...

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Image: Vitold Muratov | CC BY-SA 3.0