The city has two names, and the Czech one began as a slip of the tongue. German speakers called it Reychinberch in 1352 and Reichenberg soon after - rich mountain, and the mountain paid. Czech speakers tended to dissimilate an initial R into an L, so the record logs Rychberk in 1545, Libercum in 1634, Liberk in 1790 and, finally, Liberec in 1845. For six centuries both names described the same streets, spoken by neighbours. Then, inside a single decade, one of them stopped being used here at all. Liberec today is a Czech city of about 108,000 people, fifth largest in the country, sitting in a basin on the Lusatian Neisse with mountains on every side. Very few of its residents descend from the people who built it.
A settlement called Habersdorf appeared here in the 11th or 12th century, on the trade route running from Bohemia into Lusatia, put up by Czech settlers and German colonists together; a second settlement named Reichenberg followed in the 13th century, and the two grew into each other. The Bieberstein family held the area from 1278. After they died out, the Redern family bought the Frýdlant estate in 1558 and did the thing that decided everything afterwards - they started a textile industry. In 1577 Emperor Rudolf II raised Reichenberg to a town and gave it the coat of arms it still uses. Cloth, then carpets, then glass made the place rich enough to earn the nickname the Manchester of Bohemia, and the trade outlived the empire that fostered it: the Technical University of Liberec, founded in 1953, is still known above all for its research in textile engineering.
Walk the centre - a protected urban monument zone - and you are reading a balance sheet. Franz Neumann's city hall of 1888 to 1893 is Neo-Renaissance and carries three towers, the tallest 61 metres. The F. X. Šalda Theatre went up in 1881 to 1883, and its stage curtain, Triumph of Love, was painted by Gustav Klimt with his brother Ernst and Franz von Matsch - Klimt at the very start of his career, years before the gold. The North Bohemian Museum was founded in 1873 as the first arts-and-crafts museum in the Czech lands, and its 1898 building answers the city hall with a tower that is a deliberate copy. On the eastern slope stands the Liberecká výšina, a restaurant and observation tower built in 1900 and 1901 to look like a medieval keep, modelled on the watchtower of Nuremberg Castle. The zoo, opened in 1904, is the oldest in the former Czechoslovakia; the botanical garden of 1876 is among the oldest in the country.
When Austria-Hungary collapsed, both sides in this city reached for the same argument. The Czechs of Bohemia joined the new Czechoslovakia on 29 October 1918; on 12 November the German-speaking majority here declared for a reduced German Austria, and Liberec was named capital of the province of German Bohemia. Both cited Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points and the principle of self-determination. The Czechoslovak position was that these lands, German-settled since the Middle Ages, had always been part of the Kingdom of Bohemia. On 16 December 1918 the Czechoslovak Army marched in and the argument was settled by soldiers, which is a way of saying it was not settled. Then the Great Depression tore through the textile, carpet and glass works that the whole basin lived on, and hunger arrived with the unemployment.
Out of that hunger came the Sudeten German Party, founded by Konrad Henlein, who had been born in the suburbs of this city. After the 1935 election Liberec became a centre of Pan-German and then Nazi organising - despite a mayor, Karl Kostka of the German Democratic Freedom Party, who held the democratic line until the summer of 1938, when party death threats drove him and his family to Prague. That September the Munich Agreement handed the city to Nazi Germany; in 1939 it became the capital of Reichsgau Sudetenland. Most Czech and Jewish residents fled or were forced out, and the synagogue was burned. Henlein took over a villa confiscated from a Jewish businessman and lived in it until 1945. After the war the movement reversed and fell on people who had had no say in either direction: under the Beneš decrees nearly the entire German population of Liberec was expelled - families rooted here for centuries alongside those who had cheered Henlein - and Czechs were moved in to replace them.
The Regional Research Library was founded in 1900, and in 2000 it opened a new building on the site of the Old Synagogue that the Nazis burned in November 1938. Two things sit inside it. One is a large collection of Germano-Slavica and Sudetica - the German-language books and periodicals of Bohemia, kept by the Czech city that inherited them. The other is a new synagogue. Above the city, Karel Hubáček's hyperboloid tower on Ještěd has been the skyline since 1973. Trams have run here since 1897, including the interurban line to Jablonec nad Nisou. The zoo's white tigers gave the hockey team its name, the Bílí Tygři. And in the borough of Vratislavice nad Nisou, in 1875, Ferdinand Porsche was born - the engineer who designed the Volkswagen Beetle and left his name on a sports car, born in the city that could not keep hold of its own name.
Liberec lies at 50.767 N, 15.05 E, at 374 metres (1,227 ft) in a basin on the Lusatian Neisse, ringed by high ground. The unmistakable fix is Ještěd, 1,012 metres (3,320 ft) about 5 nm southwest of the centre, topped by a hyperboloid tower that reads as a cone with a spike - there is nothing else shaped like it in Central Europe. The Jizera Mountains rise to the northeast and the Ještěd-Kozákov Ridge runs southeast; the German border is roughly 10 nm north and the Polish border about the same to the northeast, so this is three-FIR country and crossings need planning. Best viewed between 2,500 and 5,000 feet, from which the city reads as a dense grid in the basin with the Nisa threading through it and the conurbation running northeast toward Jablonec nad Nisou. A private international airport operates in the Ostašov district on the western side of the city. Prague (LKPR) is about 49 nm south-southwest, Dresden (EDDC) roughly 53 nm northwest and Wrocław (EPWR) about 73 nm east-northeast. The basin traps fog and winter inversions, and cloud builds fast on the Ještěd ridge.