Cities of Württemberg.—Stuttgart, where Hegel was born, and where Schiller spent his youth, is the capital, and stands next to Leipzig and Berlin in the printing arts and book trade. The fortress of Ulm, on the Danube, where it leaves Württemberg, has a large transit trade. Heilbronn [504] is another important trading place. Tübingen is the university town.
THE PINAKOTHEK, MUNICH, FAMOUS GERMAN MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
The little territory belonging to the house of Hohenzollern, which runs into Württemberg on the south, fell by inheritance to the king of Prussia in 1849.
Cities of Baden, and Elsass-Lothringen (Alsace-Lorraine).—Carlsruhe, the capital, and Mannheim, at the confluence of the Neckar and Rhine, are its largest towns. Heidelberg (north) and Freiburg (south) are the seats of universities. Baden-Baden in the center, the famous watering-place, gives its name to the Duchy.
The fortress of Strassburg, on the Rhine, in central Elsass, anciently a free imperial city of Germany, is the chief place in the Reichsland and its university town, noted also for its manufacture of leather-work and of beer. The cotton, wool and silk factories and machine works of the province center at Mülhausen in southern Elsass.
The fortresses of Metz and Diedenhofen or Thionville, memorable in the war of 1871, are the chief places in Lothringen.
Cities of the Smaller States.—Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck, the remaining free Hanse[6] towns, are republics, each governed by a senate and house of burgesses. Each of them has a small territory besides that occupied by the city.
[6] The Hansa or League of the North German towns was the first trade union of Europe, and dates from the thirteenth century. At one time it included eighty-five towns, and had several foreign factories.
They are the great gates of the external commerce of Germany, and from this have also become important centers for the preparation of foreign products, and of the necessaries of trading (tobacco, sugar-refining, cotton-spinning, shipbuilding). Besides the traffic brought to Hamburg and Bremen by their rivers, all the railways of the northwest converge toward them.