After World War Two

After World War II Tübingen was the capital of Württemberg-Hohenzollern until the foundation of Baden-Württemberg in 1952. The parliament sat at the former Bebenhausen monastery.

The university still defines the image of the town. The space required for the university, as well as for new institutions like Max-Planck-Institut and the Deutsches Institut für Fernstudien (German Institute for Distance Learning), made it necessary to move away from the Neckar and Ammer valleys uphill to "Morgenstelle", "Wanne" and "Waldhausen".

The past 25 years have been characterized by an explosive growth in the university. In 1992, with 26,000 of students compared to about 84,000 citizens, Tübingen had the highest "density of students" in Germany. The bon mot "Tübingen doesn't have a university, Tübingen is a university." characterizes Tübingen's past to its present. However, in spite of the large increase in people and all the modernisation and adaptation to modern times, due to the gentle restoration of the Old Town, Tübingen has been able to preserve a lot of its atmosphere and charm.

It is quite true that Tübingen lives from the complementary interaction of the old town, the university and the civil community, that Tübingen lives between professors and wine growers, and gains its peculiar attraction and its unsurpassable "genius loci". Still, today Tübingen is a provincial and cosmopolitan city, a university village and an "Athens on the Neckar". Tübingen is the small big city, "the place for which one is vainlessly in search on earth".