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The City of Erlangen

Erlangen is a German city in Middle Franconia - a part of Bavaria. It has about 100,000 inhabitants and is strongly influenced by its university. Erlangen is part of a region dominated by its 3 biggest cities Nuremberg, Erlangen and Fürth.

Historically the most important event was the settlement of French Huguenot refugees in 1686. Christian Ernst, the count of Bayreuth, (Erlangen was part of the Bayreuth county back then) had built a new town ("Neustadt") for them. Soon afterwards the old town ("Altstadt") was destroyed by a fire and had to be rebuilt. As a result of this the architecture in Erlangen is dominated by that time and today Erlangen is still known as "Hugenottenstadt" - the city of Huguenots.

Later on after the region became part of Bavaria the city got its own administration. Finally in 1972 the administrative district of Erlangen merged with the district of Höchstadt. As an effect of the municipal reform Erlangen got the 100,000 inhabitants it has today.

Erlangen is also known for the "Bergkirchweih", its annual beer festival and third biggest fair in Bavaria. It starts a few days before Pentecost and lasts 12 days. The time during the festival is commonly called the "5th season".

www.erlangen.de (German)

The University

The Friedrich Alexander University (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, FAU) is the second largest state university in Bavaria. It consists of 11 faculties. Two of them are located in Nuremberg, the other 9 in Erlangen. The students currently number roughly 25,000 to 26,000 - a 10th of them are foreign students.

The university was founded in 1742 by Friedrich of Bayreuth. Originally it was located in Bayreuth but was soon moved to Erlangen due to the rebelliousness of the students. It started out as a Protestant institution but it slowly secularized. In 1769 the responsibility of the university went to Alexander of Ansbach and Bayreuth. He influenced it heavily and thus became the second patron in the name of the university. In 1961 the buisness college - and later the pedagogical college - in Nuremberg became part of the university and thus it was split between those two towns.

The faculties were founded in the following order.

• Theological faculty
• Law faculty
• Medical faculty
• Philosophical faculty I (philosophy, history, social science)
• Philosophical faculty II (languages and literature)
• Science faculty I (mathematics and physics)
• Science faculty II (biology, chemistry and pharmaceutics)
• Science faculty III (geology, geography, mineralogy, paleontology)
• Business- and social sciences faculty in Nuremberg
• Technical faculty
• Pedagogical faculty

uni-erlangen.org (English)