Central Germany (cultural area)

It ranked for centuries as one of the most advanced areas in Germany, a centre of both the Protestant Reformation and the 19th-century Industrial Revolution.

Large parts of the area were once governed by one of the branches of the House of Wettin, with the exception of Anhalt and Reuss and, depending on the geographical definition, the Electorate of Hesse.

Until World War II, this area was seen as the middle of Germany due to it lying approximately midway between Aachen and Königsberg.

In 1929 the Free State of Prussia and the Holy See agreed in the Prussian Concordat to combine several Catholic dioceses to form the new Middle German Ecclesiastical Province, spreading over eastern Westphalia, northern Hesse, most of Thuringia, today's Saxony-Anhalt and small parts of Saxony.

claimed that the larger Leipzig–Halle area would benefit from asserting an economic identity, separate from the other more rural new states of former East Germany.

The language used by Luther in his translation serves as a major source for the written modern standard German.

The area has also been one of the regions with the earliest development of industrialisation in Germany and looks back to a long tradition of industry culture.

Karl Marx received his PhD degree from Jena University as the intellectual environment here was more liberal and open than in the Prussia-controlled Rhineland or even Berlin where his ideas had been refused.

The city had intentionally been chosen as a meeting place at the center ("the heart") of Germany and as a symbol of German culture.