Young state

Home to just over a million people, Saarland is one of Germany's smallest states. Located in the southwestern corner of the country, the state borders Rhineland-Palatinate, as well as the countries of Luxemburg and France. The state's history has been strongly influenced by its proximity to France.

Turbulent history

Saarland is a young state. It was first created as a political entity called the "Saar Region" in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles in 1920, under the mandate of the League of Nations.

In 1935, the inhabitants held a referendum and voted in favor of joining the German Reich. After World War II and until 1949, the state was first a protectorate of France and then an autonomous region - it even had its own national soccer team and Olympics competitors. In 1957, however, it joined the Federal Republic of Germany as the 10th German state.

Coal mines, smelters, smoking chimneys, and polluted air - until the end of the 1970s, the air was so sooty in the region's urban centers that housewives didn't even dare to hang their laundry outside. At the height of the industrial development there, some 50,000 miners worked in Saarland.

Less mining, cleaner air

Today there are just 4,000 miners. Where once 12 mines flourished, only one, in Ensdorf, remains. And it was shut down for the foreseeable future following an earthquake in 2008.

The Saarland became cleaner and cleaner. The chimneys stopped pumping out smoke. Some steel mills were turned into historical monuments, industrial museums or cultural centers. At the end of the 1980s, the Saarland began to develop in a new direction - research institutions, like the Max Planck Institute and the Frauenhofer Institute, settled there, making the state a center of study for IT, software and artificial intelligence.