POSTCARD N.30 - Germany

Postcrossing postcard posted on the 29th August; received on the 4th September (from 23AUG till 4SEP I was away, so the date of reception could be any day within that interval)
Postcard image: a view of  the city of Jena
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Mona, who sent me the card, says she works in one of the high-rise buldings in the photo of the city of Jena. Thanks Mona, you must have a good view from your office....

Jena, the city of ....Zeiss. You might not know that Jena is a city integrated in the Free State of  Thuringia, located in the centre of Germany, which was part of what used to be Eastern Germany untill that beautifull day in 89 when the wall came down (sadly we live in counterflow times nowadays and walls seem to have a tendency to go up again in lots of places in the same western world that was claiming "Tear it down" just three decades ago... sic transit gloria mundi....) famous for being an important education and  investigation centre with its  Friedrich Schiller University and several institutions dedicated to  Research and Development, but the association with Zeiss immediatly rings a bell in anyone with an interest in either photography or in....soccer...or in both.... (not my case, though since I side with the former and care not about the latter....)

And all for the same reason. Jena was the place where Carl Zeiss in 1846 founded the optical company that would bear his name and would become one of the most important manufacturers and developers of optical products and solutions, even if the post war spliting up of Germany meant that the company was also split into East and West counterparts (the quality of the glass didn't seem to suffer from this division though....)

Soccer lover workers of the original company would form in 1903 a Soccer Club which they appropriately designated Fußballclub Carl Zeiss Jena, and which survives to this day, even though its former glory days as one of the main Soccer clubs of the then DDR are long gone.

The importance and dimension of the Zeiss factory can be ascertained in the area occupied by the buildings in the postcard,  built around what used to be the original factory,  of which some still remain afoot, it seems, in spite of the city having suffered heavy bombing raids during the war.

Stamps:

To post the postcard, Mona used a very nice se-tenant 2 stamp (0,45€ each) issued on 12JUL2018 with a panorama photo of the Dessau Wörlitz Garden Realm, a World Heritage Site located not that far from Jena (about 110 km to the northeast, as the crow flies). The site is "one of the first and largest English parks in Germany and continental Europe. It was created in the late 18th century under the regency of Duke Leopold III of Anhalt-Dessau (1740-1817)" according to my good friend, the Wikipedia.

The 5 cent stamp with a photo of a Phlox is part of the definitive "flowers" series, started in 2005, and it was issued on 13APR2017.