Head cinema for city runners

If you want to explore the "Traces of Radebeul's industrial history", there is not much to see. This may seem unusual for a cultural and historical city tour, but it is part of the concept - after all, the walk is designed as an audio experience. This means that visitors get something to listen to at every stop, even if there is little or nothing left of the historic buildings.

You can hear stories about historical or still existing companies, anecdotes about entrepreneurs or exciting facts about world-famous products.

Where Kiefernstrasse and Wichernstrasse meet, a "cinema in your head" of the former Haubold & Richter wafer factory unfolds. By scanning the QR code on your smartphone, you can find out a lot about the eventful history of the company after it was founded in 1907, when it quickly developed into a large-scale operation whose products were in great demand under brand names such as "Nordland" and "Victoria". By 1928, almost 100 employees were already producing wafers, gingerbread and rusks. Shortly before the Second World War, however, the company founders were expropriated in the course of "Aryanisation". The new owner saw the company through the war years and disappeared when a Soviet occupation zone emerged. In the meantime, the previous owners had emigrated to the USA. Another expropriation turned the company into the VEB Waffelfabrik Radebeul, which survived several reorganisations and even the reunification period until it ceased operations in 1992.

The wasted recipe for success

These and many other stories form an entertaining puzzle, many pieces of which are closely interwoven with the town's history. When the "phylloxera catastrophe" in 1880 put an end to winegrowing in the Elbe Valley for decades, many of the companies portrayed became the new economic backbone of Radebeul. Where vineyards had previously dominated the scene, the villas of many factory owners who settled in Radebeul now emerged - an economic boom began.

One of these was the August Koebig machine factory, which was founded in Dresden in 1890 as a "factory for the manufacture of paper processing machines". In 1894, the growing company moved to Radebeul and developed into a globally sought-after manufacturer of printing machines. Despite the complete dismantling of the factory after the Second World War, 200 people were once again working in the company, now called VEB Radebeuler Maschinenfabrik, by 1949. In 1968, it was absorbed into VEB Druckmaschinenwerk "Planeta", which was integrated into Koenig & Bauer AG after German reunification.

At the former site of the "Chemische Fabrik von Heyden" on Meißner Straße, further aha-moments await listeners of industrial history. This is where a process for the production of high-quality salicylic acid was developed, from which the company developed an extremely successful preparation called acetylsalicylic acid (ASA). Although this was patented, the competitor Bayer was quicker to protect the brand - which is why "Aspirin" is much better known today than ASA. Nevertheless, the Heyden factory became one of Saxony's most important chemical companies. One of the company's leading chemists discovered silicone - probably by chance - and another developed the ester salol. Because he thought it could be used to make a fine mouthwash, he wrote down the recipe one Sunday - and gave it to a friend as a gift. His name was Karl August Lingner and he marketed it under the name "Odol" in a distinctively shaped bottle. This made him rich, famous and the founder of the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. But that's another story...