Of course, the Inn Valley was not first colonised with the Roman conquest. The inhabitants of the Alps, described as wild, predatory and barbaric, were labelled by Greek and Roman writers with the rather vague collective term "Raeter". These people probably did not refer to themselves in this way. Today, researchers use the term Raeter to refer to the inhabitants of Tyrol, the lower Engadin and Trentino, the area of the Fritzens-Sanzeno Culturenamed after their major archaeological sites. Two-storey houses with stone foundations grouped in clustered villages, similar language idioms, burnt offering sites such as the Goldbühel in Igls and pottery finds indicate a common cultural background and economic exchange between the ethnic groups and organisations between Vorarlberg, Lake Garda and Istria. According to finds, there was also a lively exchange with other ethnic groups such as the Celts in the west or the Etruscans in the south even before the Roman conquests. Etruscan characters were used for all kinds of records.

According to Roman interpretation, the Breons, a tribe within the Raetians, lived in the area of today's Innsbruck. This name persisted even after the fall of the Roman Empire until the Bavarian colonisation in the 9th century. Although there were no Breon Popular Frontthe quote from Life of Brian could also have been used in pre-Christian Innsbruck:

"Apart from medicine, sanitation, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, water treatment and public health insurance, what, I ask you, have the Romans ever done for us?"

A climatic phenomenon known as Roman climate optimum the area north of the Alps for the first time in history. Roman Empire interesting and accessible via the Alpine crossings. From a strategic point of view, the conquest was overdue anyway. The Roman troops in Gaul in the west and Illyria on the Adriatic in the east were to be connected, invasions by barbarian peoples into northern Italian settlements were to be prevented and routes for trade, travellers and the military were to be expanded and secured. The Inn Valley, an important corridor for troop movements, communication and trade on the outer edge of the Roman economic area, had to be brought under Roman control. The transport route between today's Seefeld Saddle and the Brenner Pass already existed before the Roman conquest, but was not a paved, modern road that met the demands of Roman requirements.

In the year 15 BC, the generals Tiberius and Drusus, both stepsons of Emperor Augustus, conquered the area that is now Innsbruck. Drusus marched from Verona to Trento and then along the Adige River over the Brenner Pass to the area that is now Innsbruck. There, the Roman troops fought against the local Breons. The Roman administration was rolled out under Augustus' successor Tiberius. The military was followed by the administration. Today's Tyrol was divided at the river Ziller. The area east of the Ziller became part of the province of Noricum, Innsbruck hingegen wurde ein Teil der Provinz Raetia et Vindielicia. It stretched from today's central Switzerland with the Gotthard massif in the west to the Alpine foothills north of Lake Constance, the Brenner in the south and the Ziller in the east. The Ziller has remained a border in the division of Tyrol in terms of church law to this day. The area east of the Ziller belongs to the diocese of Salzburg, while Tyrol west of the Ziller belongs to the diocese of Innsbruck.

It is unclear whether the Romans destroyed the settlements and places of worship between Zirl and Wattens during their campaign of conquest. The burnt offering site at Goldbühel in Igls was no longer used after the year 15. There are also no precise sources on the treatment of the conquered. The Roman troops most likely drew on the expertise of the local population to secure and construct the transport routes. Today we would probably say that important human resources were handled with caution after the takeover.

The soon Via Raetia named road made the Via Claudia Augustawhich linked Italy and Bavaria via the Reschen Pass and Fern Pass, as the most important transport route across the Alps. In the 3rd century after the turn of the millennium, the Brenner route became the via publica developed. It was too steep in parts for poorly equipped trade trains to become the main route, but traffic increased noticeably and with it the importance of the Wipp and Inn valleys. Just over five metres wide, it ran from the Brenner Pass to the Ferrariwiese meadow above Wilten over the Isel mountain to today's Gasthaus Haymon. At intervals of 20 to 40 kilometres there were rest stations with accommodation, restaurants and stables. In Sterzing, on the Brenner Pass, in Matrei and Innsbruck, these Roman Mansiones Villages where Roman culture began to establish itself.

The military camp was accessible via this road network Castell Veldidena The Romans were integrated into an economic and intellectual area stretching from Great Britain to the Baltic and North Africa. The Romans brought many of their cultural achievements such as imperial coinage, glass and brick production, the Latin language, bathhouses, thermal baths, schools and wine across the Brenner Pass. Roman law and administration were also introduced. Military service in the Roman army enabled people to climb the social ladder. With an imperial decree in 212, the Breton subjects became full Roman citizens with all the associated rights and duties.

The most important remnant of the Roman Empire after its downfall was the religion and the model of society that was associated with it. After Christianity became the state religion in the 4th century, the Tyrolean region was also missionised. From this time onwards, churches and episcopal administrations existed in Brixen in South Tyrol and in Trento. The saints of Christianity replaced the polytheism. Old festivals such as the winter solstice, harvest customs and the beginning of spring were integrated into the Christian calendar and replaced by Christmas, All Saints' Day and Easter. Legendary figures such as the Saligen Fräulein continued to be worshipped in parallel by devout Christians. The deified Roman emperors were replaced by monarchy and aristocracy. The Christian father of the church, St Paul, in his Letter to the Romans the theological basis for the feudal system that was carried from the church pulpit to the people:

Jedermann sei untertan der Obrigkeit, die Gewalt über ihn hat. Denn es ist keine Obrigkeit außer von Gott; wo aber Obrigkeit ist, ist sie von Gott angeordnet. Darum: Wer sich der Obrigkeit widersetzt, der widerstrebt Gottes Anordnung; die ihr aber widerstreben, werden ihr Urteil empfangen. Denn die Gewalt haben, muss man nicht fürchten wegen guter, sondern wegen böser Werke. Willst du dich aber nicht fürchten vor der Obrigkeit, so tue Gutes, dann wirst du Lob von ihr erhalten. Denn sie ist Gottes Dienerin, dir zugut. Tust du aber Böses, so fürchte dich; denn sie trägt das Schwert nicht umsonst. Sie ist Gottes Dienerin und vollzieht die Strafe an dem, der Böses tut. Darum ist es notwendig, sich unterzuordnen, nicht allein um der Strafe, sondern auch um des Gewissens willen. Deshalb zahlt ihr ja auch Steuer; denn sie sind Gottes Diener, auf diesen Dienst beständig bedacht.

There is hardly anything left of Roman Innsbruck in the cityscape. Exhibits can be admired in the Tyrolean State Museum Ferdinandeum. In various excavation projects, burial sites and remains such as walls, coins, bricks and everyday objects from the Roman period in Innsbruck were found around today's Wilten Abbey. The centre of the Leuthauses next to the monastery dates back to Roman times. One of the Roman milestones of the former main road over the Brenner Pass can be seen in Wiesengasse near the Tivoli Stadium.

In the 15th century, the first early form of industrialisation began to develop in Innsbruck. Bell and weapon founders such as the Löfflers set up factories in Hötting, Mühlau and Dreiheiligen, which were among the leading factories of their time. Although entrepreneurs were not of noble blood, they often had more capital at their disposal than the aristocracy. The old hierarchies still existed, but were beginning to become at least somewhat fragile. Industry not only changed the rules of the social game with the influx of new workers and their families, it also had an impact on the appearance of Innsbruck. Unlike the farmers, the labourers were not the subjects of any master. They brought new fashions with them and dressed differently. Capital from outside came into the city. Houses and churches were built for the newly arrived subjects. The large workshops changed the smell and sound of the city. The smelting works were loud, the smoke from the furnaces polluted the air.

The second wave of industrialisation came late in Innsbruck compared to other European regions. The Small craftThe town's former craft businesses, which were organised in guilds, came under pressure from the achievements of modern goods production. In St. Nikolaus, Wilten, Mühlau and Pradl, modern factories were built along the Mühlbach stream and the Sill Canal. Many innovative company founders came from outside Innsbruck. Peter Walde, who moved to Innsbruck from Lusatia, founded his company in 1777 in what is now Innstrasse 23, producing products made from fat, such as tallow candles and soaps. Eight generations later, Walde is still one of the oldest family businesses in Austria. Today, you can buy the result of centuries of tradition in soap and candle form in the listed headquarters with its Gothic vaults. In 1838, the spinning machine arrived via the Dornbirn company Herrburger & Rhomberg over the Arlberg to Pradl. H&R had acquired a plot of land on the Sillgründe. Thanks to the river's water power, the site was ideal for the heavy machinery used in the textile industry. In addition to the traditional sheep's wool, cotton was now also processed.

Just like 400 years earlier, the Second Industrial Revolution changed the city forever. Neighbourhoods such as Mühlau, Pradl and Wilten grew rapidly. The factories were often located in the centre of residential areas. Over 20 factories used the Sill Canal around 1900, and the noise and exhaust fumes from the engines were hell for the neighbours, as a newspaper article from 1912 shows:

„Entrüstung ruft bei den Bewohnern des nächst dem Hauptbahnhofe gelegenen Stadtteiles der seit einiger Zeit in der hibler´schen Feigenkaffeefabrik aufgestellte Explosionsmotor hervor. Der Lärm, welchen diese Maschine fast den ganzen Tag ununterbrochen verbreitet, stört die ganz Umgebung in der empfindlichsten Weise und muß die umliegenden Wohnungen entwerten. In den am Bahnhofplatze liegenden Hotels sind die früher so gesuchten und beliebten Gartenzimmer kaum mehr zu vermieten. Noch schlimmer als der ruhestörende Lärm aber ist der Qualm und Gestank der neuen Maschine…“

Many members of the lesser nobility also invested the money from the 1848 land relief in industry and business. The increasing demand for labour was met by former farmhands and farmers without land. While the new wealthy entrepreneurial class had villas built in Wilten, Pradl and Saggen and middle-class employees lived in apartment buildings in the same neighbourhoods, the workers were housed in workers' hostels and mass accommodation. Some worked in businesses such as the gas works, the quarry or in one of the factories, while others consumed the wealth. Shifts of 12 hours in cramped, noisy and sooty conditions demanded everything from the workers. Child labour was not banned until the 1840s. Women earned only a fraction of what men were paid. Workers often lived in tenements built by their employers and were at their mercy due to the lack of labour laws. There was neither social security nor unemployment insurance. Those who were unable to work had to rely on the welfare organisations of their home town. It should be noted that this everyday life of the labourers, which we find terrifying, was no different from the working conditions in the villages, but developed from them. Child labour, inequality and precarious working conditions were also the norm in agriculture.

However, industrialisation did not only affect everyday material life. Innsbruck experienced the kind of gentrification that can be observed today in trendy urban neighbourhoods such as Prenzlauer Berg in Berlin. The change from the rural life of the village to the city involved more than just a change of location. In one of his texts, the Innsbruck writer Josef Leitgeb tells us how people experienced the urbanisation of what was once a rural area:

„…viel fremdes, billig gekleidetes Volk, in wachsenden Wohnblocks zusammengedrängt, morgens, mittags und abends die Straßen füllend, wenn es zur Arbeit ging oder von ihr kam, aus Werkstätten, Läden, Fabriken, vom Bahndienst, die Gesichter oft blaß und vorzeitig alternd, in Haltung, Sprache und Kleidung nichts Persönliches mehr, sondern ein Allgemeines, massenhaft Wiederholtes und Wiederholbares: städtischer Arbeitsmensch. Bahnhof und Gaswerk erschienen als Kern dieser neuen, unsäglich fremden Landschaft.“

For many Innsbruck residents, the revolutionary year of 1848 and the new economic circumstances led to bourgeoisie. There were always stories of people who rose through the ranks with hard work, luck, talent and a little financial start-up aid. Well-known Innsbruck examples outside the hotel and catering industry that still exist today are the Tyrolean stained glass business, the Hörtnagl grocery store and the Walde soap factory. Successful entrepreneurs took over the former role of the aristocratic landlords. Together with the numerous academics, they formed a new class that also gained more and more political influence. Beda Weber wrote about this in 1851:

„Their social circles are without constraint, and there is a distinctly metropolitan flavour that is not so easy to find elsewhere in Tyrol."

The workers also became bourgeois. While the landlord in the countryside was still master of the private lives of his farmhands and maidservants and was able to determine their lifestyle up to and including sexuality via the release for marriage, the labourers were now at least somewhat freer individually. They were poorly paid, but at least they now received their own wages instead of board and lodging and were able to organise their private affairs for themselves without the landlord's guardianship.

Innsbruck is not a traditional working-class city. Nevertheless, Tyrol never saw the formation of a significant labour movement as in Vienna. Innsbruck has always been predominantly a commercial and university city. Although there were social democrats and a handful of communists, the number of workers was always too small to really make a difference. May Day marches are only attended by the majority of people for cheap schnitzel and free beer. There are hardly any other memorials to industrialisation and the achievements of the working class. In St.-Nikolaus-Gasse and in many tenement houses in Wilten and Pradl, a few houses have been preserved that give an impression of the everyday life of Innsbruck's working class.

Although many of the buildings erected from the 1950s onwards are not very attractive architecturally, they do house interesting works of art. From 1949 there was a project in Austria Art on the building. In the case of buildings realised by the state, 2% of the total expenditure was to flow into artistic design. The implementation of the building law and thus also the administration of the budgets was then, as now, the responsibility of the federal states. Artists were to be financially supported through these public commissions. The idea first emerged in 1919 during the Weimar Republic and was continued by the National Socialists from 1934.

Austria took up art in architecture after the war to design public spaces as part of the reconstruction programme. The public sector, which replaced the aristocracy and bourgeoisie as the property developers of past centuries, was under massive financial pressure. Despite this, the housing projects, which were primarily focussed on function, were not intended to be completely unadorned.

The Tyrolean artists entrusted with the design of the artworks were selected in competitions. The best known of these was Max Weiler, perhaps the most prominent artist in Tyrol in the post-war period, who was responsible for the frescoes in the Theresienkirche on the Hungerburg in Innsbruck, among other things. Other prominent names include Helmut Rehm (1911 - 1991), Walter Honeder (1906 - 2006), Fritz Berger (1916 - 2002) and Emmerich Kerle (1916 - 2010).

The biographies of the artists were not only compiled by the Gewerbeschule Innsbruck (Note: today's HTL Trenkwalderstraße) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna as a common denominator, but also characterised by the shared experience of National Socialism. Fritz Berger had lost his right arm and one eye during the war and had to learn to work with his left hand. Emmerich Kerle was taught at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna by Josef Müllner, among others, an artist who had made his mark on art history with busts of Adolf Hitler, Siegfried from the Nibelungen saga and the Karl Lueger monument in Vienna, which remains controversial to this day. Kerle served in Finland as a war painter.

Like a large part of the Tyrolean population, politicians, civil servants and artists also wanted peace and quiet after the hard and painful years of war, to let the events of the last few decades sink in.

The works created as part of Kunst am Bau reflect this attitude towards a new moral image. It was the first time that abstract, shapeless art found its way into Innsbruck's public space, albeit only in an uncritical context. Fairy tales, legends and religious symbols were popular motifs that were immortalised on sgraffiti, mosaics, murals and statues. One could speak of a kind of second wave of Biedermaier art, which symbolised the petty bourgeois lifestyle of people after the war.

Art was also intended to create a new awareness and image of what was considered typically Austrian. In 1955, one in two Austrians still considered themselves to be German. The various motifs depict leisure activities, clothing styles and ideas of the social order and social norms of the post-war period. Women were often depicted in traditional costumes and dirndls, men in lederhosen. The conservative ideal of gender roles was incorporated into the art. Hard-working fathers, well-behaved wives who looked after the home and hearth and children who were eager to learn at school were the ideal image until well into the 1970s. A life straight out of a film with Peter Alexander.

The reality, however, was different:

"The emergency situation jeopardises the comfort of the home. It eats away at the roots of joie de vivre. No one suffers more than the woman whose happiness is to see a contented, cosy family circle around her. What a strain on mental strength is required by the daily gruelling struggle for a little shopping, the hardship of queuing, the disappointment of rejections and refusals and the look of discouragement on the faces of loved ones tormented by deprivation."

What is in the Tiroler Tageszeitung was only part of everyday reality. In addition to material hardship, society was characterised by the collective trauma of war. The adults of the 1950s were products of the education of the interwar period and National Socialism. Men who had fought at the front could only talk about their horrific experiences in certain circles as war losers, while women usually had no forum at all to process their fears and worries. Domestic violence and alcoholism were widespread. Teachers, police officers, politicians and civil servants often came from National Socialist supporters, who did not simply disappear with the end of the war, but were merely hushed up in public.

The problem with this strategy of suppression was that no one took responsibility for what had happened, even if there was great enthusiasm and support for National Socialism, especially at the beginning. There was hardly a family that did not have at least one member with a less than glorious history between 1933 and 1945. Shame about what had happened since 1938 and in Austria's politics over the years was mixed with the fear of being treated as a war culprit by the occupying powers - the USA, Great Britain, France and the USSR - in a similar way to 1918. A climate arose in which no one, neither those involved nor the following generation, spoke about what had happened. For a long time, this attitude prevented people from coming to terms with what had happened since 1933.

The myth of Austria as the first victim of National Socialism, which only began to slowly crumble with the Waldheim affair in the 1980s, was born. Police officers, teachers, judges - they were all kept in their jobs despite their political views. Society needed them to keep going.

An example of the generously spread cloak of oblivion with a strong connection to Innsbruck is the life of the doctor Burghard Breitner (1884-1956). Breitner grew up in a well-to-do middle-class household. The Villa Breitner at Mattsee was home to a museum about the German nationalist poet Josef Viktor Scheffel, who was honoured by his father.

After leaving secondary school, Breitner decided against a career in literature in favour of studying medicine. He then decided to do his military service and began his career as a doctor. In 1912/13 he served as a military doctor in the Balkan War. In 1914, he was sent to the Eastern Front, where he was taken prisoner of war by the Russians. As a doctor, he sacrificially cared for his comrades in the prison camp. It was not until 1920 that he was recognised as a hero and "Angel of Siberia" return to Austria from the prison camp.

He began his career at the University of Innsbruck in 1932. In 1938, Breitner was faced with the problem that, due to his paternal grandmother's Jewish background, he had to take the "Great Aryan proof" could not provide. However, thanks to his good relationship with the Rector of Innsbruck University and important National Socialists, he was ultimately able to continue working at the university hospital. During the Nazi regime, Breitner was responsible for forced sterilisations and "Voluntary emasculation", even though he probably did not carry out any of the operations personally.

After the war, the "Angel of Siberia" managed to wriggle through the denazification process with some difficulty. In 1951, he was nominated as a candidate for the federal presidential election as a member of the VDU, a political organisation for former National Socialists. Breitner became Rector of the University of Innsbruck in 1952. After his death, the city of Innsbruck dedicated a grave of honour to him at Innsbruck West Cemetery. In Reichenau, a street is dedicated to him in the immediate vicinity of the site of the former concentration camp.

If you walk through the city carefully, you will find many of the works of art still visible today on houses in Pradl and Wilten. The mixture of unattractive architecture and contemporary works of art from the often suppressed post-war period, long idealised and glorified in films and stories, is well worth seeing. Particularly beautiful examples can be found on the façades in Pacherstraße, Hunoldstraße, Ing.-Thommenstraße, Innrain, the Mandelsbergerstraße vocational school or in the inner courtyard between Landhausplatz and Maria-Theresienstraße.