Darmstadt is a city in the Bundesland (federal state) of Hessen in Germany. As of 2005, its population was 138,500. The city is located in the southern part of the Rhine Main Metropolitan Area.
Darmstadt is the site of one of the leading German universities, the Darmstadt University of Technology, renowned for its engineering departments. Related institutes are the Gesellschaft für Schwerionenforschung (see also 'Trivia', below) and the four Institutes of the Fraunhofer Society. The European Space Operations Center (ESOC) of the European Space Agency is located in Darmstadt, as is EUMETSAT, which operates meteorological satellites. Darmstadt is a centre for the pharmaceutical and chemical industry, with Merck and Röhm having their main plants and centres here.
The Jazz-Institut Darmstadt is Germany's largest publicly accessible Jazz archive.
The Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, harboring one of the world's largest collections of post-war sheet music, also hosts the biannual Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik, a summer school in contemporary classical music founded by Wolfgang Steinecke. A large number of avant-garde composers have attended and given lectures there, including Olivier Messiaen, Luciano Berio, Milton Babbitt, Pierre Boulez, John Cage, György Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Mauricio Kagel.
The Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung (German Academy for Language and Poetry) provides writers and scholars with a place to research the German language. The Academy's annual Georg-Büchner-Preis, named in memory of Georg Büchner, is considered the most renowned literary award for writers of German language.
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article "Germany - Darmstadt ".
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