Dietzenbach

REDIRECT Template:Infobox German place

Dietzenbach is a city in the Offenbach Rural District in the state of Hesse, Germany. The town is also the capital of the Offenbach Rural District (Landkreis Offenbach)

Geography

Dietzenbach is in the Rhine-Main area 25 kilometres (16 miles) southeast of Frankfurt. The whole area of the town is 21.67 square kilometres (8.37 square miles) large and it is 135 metres (443 feet) above sea level.^[1] It is a plain area with nearly no hills.

About 35 to 20 million years ago in the age of tertiary the whole region was lying under sea level. At that time it was covered by an ocean which was warm and not very deep. Lots of sediments sank to its bottom. Then the region rose again and the water left, leaving soil which is mostly sandy and poor.

The city consists out of the urban districts Neue Stadtmitte, Spessartviertel, Altstadt, Steinberg, Hexenberg and Wingertsberg.

The neighbours of Dietzenbach are:

Heusenstamm (north)
Rodgau (east)
Rödermark (south)
Dreieich (west)

Dietzenbach has 33,067 inhabitants (2008).^[2] About 30% of the people living here are from foreign countries. They come from many different nations.

The climate of the town is mild. There is less rain than in other parts of Germany.

Some local people are speaking a regional type (dialect) of the German language with a certain tone and special words. It is a Hessian dialect (German: Hessisch) and is spoken in the south of Hesse. This language type is related to other dialects in the south of Germany. In former times mostly every place had its own special dialect, sometimes hard to understand for people of other parts of Germany. Today the dialect speakers are a minority and the majority of them does not speak the real dialect. They rather speak a kind of regular German with a certain pronunciation.

History

In the 13th century the name of Dietzenbach was written down in a document for the first time.

Formerly the people in the Dietzenbach area were mostly farmers and craftsmen but not tradesmen. Every family had land to grow their food. When the property was handed to the next generation it was divided within the children. Therefore most families had only small farms and were poor. With the industrial revolution the Rhine-Main area got lots of factories and developed to a center for metal working, leather manufacturing and chemical processing. Many men became workmen and found a job in the factories and earned money. This increased living conditions partly.