Gründerzeit

Gründerzeit, literally the founders' period, denotes an era of rapid German and Austro-Hungarian economic expansion in the mid and late nineteenth century, driven by a boom in new companies, banks and railways that peaked between the Franco-Prussian War and the 1873 stock market crash, when Prussia alone saw 928 new joint stock companies formed. The associated architectural and cultural period extended considerably longer, lasting until 1914, and produced the Gründerzeit style, closely tied to historicism, in which private developers erected richly decorated four to six story urban buildings drawing on Gothic Revival, Renaissance Revival, Baroque Revival and German Renaissance forms. The economic boom itself was fueled by French war reparations following the Franco-Prussian War and by liberalized German corporate law passed in 1869, and it coincided with heavy rural to urban migration across the growing cities of Central Europe.