Merkur

Merkur (German pronunciation: [mɛʁˈkuːɐ̯]), Mercury) was a short-lived automobile brand sold by the Lincoln-Mercury division of Ford Motor Company from 1985 to 1989. Using captive imports produced by the German division of Ford of Europe, Merkur was targeted at buyers of European luxury brands.

After only five years of sales, the Merkur division was discontinued by Ford, making it one of the shortest-lived automotive brands.

Background

In the early 1980s, for various reasons, buyers of traditional American luxury brands such as Cadillac, Chrysler, and Lincoln began to shift their buying preferences towards European-produced cars from Audi, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, and Volvo. As a response, Japanese automaker Honda launched Acura in 1985 with their contemporaries Nissan and Toyota, later developing Infiniti and Lexus, respectively. In its own response, Ford created the Merkur (German for Mercury) franchise for select Lincoln-Mercury dealers in the United States and Canada; approximately 800 Lincoln-Mercury dealers would take on Merkur franchises. Building on the success of the original Mercury Capri (during the 1970s, the most imported car in the United States aside from the Volkswagen Beetle), Ford intended to import cars (the Ford Sierra and Ford Scorpio) targeted toward European import buyers, a market that Lincoln-Mercury did not have any competitive vehicles ready for sale.

Merkur (mountain)

The Merkur or Großer Staufenberg is a mountain, 668.3 m above sea level (NHN), in the Northern Black Forest, Baden-Württemberg, Germany. It is the Hausberg of Baden-Baden and located between the spa town and the town of Gernsbach.

Name

The mountain is named after the Ancient Roman god of trade and commerce, Mercury, to whom a Roman votive stone on the summit is dedicated. The Merkurstein has been recorded since the 16th century. Today, there is a cast of the original votive stone on the summit plateau; its prototype is in the Baden-Baden Municipal Museum collection. The original name of the free-standing conical mountain was the Großer Staufenberg, a reference to the shape of a turned drinking mug known as a Stauf.

Funicular

The summit of the Merkur is only accessible on foot, by bicycle or on the Merkur Funicular Railway (the Merkurbergbahn) from Baden-Baden. The funicular was built in 1913, but closed in 1967 for technical reasons. It re-opened in 1979. It is 1,200 metres long, one of the longest railways of its type in Germany, and climbs gradients of up to 54%. There are good views of Baden-Baden during the ascent.

Merkur (magazine)

Merkur, subtitled Deutsche Zeitschrift für europäisches Denken, is Germany's leading intellectual review, published monthly in Stuttgart by Klett Cotta. The magazine has been published since 1947 and has an edition of approximately 4,800 copies as of July 2011. In January 2016, the 800th issue has been published.

In the course of its history, many influential scholars and public intellectuals have written for Merkur. Among them were philosophers such as Hannah Arendt, Theodor W. Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Martin Heidegger, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jürgen Habermas, and Axel Honneth, or sociologists such as Arnold Gehlen, Niklas Luhmann, Hans Joas, and Dirk Baecker, but also writers such as Ingeborg Bachmann, Ilse Aichinger, Alfred Andersch, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Kathrin Röggla. Merkur has been able to gather voices from both the left and the right, which is unusual in the divisive German intellectual landscape.

See also

List of magazines in Germany

References

External links