Around the town square in Traunstein there are still shops behind most of the shop windows. Only in a few shops in the side streets are there any desks or nothing at all. In the former building of the Sparkasse, in the middle of the historic town square, the future should now find its way. Not because the savings bank moved out, it has been for a long time, the district has meanwhile filled the gap with its business promoters and tourism promoters. But they will probably have to move out again next year, because only the third floor will not be enough for the future in the long run.
Up there, 50 young people who come from 16 different countries and speak twelve different mother tongues are now studying. For seven semesters they will study in English something that threatens the existence of shops like the ones out on the town square and at the same time aims to save them. “E-Commerce” is the name of the new course that the university from nearby Rosenheim has set up here. Traunstein is also a “university town”, but the plans are much bigger.
Because while in the former counter room of the Sparkasse, Prime Minister Markus Söder is talking about “e-commerce and edelweiß”, conjuring up international competitiveness as the basis of all prosperity and, together with Science Minister Markus Blume and District Administrator Siegfried Walch (all CSU), the business and science locations of Bavaria and Traunstein praises, several excavators are digging their shovels into the earth and concrete just a few hundred meters away at the station. “Güterhallenstraße” will soon no longer be a matter of course as an address there, because the goods hall directly on the tracks has been as good as demolished, and instead of the former Baywa warehouse with its filling station, only extensive wasteland can be seen for a long time.
The district of Traunstein has secured a good 25,000 square meters of space on the other side of the tracks, partly from the city and partly from private owners with a little more effort. The “Campus Chiemgau”, a joint research and education center of the Technical University of Rosenheim with the Chamber of Crafts and the Chamber of Industry and Commerce for Munich and Upper Bavaria, is to be built here in the coming years for a very high, but not yet precisely quantified, sum of millions. Lecture halls and seminar rooms, workshops, laboratories, the canteen and the underground car park are to be shared by all those involved on this “campus for vocational training”, as Heinrich Köster also envisions it. This will be “unique in this network,” says the President of the TH Rosenheim, who is considered to be quite well connected, both in the region and in state politics.
At the Chiemgau campus, the students should deal with technologies that are considered to be particularly promising.
(Photo: Matthias Köpf)
The district of Traunstein has invested a lot in recent years to finally land a university and thus keep its young people hungry for training in the region and provide the strong local economy with the urgently needed specialists. The district even set up an endowed professorship a while ago and paid for its first professor itself. Andreas Straube is now also “site manager” of the TH Rosenheim in Traunstein and already has two colleagues there, three more professors are to follow soon.
They will then not only teach the 50 students in the subject “e-commerce”, of which, according to Köster, only three dozen have arrived in Traunstein so far because the others still have to overcome bureaucratic hurdles when entering the country. A master’s course in “Industrial Engineering” is scheduled to start next fall, followed a year later by a degree in digital media design, after which the future is still open.
Mayor Christian Hümmer (CSU) compares the importance of the campus for Traunstein with that of the salt works 400 years ago.
(Photo: Matthias Köpf)
Traunstein with its 22,000 inhabitants has always been a large school location, currently 10,000 pupils liven up the townscape. Since a cabinet decision on Tuesday, Traunstein can formally call itself a “university town”, and Mayor Christian Hümmer, in his own words, does not want to hesitate to have the title written on the town signs. He sees the campus as a “chance of the century”. In terms of its importance, it can even be compared to the salt works, which brought some prosperity to Traunstein 400 years ago. “It’s history being written there,” says Hümmer. In his view, students from all over the world will also change “the mentality, the cityscape and the cultural life” in Traunstein.
In any case, on the day of the official opening, the students are conspicuous in the city, because they all wear black hoodies with the words “E-Commerce” on them, like the ones Söder and Blume now have in their closets. The two also received gingerbread hearts with QR codes to scan. The link leads to a letter of thanks from the first Traunstein students in English, the language of instruction. The fact that they chose “Tronstein” is in any case a “very clever and wise decision” for Minister Blume.