n.
City (pop., 2002 est.: city, 570,765; metro. area, 1,315,736), capital of North RhineWestphalia state, western Germany.
Located on the Rhine River , it is the administrative and cultural centre of the industrial Rhine-Ruhr area. Chartered in 1288 by the count of Berg, Düsseldorf passed to the Palatinate-Neuberg line in 1609. Although it suffered considerably in the Thirty Years' War and the War of the Spanish Succession , it later revived. It was transferred to Prussia in 1815 and grew rapidly with the establishment of iron and steel industries in the 1870s. Heavily damaged in World War II, its old buildings were repaired and new ones erected. It is the site of the first German skyscraper, the Wilhelm-Marx-Haus (1924). It is the birthplace of Heinrich Heine .