Berg

Berg (bĕrk), former duchy, W Germany, along the right bank of the Rhine River between the Ruhr and Sieg rivers. Düsseldorf was its chief city. A county in the 12th cent., Berg passed (1348) to the dukes of Jülich and in 1380 was made a duchy. In 1423 the duchies of Berg and Jülich were united. On the extinction (1511) of the Berg-Jülich line, Berg passed to Duke John III of Cleves (see Cleves, duchy of), whose line died out in 1609, setting off a virulent struggle over succession that contributed to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War (1618–48). In 1614, Berg was awarded to the Palatinate-Neuburg branch of the Bavarian house of Wittelsbach; the award was confirmed in the Treaty of Cleves (1666). Ceded to France in 1806, Berg was raised to a grand duchy by Napoleon I in favor of Joachim Murat. The Congress of Vienna assigned (1815) the duchy to Prussia.

---

Berg

Former duchy, Holy Roman Empire. Located on the Rhine River, the area now lies in the districts of Düsseldorf and Cologne, Germany. In the 11th century the counts of Berg acquired Westphalian lands east of Cologne; these were incorporated into a duchy in 1380. Berg became a leading iron and textile manufacturing centre in the 17th–18th centuries. In 1806 Napoleon made it a grand duchy in his Confederation of the Rhine. Following the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15, it became part of Prussia.

---

Berg

1. Alban (Maria Johannes) . 1885--1935, Austrian composer: a pupil of Schoenberg. His works include the operas Wozzeck (1921) and Lulu (1935), a violin concerto (1935), chamber works, and songs

2. Paul. born 1926, US molecular biologist, the first to identify transfer RNA (1956). Nobel prize for chemistry 1980