esentative at the Congress of Vienna, was successful in achieving the non-mediatisation of Bremen, Hamburg and the L�beck by which they were not incorporated into neighbouring monarchies, but became sovereign republics.
The first German steamship was manufactured in 1817 in the shipyard of Johann Lange.
In 1827, Bremen, under Johann Smidt, its mayor at that time, purchased land from the Kingdom of Hanover, to establish the city of Bremerhaven (Port of Bremen) as an outpost of Bremen because of the increased silting up of the river Weser.
Brauerei Beck & Co KG, a brewery, was founded in 1837 and remains in operation today. The shipping company The North German Lloyd (NDL) was founded in 1857. Lloyd was a byword for commercial shipping and is now a part of Hapag-Lloyd. In 1872, the Bremen Cotton Exchange was created.
A Soviet (Council) Republic of Bremen existed from November 1918 to February 1919 in the aftermath of World War I before it was overthrown by Gerstenberg Freikorps.
Henrich Focke, Georg Wulf and Werner Naumann founded Focke-Wulf Flugzeugbau AG in Bremen in 1923; the aircraft construction company as of 2010 forms part of Airbus, a manufacturer of civil and military aircraft. Borgward, an automobile manufacturer, was founded in 1929, and is today part of Daimler AG.
The villages of Grohn, Sch�nebeck, Aumund, Hammersbeck, F�hr, Lobbendorf, Blumenthal, Farge and Rekum became part of the city of Bremen in 1939. The Bremen-Vegesack concentration camp operated during World War II.
Following the bombing of Bremen in World War II, the British 3rd Infantry Division under General Whistler captured Bremen in late April 1945.
Bremen's mayor Wilhelm Kaisen (SPD) travelled 1946 to the U.S. to reestablish Bremen's statehood, as Bremen had traditionally been a city-state, in order to prevent its incorporation into the state of Lower Saxony in the British zone of occupation. In 1947 the city became an enclave,
