Alfons Kern

Alfons Kern (born March 13, 1859 in Pforzheim ; † March 1, 1941 in Pforzheim) was a German architect and construction clerk .

From 1891 to 1905 he was the head of the structural engineering department of the city of Pforzheim, founded the Pforzheim Reuchlin Museum and the city's collection of paintings, and did a lot for the Pforzheim city archive. He is considered to be the founder of the urban tradition in Pforzheim and was made an honorary citizen of the city in 1939 . The museum, painting collection and archive were largely destroyed in the air raid on Pforzheim on February 23, 1945 .

Life

Kern was born into a family of innkeepers at the Zum Römischen Kaiser inn in Pforzheim, attended the nearby Winther private school and then the secondary school . From 1876 he studied architecture at the Technical University in Karlsruhe and did his military service as a one-year volunteer in 1880/1881 . He then joined the Offenburg construction office Armbruster as an intern and in 1882 switched to the newly established building construction department of the city of Freiburg im Breisgau . There he worked for Carl Müller and was involved in the planning and construction of numerous public buildings.

In 1885 he left Freiburg and returned to Pforzheim, where he managed the renovation of his parents' inn. At that time he received a first offer for a service in the Pforzheim Building Department, which he refused. After a trip to Italy in 1886 he accepted a position at the state district building inspection in Offenburg , where he was responsible for the planning and construction of various public buildings and parsonages under senior building officer Heinrich Lang . In 1887 he moved back to Freiburg, where he and Lang planned the new surgical clinic.

City architect in Pforzheim 1891–1905

Saalbau Pforzheim, built 1897–1900

In March 1891 he joined the office of a befriended architect as a partner. His independence did not last long, because after the Pforzheim town hall fire at the end of March 1891 and the subsequent reorganization of the Pforzheim construction industry, he applied for the newly advertised position as city ​​architect and head of the municipal building department in Pforzheim, which he took up on September 1, 1891. The construction of the old town hall from 1893 to 1895 in the neo-renaissance style was his first big task in Pforzheim. None of the designs awarded in a previous architectural competition were implemented, but a new design was created and executed by Kern using a merely "purchased" competition design by Hermann Thume , which also provided suitable rooms for the city archive, which in his opinion had been neglected so far. In addition to the town hall, he planned three school buildings in Pforzheim, the municipal hall, the water tower on the Rodplatte and the building of the power station. The buildings planned by him are kept in the typical neo -renaissance style , a variant of historicism .

When the renovation of the Au-Vorstadt in Pforzheim had to be demolished from an art-historical point of view and Roman and Alemannic excavations came to light during sewer work , Kern campaigned for the documentation of the houses to be demolished and the recovery of finds and parts of the building. At his suggestion, a first provisional local history museum was set up in two rooms in the town hall in 1900.

Local political and voluntary work from 1905

On May 22, 1905, he resigned his position at the municipal building department and in future took care of the city archive and the collection of antiquities on a voluntary basis. In July 1905 he was elected to the Pforzheim City Council, to which he belonged with interruptions until 1922. From 1908 to 1919 he was a member of the district assembly , then until 1926 also a member of the district council .

From 1916 he was financially compensated for his work in the museum and archive. After the First World War , he succeeded in exchanging land, which brought the old tax office building with the archival tower of the Margrave's Castle near the castle church into the possession of the city. Kern wanted to convert this building into a museum and collected 165,000 marks from the citizens . Kern also planned the expansion of the building to include a Reuchlin House , the addition of an old Gothic bay window and the partial reconstruction of the rogue tower, which was demolished during the city renovation . However, his plans were criticized by the majority of the Pforzheim architects, who feared an impairment of the cityscape. Planning was delayed and inflation wiped out the capital. In 1924, a Pforzheimer Heimatmuseum named after Johannes Reuchlin was opened in the old tax office building and in the archive tower, without Kern's extension buildings being able to be realized. However, Kern managed to have the city set up annual reserves for the expansion of the museum from 1925 onwards, so that the museum could still be expanded in 1932. The tax office building and the archive tower were structurally connected, the old bay was added. The museum thus had 22 rooms on three floors. The main focus was on Johannes Reuchlin, the general history of the town, goldsmithing, rafting and weaving .

Grave of Alfons Kern in the main cemetery in Pforzheim

Alfons Kern also built up a municipal collection of paintings, which was given rooms in the Bohnenberger Schlösschen in 1928 , where the archive moved in in 1936, which Kern had meanwhile expanded to include an archive library of around 8,000 volumes. The mayor of Pforzheim, Habermehl, provided the necessary funds to set up the archive library and to set up a collection of old Pforzheim prints. Since Kern had devoted himself mainly to the museum soon after he began his archival activities, a comprehensive reorganization of the archival material, which had since been immensely expanded due to the countless acquisitions, was necessary when the archive moved. The businessman and local researcher Oskar Trost and other employees were on hand to help Kern .

In 1939 the city granted Alfons Kern honorary citizenship, and the city's collection of paintings was renamed the Alfons Kern collection in his honor . In the last years of his life, Kern donated 13,000 Reichsmarks to the city to promote scientific work on the history of Pforzheim. He died in 1941 and was buried in an honorary grave in the main cemetery in Pforzheim .

Aftermath

The Second World War , devastating for Pforzheim, almost completely destroyed Kern's life's work. Of Kern's buildings, only the Osterfeldschule and the water tower on the Rodplatte survived the war in Pforzheim. The holdings of the museum and archive burned in the firestorm, only the holdings of the lapidarium remained in the cellar of the archive tower and later formed the basis for today's Pforzheimer Heimatmuseum.

Although Kern largely neglected the order of the Pforzheim archive up into the 1930s, he was still considered a perfectionist. He was of the opinion that the archive should only be released for scientific processing when it had reached a certain degree of completeness. In spite of his extensive historical knowledge, he himself presented only a few publications, as he did not want to publish anything that was not completely solid. He even sharply criticized his colleague Trost for his publications. This led to the fact that the scientific evaluation of the archive, which had been immensely enlarged by Kern, was not carried out and the archive material destroyed in the Second World War was lost forever.

plant

Osterfeld School (2009)

Buildings in Pforzheim

• 1893–1895: Town hall (destroyed in World War II; in its place is now the New Town Hall )
• 1897: Electricity plant (destroyed in World War II)
• 1900: Water tower on the Rodplatte
• 1900: Hall building (destroyed in World War II; the Reuchlinhaus is located in its place today )
• 1905–1907: Osterfeld School
• Wooden garden school (destroyed in World War II)
• School on Calwer Strasse (destroyed in World War II)

Fonts

• A development plan for Pforzheim 100 years ago. Pforzheim 1909.
• Pforzheim and the surrounding area. At the same time guide through the jewelry industry in Pforzheim. Heilbronn 1920.
• Medieval Pforzheim and its city walls. In: Southwest German Officers' Day in Pforzheim from June 24th to 26th, 1921. Pforzheim 1921, p. 8 f.
• The Bohnenberger Schlößle. Pforzheim 1922.
• Pforzheim, its historical and structural development. In: Pforzheim. Stuttgart 1922, pp. 5-13.
• Reuchlin Museum Pforzheim. City history collection. Short guide. Pforzheim 1924.
• The city of Pforzheim. Development of building and economic history. In: Badische Heimat , 12th year 1925, pp. 144–168.
• The Reuchlin Museum in Pforzheim. In: Badische Heimat , 12th year 1925, pp. 230–234.
• About the craft in Pforzheim in the 18th and early 19th centuries. In: Der Gewerbefreund , 6th year 1926, pp. 56–58.
• The Pforzheim Reuchlin Museum. Pforzheim 1934.

literature

• Martin Krauss (arr.): "... in such an old city ...". Alfons Kern (1859–1941). Founder of urban tradition in Pforzheim. Pforzheim 1995.
• Susanne Roth: Alfons Kern. An architect who changed Pforzheim. JS Klotz Verlagshaus, Neulingen 2019, ISBN 978-3-946231-35-6

Individual evidence

1. ^ Christoph Timm: Pforzheim, cultural monuments in the city area. Regional culture publishing house, Ubstadt-Weiher 2004, pp. 83–84.
2. ↑ Drafts were purchased (or received an acquisition) from which individual motifs and ideas judged to be particularly attractive or practical should possibly be incorporated into the final implementation draft - cf. Architectural competition .
3. ^ Deutsche Bauzeitung , Volume 26, 1892, No. 10 (from February 3, 1892), p. 60. (Note on the competition result)
4. ^ Christoph Timm: Pforzheim, cultural monuments in the city area. Regional culture publishing house, Ubstadt-Weiher 2004, p. 84.