Bonn Citizens' Association
The Bonn Citizens' Association was a sociability association founded in Bonn in 1862 , which existed for 124 years and dissolved in 1986. The club house was located from 1909/10 to 1969 on Poppelsdorfer Allee / corner of Kronprinzenstraße (today: Prinz-Albert-Straße). From 1949 to 1965 it was the venue for the Bonn City Theater .
prehistory
After 1848 it was fermenting in the enlightened Bonner educated middle class . In particular in the reading , the intellectual center on the banks of the Rhine, the students discussed the religion-critical works of their former Bonn fellow students Karl Marx , Friedrich Nietzsche and Heinrich Heine , whose writings were all on the index of the Catholic Church. They were so controversially discussed that a not inconsiderable number of strictly Catholic reading members (together with the clergy and professors of religious studies at the university ), tired of the denominational disputes, withdrew under protest and joined efforts, one less political -to found a critical association.
In 1862 these efforts resulted in the foundation of the Bonn Citizens' Association, a society for non-profit teaching, sociable entertainment and cultural training, by a number of Christian citizens, master craftsmen, commercial medium-sized companies, manufacturers, clergy, theology students and religion teachers.
Bonn citizens' association house
In 1907 an architectural competition was held to build a new community building for the Bonn Citizens' Association. From it the Cologne architecture firm Schreiterer & Below emerged victorious with the 1st prize. The Cologne architect Heinrich Mattar was one of the other award winners . However, the design of the government architect Karl Thoma (1857–1923), who envisaged a pompous building complex, was carried out. It was built at the beginning of Poppelsdorfer Allee / corner of Kronprinzenstraße (today's Prinz-Albert-Straße) in the immediate vicinity of the underpass of the railway tracks. Today the Hotel Bristol stands on this property . The building was completed in 1909/10. The new social building was a four-storey monumental building with a facade undecided between historicism , art nouveau and neoclassicism , oversized ribbon windows on the upper floors (through the halls behind) and a voluminous mansard roof .
The building housed restoration rooms with a garden café on the ground floor (a terrace facing Poppelsdorfer Allee) and three bowling alleys in the rear. On Kronprinzenstrasse there was a large staircase with the portal to the large ballroom; the later post-war theater hall. On the upper floors were club rooms, social and conference rooms as well as reading rooms with a library. The basement consisted of masonry barrel vaults with intersecting penetrations and contained a cool storage area for beer kegs and, according to rumors, 100,000 wine bottles.
The Bonn Citizens Association survived the bombing raids in World War II relatively unscathed and, after some renovations, opened in 1949 as a theater hall for the municipal theaters that had previously played in the auditorium of the undestroyed Clara-Schumann-Gymnasium from 1945 to 1949 . On September 1, 1949, the first constituent meeting of the CDU / CSU parliamentary group took place in the Great Hall of the Bonn Citizens' Association. In 1965, the new building of the Bonn City Theater on the banks of the Rhine was ready for occupancy, so that from then on the town hall was mostly vacant.
Due to the socio-cultural development, the leisure club lost its attractiveness. Only the restaurant survived. The jazz cellars “Rainbow Dance Club” and “The Swinging Pool” were set up in the vaulted cellars, which are now more and more vacant . In 1963, the Bonn “ Beat Scene” finally took over the vaulted cellar and created the “Bus Stop” in it. This name comes from the fact that the club entrance was directly in front of the Kronprinzenstrasse bus / tram stop and the entrance area was furnished with old bus seats. The name was later taken as a reference to a top hit by the beat group The Hollies . Especially with the “1600 Club” (an allusion to the moral police and youth protection ), the basement became one of the most important meeting places for young people over 16 from the Bonn area. Here the teenagers could let off steam and dance until curfew and then take a cool shower in the Kaiserbrunnen (across from the Kaiserhalle ) on hot summer nights . Later, the former Tabu night bar was also used for beat concerts. The last major music event in the Great Hall of the Bonn Citizens' Association was the guest performance of the internationally known British beat band The Kinks .
The club house was blown up and demolished on March 22, 1969. The Hotel Bristol was built on this site until 1972 based on a design by the Bonn architect Ernst van Dorp . The association disbanded in 1986.
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Gerhard Kirchlinne: The Bonn Südstadt: One of the most splendid Wilhelminian style quarters in Germany . Bonn 2015, ISBN 978-3-00-050248-4 , p. 125.
- ↑ http://www.europese-bibliotheek.nl/Books/Bonn_am_Rhein_in_alten_Ansichten_Band1/101-120560/4
- ↑ The district between Poppelsdorfer Allee, Bonner Talweg and Königstraße (with the municipal gallery Zur Kerze ) was a cultural center until the mid-1960s.
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Archive link ( Memento of the original from November 29, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ http://www.bn-beat.de/89html ( page no longer available , search in web archives ) Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ An outcry and five quintals of dynamite , General-Anzeiger , October 21, 2014.
Coordinates: 50 ° 43 '48.5 " N , 7 ° 5' 59.2" E