Villa Braunbehrens
The Villa Braunbehrens (also known as Café Ehmann ) is a listed building in the Kohlhof , which administratively belongs to the old town of Heidelberg , but is located three kilometers southeast of the city on the ridge of the Königstuhl . The building, which has been owned by the city for a long time, has been inhabited by several artists in the course of its history and has long been used for gastronomic purposes.
history
The building was built for Anna Maria von Braunbehrens in 1912/14. She was a cousin of the art patron Karl Ernst Osthaus . With heart disease and widowed at an early age, she came to a spa stay in the spa hotel in Kohlhof and decided to settle in the neighboring settlement. To the north, above the existing residential development, she had a building erected on the edge of the forest. The architect was a student of Henry van de Velde , with whom the client maintained a lifelong friendly relationship. The design of the house is based on several buildings by van de Velde: the Hohenhof in Hagen and the Hohe Pappeln house in Weimar . As the only building in the Kohlhof, the villa was not inconspicuous as is typical of the region, but was built in the style of the time with echoes of Art Nouveau .
The owner ran a small poultry farm, for which a separate chicken coop was built above the Kohlhof forester's house. After the owner moved to Handschuhsheim in 1940 , the villa was rented to IG Farben , which at the same time acquired the nearby spa hotel and operated a secret research facility there. The villa served as the director's seat.
The composer Wolfgang Fortner lived in the building from 1945 to 1950 . He gathered a group of young musicians and composers around him. These included u. a. Klaus Loeffelholz von Colberg , Hans Werner Henze , Hans Zehden , Hans Ulrich Engelmann , Wolfgang Ludewig , Günther Becker and Ernst-Ulrich von Kameke . Fortner made his students with during the time of National Socialism proscribed Neutönern as Paul Hindemith familiar and taught them in contemporary composition technique. Together they heard and played their own compositions and enjoyed a lively musical exchange. Contemporaries mockingly called the gathering musicians the Kohlhof Club , the Berlin critic Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt even described the Kohlhof as a marshalling yard for young composers . Ultimately, however, Fortner's most successful compositions were composed at the Kohlhof, including his violin concerto, the Shakespeare songs and the 1947 symphony . It was there that the young Hans Werner Henze received the musical stamp of his work, which soon after 1950 would surpass that of his teacher Fortner.
From 1959 the Heidelberg restaurateur Karl Ehmann was the tenant of the building. He already ran the well-known ship restaurant on the Neckar in Heidelberg on Neuenheimer Ufer and set up the Cafe Ehmann in the Kohlhof villa . The café became a popular destination, especially since the Kohlhof had become a Heidelberg winter sports area in the post-war period. Cross-country skiing competitions were held there from the 1950s , a ski jumping hill built in 1948 on the edge of the Kohlhofwiese offered competitive athletes the opportunity to practice and the Heidelberg youth ski days were considered the region's talent factory. The elevated café offered a panoramic view of winter events. The seats on the (later glazed) terraces were particularly popular. The popular café received a further boost from the rehabilitation clinic built in the immediate vicinity since 1951 as an extension of the former spa hotel, whose patients and visitors only had to walk a few meters to the café. Inside the café was equipped with tiled stoves and lamperia , and the furniture was solidly crafted. In addition, the building was surrounded by a large park-like garden, which in summer offered additional seats in the green around the house.
Around 1970 the villa came into the possession of the city of Heidelberg. Mayor Reinhold Zundel finally advocated leasing the building cheaply from 1985 to the sculptor Klaus Horstmann-Czech , who lived there until March 2016. The house has been empty since then.
literature
- Georg Stein (Ed.): The island in the forest. 300 years Heidelberger Kohlhof , Palmyra-Verlag, Heidelberg 2006, therein a. a .:
- Georg Stein: "Villas", barns and other houses , in this: Die Insel im Wald , Heidelberg 2006, pp. 96-101.
- Matthias Roth: The composer Wolfgang Fortner and his "Kohlhof Club" , in Georg Stein (ed.): Die Insel im Wald , Heidelberg 2006, pp. 132-139.
- Eckhardt Schmidt: "Ski and toboggan good" - winter sports on the Kohlhof , in Georg Stein (Ed.): The island in the forest , Heidelberg 2006, pp. 160–163.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Is the Villa Braunbehrens an alternative? Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung , March 27, 2018, accessed on the same day.
Coordinates: 49 ° 23 ′ 18.5 " N , 8 ° 44 ′ 6.8" E