Collegium Maius (Erfurt)

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Collegium Maius from the south, September 2012

The Collegium Maius was the main building of the Old University in Erfurt , which existed from 1392 to 1816. A new building built from 1998 in the old style is located after the destruction of the old building in 1945 in Michaelisstrasse in the center of Erfurt's old town , in the so-called "Latin Quarter". The old building housed the rector's office, lecture halls and the large ballroom of the university. In 2011, the regional church office of the Evangelical Church in Central Germany , which was created through the merger in 2009, moved into the new Collegium Maius.

History of construction and use

For the history of the old university see: University of Erfurt # history

Beginnings until 1510

When the university was founded after 1392, town houses in the "Latin Quarter" were used for teaching. The area of ​​the later Collegium Maius was also used by universities. This was bordered by Michaelis-Straße, Studentengasse and Furtmühlgasse. A university building lay in an east-west direction behind today's Collegium Maius, roughly where the library building now stands. There were houses with different functions, a library, but also a bakery and a fountain.

A Collegium Maius in the area of ​​the building that bears this name today was built in 1435. The university church (Michaeliskirche) and numerous printing works were located in its immediate vicinity. It was the main building and heart of the university.

During the "great year" of 1509/1510 the Collegium Maius was badly damaged. The trigger was the bankruptcy of the city's financial budget, which was declared by the council in view of the growing mountain of debt. This led to inner-city disputes. When students and mercenaries clashed at the church fair in August 1510, cannons were even aimed at the Collegium Maius in the course of the conflict. Eventually it was stormed, the facility demolished and the inventory looted.

1511 to 1806

A new building of Collegium Maius with strong stone walls took place from 1511 to 1515 in the style of Gothic . A high hipped roof was planned and perhaps also put on. The late Gothic north gable probably dates from around 1490 and has been preserved. The ground floor with tracery windows and a striking keel arch portal were built between 1511 and 1513. This is considered a masterpiece of late Gothic stone carving. On the upper floor, behind the four windows above the portal, a “splendid four-seater catheter, the throne for the university's ceremonies” was erected. The patron saint of the Philosophical Faculty rose above it, a Madonna in a halo.

The upper floor with the representative auditorium was completed in the Renaissance style between 1547 and 1551. On the north gable a three-part window front was created in tracery, on the west and south side Renaissance windows with columns, arches, coats of arms and inscriptions by donors (collegiates). There is evidence that there was a second upper floor made of half-timbered buildings from around 1550. Around 1680 this was removed and the roof renewed. The Faculty of Philosophy was also located in the building until 1681.

In the period from 1664 onwards, Erfurt was the second state university in Kurmainz and should probably take a back seat to Mainz . The Collegium Maius was built for general university purposes with modest baroque decoration. It was given the name Collegium Anselminum after the Elector and Archbishop Anselm Franz von Ingelheim to underline the lordly character of the university . In 1681 the building was re-covered and the east wall renewed. The Great Hall, which was rebuilt in 1688, became a legal auditorium. In 1690 it was divided by a transverse wall, the northern part now served as a library. On the ground floor to the left of the main corridor was the medical auditorium, to the right that of the philosophers. All auditoriums were equipped with catheters and benches and decorated with wall paintings. Before the 400th anniversary of the university in 1792, the partition on the upper floor was removed and the final concert took place in the ballroom.

1806 until destruction in 1945

In 1806 the French occupied the Collegium Maius with prisoners of war Prussians and then used it as a hay store. The main college, like other buildings of the university, was used for purposes other than intended by the French until 1814.

In 1816 the Hierana , which "had long since been only a shadow of its former size" and still had 20 students, was closed by royal cabinet orders from the Prussian government. The former Collegium Maius was expanded into a “workhouse” from 1816, and the “saddest period in the history of the Great College” began - until it was destroyed in 1945. From 1820 to 1877 the neighboring Philosophenhaus, built in 1547, was demolished on Studentengasse. It was also used by the French from 1806 to 1814, also as a “hospital for lepers and venereal people”.

Between 1844 and 1847, a multi-storey building was built on the back of the Collegium Maius to enlarge the workhouse. The municipal pawnshop and pawnshop moved into the building complex later . In 1879 some of the rooms were given over to the high school . The northern half of the upper floor served as an auditorium. The Thuringian Forest Museum was also temporarily located in the Collegium Maius. In 1909 the school (now the municipal high school) moved to the new building on Meyfartstrasse. The Collegium Maius then served as a vocational training school until 1933.

In 1934, the Collegium Maius, including the back building, was designated to accommodate the Erfurt city library (previously on the Anger) "as the traditional bearer of the old university library ". After the death of the Mainz governor and university rector Philipp Wilhelm von Boineburg , a library building was built on Mainzerhofstrasse with his capital and book collection in 1723, which burned down in 1899. Its splendid portal with inscriptions and decorative elements was first given to the Municipal Museum and now, in 1935, it was built into the back building, which had now been redesigned as a book store , as Boineburg's portal .

As part of the renovation in 1934/36, the ground floor of the Collegium Maius was given the functions of lending books and administration. All fixtures were removed from the upper floor and a ballroom that took up the entire floor area was restored. He received a diagonally arranged wooden coffered ceiling, stylish ceiling lights, colored glass windows in the north gable and parquet flooring. The wall paintings have been restored and the “venerable catheter” returned to its intended use. Until 1944, the large hall served mainly as the reading room of the city library. But also through its diverse use as a ballroom until the college was destroyed in 1945, the university concept lived on after the university was closed. The academy of non-profit science and the society for the history and archeology of Erfurt provided for academic life. Many lectures (e.g. from the Erfurt Art Association ) and events (e.g. the 19th German Historians' Day in 1937) completed the program.

Before the destruction, the Collegium Maius was a two-storey, seven-axle building made of quarry stone masonry with a half-hipped roof, slightly bent along the street. The central portal with keel arch and the north gable with rectangular tracery windows were elaborately designed. The auditorium on the upper floor had a Gothic wall structure on the north side and partly a Renaissance wall structure on the west side.

On February 9, 1945, the Collegium Maius was destroyed down to the ground floor walls in an explosive bomb by the US Air Force . The portal was still sticking out of the rubble. The ruin was completely cleared and secured, but numerous architectural parts were salvaged and covered in the courtyard and in other places.

New construction from 1998 and use from 2011

In 1983, as part of the Luther year (Luther had studied at the University of Erfurt, even if not in this building), the striking late Gothic portal with adjacent wall sections with tracery windows on both sides was rebuilt .

During the fall of the Wall in 1989, the Collegium Maius stood as a symbol for a spiritual and cultural awakening. Encouraged by the Erfurt University Society , founded in 1987 , which also wanted to rebuild the symbolic building, the university was re-founded in 1994. Many citizens participated voluntarily and with donations in the project to rebuild the Collegium Maius. Reconstruction of the building began on May 26, 1998, and the topping-out ceremony for the shell took place on April 23, 1999. The building was later plastered and painted pink. The high gable roof with turrets on it did not exist in the past.

Since the university could not come to an agreement with the city of Erfurt on financial and legal details, the city of Erfurt sold the Collegium Maius in 2008 to the Thuringian regional church, which was merged into the Evangelical Church in Central Germany (EKM) on January 1, 2009 . It was planned to use the complex as the administrative headquarters of the EKM. The university society was no longer involved in the process of reconstruction and construction planning. The EKM planned to build in the historic ballroom on the upper floor in order to gain consultation rooms there. Great excitement resulted from the EKM's claim that there was no evidence of the existence of a large ballroom anyway. Numerous protests, open letters and public discussions were the result. A compromise was then agreed: thanks to the partly flexible and partly transparent shape of the partition and the fixtures, the former ballroom, reduced to around 60% of the floor area, is still imaginable in its entirety. The partition wall begins next to the middle outer window of the facade, where the catheter stood before the destruction in 1945. The hall can also be used for larger events with up to 250 seats. The design of the north gable and the interior work were carried out until 2011. Over 300 fragments of ashlar from the preserved rubble were reused for the reconstruction of the walls and windows. The stones were supplemented or left with impacts from bomb fragments. New stones were made from Seeberger sandstone , as was the case with the originals. The east wall is designed very simply, the ceiling is a suspended ceiling, the floor is covered with laminate.

New buildings for the regional church office

The EKM erected a large, U-shaped, modern, "highly thermally insulated" new building with a flat roof next to and on the Collegium Maius and the former library building. With its facade cladding and the mirror effects, it “makes direct reference to the adjacent half-timbered buildings”. The roof of the library building nested on two sides by the new building was given large dormers on both sides. The historic Boineburg portal in the former library building is now behind a glass porch, in whose panes the house opposite is reflected. The portal is therefore often difficult to see from the outside. The renovations and new buildings (the shell of the Collegium Maius had already been built between 1998 and 2000) cost 11.7 million euros, of which 7.25 million came from federal and state urban development funds. In 2012 the “Thuringian State Prize for Architecture” was awarded for the new building.

On June 24, 2011, the EKM's regional church office moved into the Collegium Maius.

Since December 2016, a work of art has adorned the main stairwell of the administration building. It was created as the result of a limited artist competition on the occasion of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation with the topic of "Reformation and the Word". The three-dimensional, ten-part, suspended glass object was made according to the design of the glass designer Günter Grohs from Wernigerode and executed by the Derix Glasstudios, Taunusstein, in collaboration with the artist.

The Collegium Maius is so important because only a few Central European universities can boast a “large college” / main building from the late Middle Ages. As a lively, symbolic university location, where u. a. The COLLEGIUM MAIUS EVENINGS are jointly organized by the EKM and the University Society, it is also a central place of remembrance for Lutherstadt Erfurt. Since June 2012, the bronze plaque donated by the University Society in 1992 has been marking the former main university building again.

Pictures from 2007 to 2011

literature

  • Erich Kleineidam: History of science in medieval Erfurt. In: Hans Patze and Walter Schlesinger (eds.): History of Thuringia (2). High and late Middle Ages. Cologne 1973.
  • Almuth Märker : History of the University of Erfurt 1392-1816. Weimar 1993.
  • Steffen Raßloff : Erfurt. The oldest and youngest university in Germany . Erfurt 2014. ( E-Paper )
  • Jürgen Miethke: University foundation at the turn of the 15th century: Heidelberg in the age of schism and conciliarism. In: The history of the University of Heidelberg (Studium generale of the Ruprechts-Karls-Universität Heidelberg. Lectures in the winter semester 1985/1986). Heidelberg 1986, pp. 9-33.
  • Steffen Raßloff: The Collegium maius - renaissance of an outstanding cultural monument. In: City and History. Journal for Erfurt 43 (2009), p. 22 f.
  • Astrid Rose: The workhouse in the Collegium maius. City and History, No. 50, 01/2012, pp. 26–27.
  • Werner Schnellencamp: Building history of the "Collegium Maius" of the University of Erfurt. (On the occasion of the inauguration of the new home of the city library in the Collegium Maius in June 1936) . Kurt Stenger publishing house, Erfurt 1936.
  • Regional Church Office of the Evangelical Church in Central Germany: Regional Church Office and Collegium Maius in Erfurt. Leaflet, Erfurt 2011.
  • Derix Glasstudios: Reformation and the Word. A work of art for the regional church office of the Evangelical Church in Central Germany. Brochure. Taunusstein 2018.

Web links

Commons : Collegium Maius  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Helmut Wolf: Erfurt in the air war 1939-1945. Glaux-Verlag, Jena 2005, ISBN 3-931743-89-6 . (Writings of the Association for the History and Archeology of Erfurt , Vol. 4)
  2. Rudolf Zießler In: Götz Eckardt (Hrsg.): Fate of German architectural monuments in the Second World War. Volume 2. Henschel-Verlag, Berlin 1978, pp. 484-485.
  3. ^ Leaflet from the EKM regional church office: "Regional church office and Collegium Maius in Erfurt", 2010
  4. Old and new united. State Church Office receives State Architecture Prize . Thüringische Landeszeitung (dapd), November 10, 2012
  5. ^ Steffen Raßloff: oldest university in Germany. A memorial plaque on the Collegium maius has now returned to the renovated building . In: Thüringer Allgemeine from June 23, 2012

Coordinates: 50 ° 58 ′ 46.5 ″  N , 11 ° 1 ′ 40.9 ″  E