Dresden Bridge Office

The Dresden Bridge Office (in Dresden for short: Bridge Office , often also the Holy Cross Office , from the 18th century mostly Spiritual Bridge Office ) is a bridge office that was first mentioned in Dresden in 1432. It was formed for the simultaneous maintenance of the Dresden Elbe Bridge and the Kreuzkirche . It was assigned tangible and intangible assets (villages, land, foundations, donations, interest, bridge tariffs, etc.), which it also managed.

Dresden Elbe Bridge on an engraving from around 1650, to the left of the bridge the tower belonging to the Kreuzkirche. Both were administered as joint assets by the Dresden Bridge Office.

After the introduction of the general city order in the Kingdom of Saxony in 1832, it was incorporated into the Dresden municipal administration and existed as the administration of the Dresden Elbe Bridge until after 1844. As a judicial office, it remained until 1851, from the fortune fund that was then still available, the Kreuzkirche, including it, was built in 1868 assigned assets, which until then belonged to the city. According to this, it is mentioned in 1881 as the Augustusbrücke property as an independent unit of account within the budget of the city of Dresden, the final dissolution of the special fund is unknown.

history

Emergence

It has not yet been clarified who initiated, built or financed the Dresden Elbe Bridge . The first documents from 1287 onwards do not show any ownership structure, so that on the one hand this bridge could represent its own estate , similar to a foundation . This is supported by most researchers, as no documents about the ownership structure of the bridge are known either before or after this point in time.

Because of the river crossing, which was important for a merchant settlement, which was Dresden at that time, it would be obvious, according to the researcher Karlheinz Blaschke , that the church (the later Kreuzkirche ) and the bridge (the later Augustusbrücke ) should be viewed as a financial unit from the outset and, in today's sense, rather could have been assigned to a kind of cooperative management .

According to the historian Alexandra-Kathrin Stanislaw-Kemenah, such a unity of church and bridge is quite obvious, because in 1295 the first initiatives to maintain the bridge came from the merchants, approved by the sovereign: At that time, political communities were always ecclesiastical communities. Bridge and church were also dependent on each other in the Middle Ages: The only Elbe crossing as a bridge for several dozen kilometers upstream and downstream secured the Dresden bridge a special position for the transport of goods. The church with its relics in turn ensured a stream of pilgrims who, coming from the east and north, relied on the bridge. This is also supported by the fact that the bridge, like the church, was classified by the Meißner bishop as piae causae (pious foundations).

A bridge master, from the 16th century bridge Executor called, in 1303 for the first time as magister pontine mentioned. He was appointed by the council, at the end of the Middle Ages (2nd half of the 15th century) also by the sovereign, who always reserved an influence, and was mostly councilor himself. The bridge master or bridge office administrator was also the administrator of the Frauenkirche , the bridge courtyard (or at the beginning of the bridge courtyards on the Dresden and Altendresdner side) and the later bridge courtyard hospital. He was not only responsible for the necessary maintenance of the bridge, but increasingly also the administration of the foundations and donated funds, which can be proven from 1304: In this year the Dresden citizen Jacobus Magnus bequeathed an annual interest to the bridge, which he received from the village of Kötzschenbroda .

In 1304 part of Golberode was donated, but later sold again. In 1311, the villages of Lockwitz , Prohlis and Bannewitz , which were bought by the citizens of Dresden, were assigned to the bridge , as was Grumbach , which had already been acquired in 1308 . From Kötzschenbroda wine was obtained from a vineyard located there. In addition, there were indulgences (from 1319) as well as income from numerous foundations and donations both in the sticks and with the table .

The bridge courtyard on the left Elbe , located at the end of the Kanzleigäßchen, was first mentioned in 1370 as curia circa pontem , and in 1388 as bruckynhof , was the service yard for the bridge. It was about 100 cubits from the Elbtor, which protected the bridge on the Dresden side.

Duties of the office

However, the increasing tasks - in addition there was the collection and administration of the bridge toll (from 1388 verifiable) directly by a bridge customs officer in a customs house on the bridge - meant that these administrative tasks themselves continued to increase. So further villages were added until 1370: Gittersee (donation 1352), Possendorf and Obergohlis . The first surviving bridge office bills (not called the bridge office at the time , but as the register sancta crucis et pontis ) date from 1370 and show that the Kreuzkirche and the bridge were viewed as a unit. Between 1432 and 1462, shares from the villages of Blasewitz , Seidnitz , Strehlen , Pieschen and Weixdorf finally followed . On the ducal orders, Lockwitz had to be sold to the Freiberg citizen Georg Alnpeck in 1511 , where a separate manor was established. The same thing happened in Weixdorf in 1552.

These increasing administrative tasks led to the first mention of a bridge office in 1432, from the second third of the 15th century it was run as an independent unit alongside the city's budget. On the one hand, the Bridge Office was responsible for the administration of the assets of the Kreuzkirche and the bridge. In the 14th and 15th centuries, the lower jurisdiction was added for the villages that belonged to the bridge office (Bannewitz, Gittersee, Lockwitz, Prohlis, Obergohlis, Blasewitz). On the bridge itself, the bridge office had jurisdiction over the neck , which was important as the bridge toll was paid in the middle of the bridge.

The interest earned also affected fields, pastures, meadows, gardens in and around Dresden ( Strehlen and Seidnitz in addition to the villages mentioned), vineyards on the Tatzberg and the meat banks in Dresden itself. Second, the management came from the maintenance of the bridge and the Secondary branches that serve the church, such as the operation of a quarry near Struppen , the operation of a brick factory and a lime kiln. There were two bridge courtyards to maintain the bridge , later only the one on the left bank of the Elbe. And finally the office took fines, be it from public or from church fines. There was only a separate invoice for church and bridge for the altar donations of the respective altar brotherhoods, which were clearly assigned to the church and whose brotherhoods were also administered separately.

The expenses of the bridge office can be traced for the 14th and 15th centuries z. B. for bells, organ, vestments (regalia), school, expenses for processions, personnel expenses for clergy and rabble wages, but also the litter rate as the base rate for the bridge as one of the oldest buildings in Dresden to the cost of food for the clergy (priests and chaplains ) for the final handouts for the dying. Any accounts for an existing boys' choir (the later Kreuzchor ) are not available despite the detailed accounts for church and school.

In 1480, the bridge tariffs achieved 28 percent of the bridge office's income (from this point onwards the invoices were also classified), but the maintenance work on the bridge and church itself also grew. While the current expenses were apparently covered, special expenses (fire of the Kreuzkirche 1491 ) Special funding can be found.

In 1517 a hospital, the Brückenhofhospital, was set up in the Brückenhof , which mainly took in people suffering from the French disease ( syphilis ). In 1537 it was relocated to the Bartholomäihospital near Freiberger Platz as the “Franzosenhaus” : jurisdiction and financial responsibility remained with the Bridge Office until 1834.

Secular reduction from the Reformation in 1539

Along with the Reformation, which was introduced by Duke Heinrich the Pious in Dresden in 1539, after two church visits the Kreuzkirche was removed from the centuries-old holdings of the Bridge Office and made an independent institution within the council, to which the building and facilities as well as the altar foundations were transferred . The associated school also took over the city, as did the cross choir formed from the school . This made the bridge office exclusively responsible for purely secular tasks that remained with him.

The new construction of the Elbe bridge was always a constant companion of the demands, which the bridge office refused, referring to the lack of funds. So it came about that the construction of the new bridge was financed by the Elector 1727–1731 under Augustus the Strong by the court builder Matthäus Daniel Pöppelmann together with the council builder Johann Gottfried Fehre , the management of the bridge remained with the bridge office.

City order from 1832 and gradual dissolution

Only after the general city ordinance of 1832 was passed, the juxtaposition of the Bridge Office and the Dresden Council, which was always linked in terms of personnel, but was always legally separate, could be eliminated. A first step towards this was in 1833 the subordination as an independent area within the " Stadtcämmerey ". Externally, in 1834 the first handing over of responsibilities not related to the bridge took place, namely the amalgamation of Materni , Bartholomäus and Brückenhofhospital under the name "Maternihospital", which was rebuilt in 1837 by Gottfried Semper on today's Freiberger- / Ammonstraße.

After a process lasting several years, the Dresden Appeals Court found in 1844 (it was about the cost of rebuilding the piers that had been blown up in 1813 and rebuilt in 1819) that the question of ownership of the bridge was indeed open and could not be clarified by the documents. In its decision, it granted ownership of the bridge to the city of Dresden, and ruled that the cost of this reconstruction of the river pillars would ultimately have to be borne by the state, since it was a matter of replacing war damage.

The bridge office has now been gradually dissolved and the administrative tasks as well as the tasks not directly related to the bridge have been integrated into the city administration formed on the basis of the city regulations. Asset management and lower jurisdiction remained with the Bridge Office. With a recess (i.e. the council resolution) of September 30, 1851, the city council ceded lower and higher jurisdiction to the state. With this, the jurisdiction of the council offices was transferred to a royal city court for the city district and a royal district court for the district. By decree of September 2, 1856, the Dresden court office took over from both places.

In 1868, following the enactment of the church and synodal order, the Kreuzkirche and the property assigned to it were spun off from the property management and the remaining joint management of the Kreuzkirche and bridge property was abolished; the remaining property was managed separately as the Augustusbrücke property . The Brückenhofhospital (as part of the Maternihospital) received an amount of 30,000 marks as a foundation with a review of February 4, 1881.

The exact date of the final dissolution of the bridge office or its remaining administration is not known.

literature

• Bridge Office . In: Folke Stimmel, Reinhardt Eigenwill a. A .: Stadtlexikon Dresden A-Z . Verlag der Kunst, Dresden and Basel, 1994, ISBN 3-364-00300-9 , p. 79.
• Alexandra-Kathrin Stanislaw-Kemenah: The Dresden Bridge Office in the Middle Ages . In: Dresdner Geschichtsverein (Hrsg.): Dresdner Elbbrücken in eight centuries (= Dresdner Hefte - Contributions to the cultural history. No. 94, 2/2008). Dresden 2008, ISBN 978-3-910055-90-2 , pp. 15-24.
• Christian Püschel: The urban finance. In: Ed. Karlheinz Blaschke with the participation of Uwe John: History of the City of Dresden, Vol. 1: From the beginnings to the end of the Thirty Years War. Theiss, Stuttgart 2005, ISBN 3-8062-1906-0 , on the Bridge Office: pp. 398-400.
• Mathias Meinhardt: Residence in Transition . Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-05-004068-4 , pp. 57–60 ( limited preview in the Google book search).

Web links

• Holdings in the German Digital Library
• The Dresden Bridge Office in the Stadtwiki Dresden

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Stanislaw-Kemenah, pp. 16-18.
2. ↑ Stanislaw-Kemenah, p. 18
3. ^ ^{A b} Otto Richter : Constitutional and administrative history of the city of Dresden. Third Volume: Administrative History, Second Section. Theodor Baensch, Dresden 1891. ( digitized version) pp. 232-234, accessed on June 21, 2018.
4. ^ Carl August Weiske: Archive for practical legal studies with excellent consideration for Saxon law. Second part. Gebrüder Schumann, Zwickau 1834, p. 26 ( digitized in the Google book search, accessed on June 21, 2018).
5. ↑ In: Wochenblatt for strange legal cases in act-like representations from the area of ​​the administration of justice and administration first for the Kingdom of Saxony, No. 9 and No. 10 , case No. 26, Verlag Bernd Tauchnitz jr., Leipzig 1844, p. 65– 78 ( digitized version in Google Book Search, accessed June 21, 2018). Strangely enough, the fact that the construction costs of the Pöppelmann Bridge - which was involved - were paid by the electoral state did not play a role in the entire process.
6. ^ Otto Richter: Constitutional and administrative history of the city of Dresden. Volume Two: Administrative History, First Section. Theodor Baensch, Dresden 1891. ( digitized version ) p. 2, accessed on June 21, 2018.
7. ↑ Gerhard Wendelin (Ed.): 750 years of the Kreuzkirche in Dresden . Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, Berlin 1965, p. 14, without ISBN.
8. ^ Otto Richter: Constitutional and administrative history of the city of Dresden. Third Volume: Administrative History, Second Section. Theodor Baensch, Dresden 1891. ( digitized version) pp. 232–237, here p. 235, accessed on June 21, 2018.