Festival Emperor Alexander

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Floor plan (around 1840)

The fortress of Kaiser Alexander was a fortress on the Karthaus in Koblenz, completed in 1822/1824 . In terms of the converted area, it was one of the largest individual fortresses in Europe in the first half of the 19th century.

history

Construction and further expansion

As part of the Prussian fortress of Koblenz , the fortress of Kaiser Alexander was built on the last foothill of the Hunsrück - the so-called Hunnenkopf - southwest of the city center of Koblenz at an altitude of 170 meters. After a final draft by the fortress engineer Claudius Franz Le Bauld de Nans , construction began on September 3, 1816. On November 24, 1818, the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III. Occasionally a visit to the plant in honor of the Russian Tsar Alexander I named feasts Emperor Alexander . As early as 1822, parts of the fortress could be occupied with troops, on April 2, 1824 the extensive completion was reported to Berlin. In 1831 work on the underground passage to the Grand Duke Constantine Fort was finished.

The more powerful siege artillery then required reinforcement of the system. In the 1860s the ramparts were traversed , the inner reduit arch was initially protected by an earthfill and in 1874/76 by a 5-meter-thick walled casing.

The following engineer officers were involved in the construction of the fortress until around 1822:

  • Carl Wilhelm Becherer (since 1840: von Becherer, born March 6, 1791 in Berlin; † December 13, 1846 in Klein Mehßow ), joined the Prussian engineer corps in 1814 as a former construction manager , 1816–1818 in Koblenz, passed away as major in 1824.
  • Friedrich August von Meerheimb , joined Infantry Regiment No. 32 as a Russian Second Lieutenant in 1815 and joined the Prussian Engineer Corps from there in 1816, 1816–1817 in Koblenz, 1817 retired.
  • Heinrich von Mühlbach
  • Moritz von Prittwitz
  • Carl August Roese (* July 25, 1795 in Zilenzig ; † December 30, 1872 in Wittenberg ), joined the Prussian engineer corps as a second lieutenant from Fusilier Regiment No. 33 in 1819, in Koblenz from 1820–1821, lastly lieutenant colonel and field engineer in Wittenberg, adopted in 1854.
  • Otto Albert von Scheel
  • August Toepel (* around 1793; † March 7, 1819 in Torgau ), joined the Prussian engineer corps in 1815 as a Saxon tranche sergeant, 1816–1818 in Koblenz, most recently a captain.
  • Carl Friedrich Albert Wittich (* around 1782; † February 27, 1844 in Hausberge near Minden), joined the Prussian engineer corps in 1814 as a former construction manager, 1816–1817 in Koblenz, most recently captain and field engineer in Wesel , retired in 1841 as major .
  • Franz (Carl Josef August) von Ziemietzky (* July 8, 1798 in Glatz ; † May 1, 1861 in Leschnitz ), joined the Prussian engineering corps in 1816, in Koblenz from 1819–1820, lastly Prime Lieutenant in Neisse , retired as captain in 1835.

Abandonment and destruction

Throat Reduit (1993)

In 1886, the entire Koblenz fortress was downgraded as a fortress of the 2nd line, the state of which can only be preserved. On January 23, 1900, the work was abandoned and given up on January 27, 1903 as a fortification. The dilapidated facility then served as a training ground for the fortress battle. The barracks in the inner courtyard and the reduit - mostly referred to here as the core plant - continued to be used as accommodation.

After losing the First World War , France in particular insisted on the complete destruction of the Koblenz fortifications. On February 12, 1922, the resolution was passed to demolish the fortress of Emperor Alexander. The work lasted from the beginning of April to November 1922. After the masonry was blown up, a total of 136,000 m³ of wall rubble was removed with the help of a backhoe and a narrow-gauge railway, and 182,000 m³ of earth were moved. Only the entrance gate (lion gate) and the reduit with the piece of wall in between remained. Only a small part of the site was immediately prepared as building land, the actual development only took place after the city of Koblenz took over the area on January 1, 1934. During the Second World War , the core plant was severely damaged by the air raids in late 1944. Nevertheless, in the post-war period it served as an emergency shelter for families who had been bombed out or who had fled, and over the next few years it developed into a slum area, where the first cases of typhus and dysentery arose in the 1950s . It was not until 1962 that the facility was completely cleared and the last residents relocated. In July 1964 the reduit was demolished except for an outer wall.

garrison

Initially, only the casemates in the three main trench capons and in the reduit were intended to accommodate the permanent crew . Until 1860 the following were stationed there:

In May 1860, two battalions of the Guards Grenadier Regiment No. 4 moved here. Five companies moved into the core plant and one each in the capons. At the beginning of the 1870s, eight crew barracks were built in the southern part between Saillant II and III. As a replacement, the following were gradually built: On the Moselle side in front of the Reduit in 1889 a half-timbered barracks, on the Rhine side in the 1890s a farm building and a parade hall near the Reduit and in 1909 a masonry team building near the curtain wall . The Guard Grenadiers always stayed in the fortress with seven to eight companies until 1893. They were replaced by Infantry Regiment No. 68 , initially with one and since 1894 with two battalions. After the completion of the first team house of the Spitzberg barracks around 1911, only parts of the 1st battalion remained in the reduit and the half-timbered barracks . The masonry team building was occupied by the MG company of the 2nd Battalion. The Americans followed as Allied occupation troops in 1919 and the French in 1923, who renamed the plant in Fort Verdun . In the course of time, other individual buildings such as an armory , several sheds and a horse stable had been built in the inner courtyard . In 1915, the city had a 45-meter-high, highly visible tower tank built to supply the households on the plateau with water (broken off in September 1953). When the fortress was razed, the parade hall disappeared first, the half-timbered barracks remained until the 1930s, and the farm building was destroyed by the air raids in World War II. The Catholic St. Beatus Church was built from the horse stable in 1946–1948 . The brick-built team building - sometimes called the machine gun barracks - was used as a residential building, chapel and kindergarten after 1945. Since 1949 there has also been a construction school in the attic. The resulting United Technical Schools in Koblenz finally used the entire building from the beginning of 1950.

Building description

The Emperor Alexander Fortress had a side length of about 500 meters and thus almost completely encompassed a plateau that slopes steeply on three sides to the Moselle, the city and the Rhine, while the fourth side opens over the flat Karthäuserfeld to the city forest. The inner quadrangle or the main wall consisted of four corner bastions (or saillants) that were connected by three curtains. In the middle of the throat facing the city was the two-part reduit. In the inner reduit arch there were 50 casemates on two floors and in the outer 39 casemates on three floors. The main trench, which is up to 19 meters wide, ran about 12 meters below the crest of the wall. In front of the curtains there was a carponnier with 26 or 34 casemates on two floors as well as eight trench batteries in the escarpe . In front of each carponniere and the two corner bastions II and III there was an envelope , which was enclosed by a ditch around 9 meters lower and up to 15 meters wide. From there the mine-listening tunnels ran into the apron on the main and Moselle fronts . The ditch could be covered with eight batteries. Finally, there were three log houses in the glacis in front of the main front . There were around 250 open and casemated gun emplacements in the fortress, around 140 of which were used for long-range combat and 110 to line the trenches. In addition, 12 mortars could be set up in two batteries on the two corner bastions II and III for steep fire . A well in front of the curtain wall on the main front, another in the reduit and a cistern in each of the carponnies and in the Reduithof were available to supply the entire complex with water . From around 1904/05 the cistern in the Reduit was connected to the public water network via a pump in the throat tower of the Fort Grand Duke Constantine.

During the entire period of use of the fortress, there were repeated difficulties with the building ground. The plateau is crossed by a thick layer of clay . The overlying water-bearing layers did not give the mighty earthworks sufficient support. As a result, entire earth walls slid down, sections of the wall collapsed and groundwater penetrated the casemates.

Lion gate

Lion Gate (1993)
Celebrations Kaiser Alexander Löwentor Front 001.JPG
front
Festivities Kaiser Alexander Löwentor Rück 001.JPG
back

The front side of the lion gate ( position ) originally stood above the Eskarpemauer , the inner wall of the moat surrounding the fortress. The former main gate is a tall, uniform building block. This is closed at the top by a circular arched frieze on dimpled cube consoles and a crenellated wreath above . These battlements were removed in the second half of the 19th century and restored during the restoration of the Lion Gate in 1982.

In the middle of the block is the arched gate opening in a semicircular niche bordered by dimpled blocks. The gate opening is flanked by two monumental griffin reliefs made of cast iron , which were created in the Sayner hut based on the designs of General Ernst Ludwig von Aster. The following inscription is located above the entrance to commemorate the construction of the Kaiser Alexander Fortress : Veste Kaiser Alexander / Built under King Friedrich Wilhelm III / in the years 1817 to 1822 . To defend the entrance, the front wall has two gun slots on top of each other . Behind it in the passage there are two wooden gate wings with lattice-shaped iron fittings.

The former inside of the Lion Gate is built like a triumphal arch with three round-arched blind arcades between simple pillars . In the middle blind arcade the passage leads into the former fortress, on the right and left windows are let into the flanking guard rooms. At the north-west corner inside, a spiral staircase leads to the roof.

From 1985 to the end of 1991 the fire brigade of the Koblenz volunteer fire brigade, unit 11 (Karthaus), was housed in the Löwentor.

The Löwentor is a protected cultural monument according to the Monument Protection Act (DSchG) and is entered in the list of monuments of the state of Rhineland-Palatinate . The structure has also been part of the Upper Middle Rhine Valley UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002 .

System Alexander

In addition to the fortress of Emperor Alexander, these included the fortress works:

The fortifications of the Alexander system were given the task of barring attackers from access to the Karthäuserhöhe and thus preventing direct fire from there on the Koblenz city center - as happened during the sieges during the Thirty Years' War and the Palatinate War . Furthermore, from this key position, the Rhine and Moselle shipping as well as the five Koblenz bridges could be taken under fire.

literature

  • Hermann Blumhardt: The standing attachment for officers of all weapons and for war schools . tape 2 . Darmstadt 1864, p. 204-207 ( bsb-muenchen.de ).
  • Klaus Weber: The Prussian fortifications of Koblenz (1815-1834) (=  art and cultural research . Volume 1 ). 2003, ISBN 3-89739-340-9 , pp. 182-196 .
  • Rüdiger Wischemann: The Koblenz Fortress. From the Roman fort and Prussia's strongest fortress to the largest garrison of the Bundeswehr . Koblenz 1978, p. 78-86 .

Web links

Commons : Category: Feste_Kaiser_Alexander  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Dieter Marcos: The fortifications on the Karthaus . In: Festschrift 50 years of St. Beatus . Koblenz 1998, p. 80–84, here p. 82 .
  2. ↑ See the illustration of it in Weber, p. 455.
  3. ↑ Weber, pp. 182-187; Wischemann, pp. 79, 82.
  4. ^ Udo von Bonin: History of the engineer corps and the pioneers in Prussia . 2: From 1812 to the middle of the nineteenth century. Berlin 1878. Friedrich Wilhelm Hansch: History of the Royal Saxon Engineer and Pioneer Corps (Pioneer Battalion No. 12) . Dresden 1898. Klemens Mersmann: History of the Royal Prussian Guard Pioneer Battalion . 2nd Edition. Berlin 1910. Military weekly paper [years 1816–1868] . Berlin. Ranking and quarters list of the Royal Prussian Army for the year ... [1817–1868] . Berlin. Archives: Garrison military church books, 18th and 19th centuries. Evangelical Central Archive in Berlin and Secret State Archive of Prussian Cultural Heritage .
  5. ↑ Matthias Kellermann: The festivals of Emperor Alexander in Koblenz from the dismantling in 1922 to the destruction of the Reduit in 1964 . In: Fortress Journal. Journal of the German Society for Fortress Research (DGF) . tape 32 , July 2008, p. 33-46 . F. Wagner: The razing of the Koblenz-Ehrenbreitstein Fortress after the World War . In: Koblenzer Heimatblatt . tape 8 , no. 10 , May 10, 1931, p. 1–3, here p. 2 ( dilibri.de ). Matthias Kellermann: Koblenz Fortress and Ehrenbreitstein. Deconsolidation 1920-1922 - photographs by Joseph Ring . Koblenz 2018, ISBN 978-3-95638-413-4 , pp. 153–197, here p . 155 .
  6. ^ Address books of the city and the administrative district of Koblenz; Regimental histories of the units mentioned.
  7. ↑ Friedrich Betkau: History of the sixth Rhenish Infantry Regiment 68th . Koblenz 1908, p. 149-150 . Maximilian von Braumüller: History of the Queen Augusta Guard Grenadier Regiment No. 4 . 2nd Edition. Berlin 1907, p. 4, 114, 118, 262, 278 . On the history [of the Koblenz engineering school] . ( hs-koblenz.de [accessed on August 1, 2019]). Manfred Böckling: This new accommodation was a major step forward . In: Fort Konstantin. Historic place with a future . Koblenz 2013, ISBN 978-3-936436-24-2 , p.  67–82, here p. 72 . Weber, p. 195.
  8. ↑ Weber, pp. 187-193. Wischemann, pp. 79-82. Fritz Michel : The art monuments of the city of Koblenz. The profane monuments and the suburbs (=  The art monuments of Rhineland-Palatinate . Volume 1 ). Berlin 1954, p. 71-72 .
  9. ^ General Directorate for Cultural Heritage Rhineland-Palatinate (ed.): Informational directory of cultural monuments - district-free city of Koblenz . Koblenz 2013, p. 23-24 ( gdke-rlp.de [PDF]).

Coordinates: 50 ° 20 ′ 49 ″  N , 7 ° 34 ′ 39 ″  E