Hanna Adenauer

Hanna Adenauer as a console figure for the sculpture by Josef Stübben on the Cologne town hall tower

Hanna Adenauer (born November 26, 1904 in Cologne , † July 14, 1978 in Cologne) was a German art historian. From 1948 to 1969 she was the city ​​curator of Cologne.

Career

Hanna Adenauer was born in Cologne in 1904 as the daughter of the lawyer August Adenauer , a brother of Konrad Adenauer . From 1926 to 1932 she studied art history at the Universities of Cologne, Berlin, Vienna and Paris. In 1932 she completed her doctorate with Paul Clemen in Bonn with the thesis The Cathedral of Laon : Studies on its history and its stylistic foundation in the context of French architecture . Subsequently, she was employed by the provincial curator of the Rhine province until 1938 and inventoried the monuments of the Rhine province. At the end of the 1930s she was employed by the district curator in Kassel , and in 1943 she continued to work in the area of ​​monument inventory in Kurhessen , Oldenburg, Halle and Hamburg , where she recorded the inventory of the local bell storage facility , which had to be delivered during the Second World War . She worked on the Mayen district for the Handbook of German Art Monuments in the Ernst Gall edition .

Since the end of 1943, Hanna Adenauer, as an employee of the city's conservationist Hans Vogts in Cologne, was entrusted with damage registration and art protection - the salvage and removal of cultural assets to protect against war damage. She personally organized and accompanied the transports related to the preservation of monuments, including pieces such as the altar of the city patron created by Stefan Lochner from Cologne Cathedral and numerous other art treasures. In 1944 she was promoted to curator .

From 1948 onwards, Hanna Adenauer was - initially for five years - in charge of safeguarding the city's monuments, such as the heavily damaged Cologne City Hall and the almost completely destroyed Spanish building , Haus Balchem , the Overstolzenhaus and many others. In April 1953 she was confirmed in office as a monument conservator. Her term of office was characterized by the rebuilding of the destroyed city of Cologne, so that she always moved in the field of tension between the preservation of the existing building fabric and the desire for modernization, expansion and change. It was not infrequently "in the crossfire of criticism" by builders and architects, but also in contradiction to the city administration itself.

Gravestone of Hanna Adenauer on the family grave of the August Adenauer family, Melaten-Friedhof , Cologne.

Looking back on your tenure in office, her colleagues attested that she was “forceful and tenacious” as “advocate of the monuments in Cologne”. One of her successors in office, Ulrich Krings , assessed her role in 1997 as follows:

"... none of these structures presented in our" reader "would not have been saved without the active care of Hanna Adenauer. The reconstruction of the Rhein and Martinsviertel including the rows of houses on the Alter Markt and on the Heumarkt with the conservative-historicized building forms found in the 30s is thanks to their energetic struggle for every detail, especially the slate roofs "

- Ulrich Krings

After her retirement at the end of 1969, Hanna Adenauer was responsible for the restoration of the council tower until 1975, where she made a significant contribution to the current appearance with her specifications. In 1969, the sculptor Gerd Haas designed a console of the council tower figures with their bust in her honor. This shows the conservator holding her hands around the gables of old houses to protect them from the demolition excavator.

In 1978 she died at the age of 73; her grave is in the Melaten cemetery (corridor 20 in E).

Publications

• The maintenance of the secular architectural monuments in Cologne. 1955/1956.
• Rhenish Association for Monument Preservation and Heritage Protection (Ed.): Rheinische Kunststätten. Row 3, The Maifeld. No. 1, Mayen, castle and town fortifications . 1937.
• Rhenish Association for Monument Preservation and Heritage Protection (Ed.): Rheinische Kunststätten. Row 3, The Maifeld. No. 2, Mayen, churches and secular buildings . 1937.
• The fate of the Cologne City Hall before, during and after the Second World War. In: Peter Fuchs (Ed.): The City Hall of Cologne. History, buildings, shapes. Extended new edition. Greven, Cologne 1994, ISBN 3-7743-0283-9 , pp. 125-147.

Web links

Commons : Hanna Adenauer  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

• Entries in Arthistoricum.net

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Willy Weyres : Hanna Adenauer 65 years. In: Rheinische Heimatpflege . Vol. 7, 1970, p. 99.
2. ↑ Hanna Adenauer: cheerful and contemplative things from serious times. In: Festschrift for Franz Graf Wolff Metternich. Rhenish Association for Monument Preservation and Landscape Protection (ed.), Yearbook 1974. pp. 45–49.
3. ↑ Five-year conservator interregnum ended. The main committee approved the appointment of Miss. Adenauer too. In: Kölnische Rundschau . April 18, 1953
4. ↑ Helmut Signon: Chauffeured into boarding house with a pickled hood. Conservator Dr. Hanna Adenauer retired. In: Kölnische Rundschau. November 29, 1969, p. 14.
5. ^ Cologne: 85 years of monument protection and preservation 1912–1997. Series of Stadtspuren - Monuments in Cologne. Volume 9.I. Ed .: The City Conservator. JP Bachem, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-7616-1129-3 , p. XIV.
6. ↑ Hiltrud Kier , Bernd Ernsting , Ulrich Krings : Cologne, the council tower: its history and its program of figures . Ed .: City of Cologne. JP Bachem Verlag , Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-7616-0858-6 , p. 331 .
7. ^ Josef Abt, Johann Ralf Beines, Celia Körber-Leupold: Melaten - Cologne graves and history. Greven, Cologne 1997, ISBN 3-7743-0305-3 , p. 70.