Hans Kölle

Hans Kölle , actually Karl Heinrich Johannes , (born June 10, 1880 in Reelsen Kr. Höxter, † July 4, 1950 in Potsdam ) was a German garden architect .

Life

He was the son of the railway official Adolf Kölle and Mathilde geb. Mecke, had completed his apprenticeship from 1894–97 with the art and trade gardener Bütepage in Lüneburg. He then worked in the city garden administration of Hanover and from 1899–1901 with Hermann Wendland in the mountain garden . After his military service, he became first assistant to head gardener Alfred Reuter in the Sanssouci park district in 1903 .

Provided with good certificates, on March 1, 1906, when he was only 25 years old, Kölle became the chief city gardener of Potsdam. Another mentor was perhaps court gardener Albert Rosenberg (1841–1914, not related to Alfred Rosenberg), who had studied under Lenné in Potsdam and had been chairman of the Potsdam Horticultural Association since 1904. As a member of the municipal planting commission founded in 1905, Rosenberg had also worked for the city, including a renovation of Wilhelmsplatz in 1881. Kölle became his son-in-law in 1910 and in 1913 also secretary of the Potsdam gardening association.

In 1913 his position in the city garden inspector was improved.

When the war broke out, Kölle still fell under conscription and had to serve 1915-18.

After the retirement of the cemetery and garden director Rudolf Kierski , who had in fact only been responsible for the cemeteries since 1906, on October 1, 1923, the city garden and cemetery administration were combined, and Kölle became the city garden and cemetery director on April 1, 1924.

On March 1, 1934, Hans Friedrichs (NSDAP) took over the office of Lord Mayor. Friedrichs was taken with the idea of ​​nature and homeland protection and believed these issues were effectively promoted by the NSDAP. It was his endeavor to preserve the landscape parts of Potsdam designed by the kings and to concentrate new buildings in the peripheral areas and suburbs. Friedrichs worked well with Kölle. He had him prepare detailed annual reports from March 1, 1934. In some cases, Kölle had to take over the designs of the city architect Georg Fritsch and implement them in the implementation planning.

In 1945, Kölle remained in office for half a year after the end of the war. In August / September 1945 he was released after political and personal allegations. Political statements from Kölle are not known. It is reported from his circle of friends that he had a German national attitude and did not appreciate the Nazis, even though he became a member of the NSDAP in May 1933 in order to be able to stay in office. He hid the cult objects from the destroyed synagogue in Potsdam and handed them over to the Jewish community in Berlin in October 1945. As a result, he received a discharge certificate in 1946 from the “Committee of the Antifascist Parties to Review Nazis”.

Kölle's grave is located on the large hereditary burial of the gardener Borgmann, his wife's grandfather, in the New Cemetery in Potsdam.

plant

Imperial times

Kölle's first independent work in 1907 was the design of the square around the then Bismarck monument in Bismarckstrasse (Bertha-von.Suttner-corner Hebbelstrasse). Kölle planted two oaks from the Sachsenwald near Friedrichsruh that are still there.

When the Tornow was opened up in 1911, Kölle designed the landscaped green spaces adorned with boulders on the Küsselspitze and on the Tornowspitze.

Kölle's greatest work before 1918 was the school garden on Kurfürstenstrasse, a remarkable botanical garden with landscaped curved paths that was destroyed by floods in 1940.

Kölle's work seemed modest and, in its insistence on the traditions of the Lenné-Meyerer School, out of date compared to the dazzlingly modern work of Erwin Barth , who was the same age and who had received a far more thorough training from Fritz Encke at the Potsdam gardening school .

When Barth began to geometrically design Charlottenburg's city squares, Kölle also changed his design style. Probably for the first time in 1914 with the design of the facilities for the Werner-Alfred-Bad on the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Promenade, Kölle joined the modern age. His design, drawn with colored chalk instead of watercolors as before, marks a tremendous advance in his artistic expressiveness.

Weimar Republic

Settlement at the fountain

After the First World War , Kölle was offered a much larger field of activity than in the imperial era. While the court gardens slowly fell into disrepair, the city began one building project after the other. Kölle was given numerous opportunities to design green spaces and allotments. Here it was mainly about simple functionality, aspects of homeland security were added in the Stadtheide ("village trees"). His handwriting can be clearly seen in the small, hedge-lined squares of the more lavish Am Brauhausberg and Am Brunnen settlements from the second half of the twenties.

1929–31 he designed sophisticated facilities at the municipal hospital in Türkstrasse, which connected the inhomogeneous buildings with one another, including an elaborate perennial ground floor.

In 1924 he was commissioned to convert the airship port area in Zeppelinstrasse , which had been repurchased by the city, into a land and water sports area. The sports field met the highest demands in terms of garden design. The sports facility, opened in 1927, was Cologne's largest and one of his most important works.

Kölle was also active in Potsdam's cemeteries. The only one of his works that has recently been restored is the war cemetery on the New Cemetery (1917), which is an extremely impressive complex with its two lawn parterres, the upper one of which has a plane tree grove. In 1931, Kölle, together with city building officer Dreves, laid out an urn cemetery with eight terraces made of planted dry stone walls. The tombstones were uniformly shaped according to different types.

Among the Potsdamer Platz, it is the Platz der Einheit that has always been the focus and was the first to be updated. After a lively public discussion, a draft by Kölle from December 1928 was carried out for the redesign of the jewelry area, which had previously been divided into a star shape. It now consisted of an undivided lawn, surrounded by avenues of lime trees and two rose fields in the south. The effort to replace small-scale ornamental systems with spacious, tended lawns can often be found in the Kölle plant.

time of the nationalsocialism

In Kölle's first annual report for Friedrichs, nothing less than a "comprehensive expansion of the urban green spaces" is in prospect, and an increase in green spaces of 86,400 m² is recorded. The labor service enabled labor-intensive work to be carried out from 1932 to 1939. Extensive new systems were created, which are also characterized by their simplicity. Kölle partially modernized its own older systems.

Another focus of Friedrichs' town planning was keeping the banks of the Havel open and opening up. He provided for continuous public riverside paths on the Havel, which Kölle implemented. In 1933/34 the urban riverside path was created at the Hinzenberg allotment garden colony, and in 1934–36 the riverside path from Leipziger Strasse to Tornow. Starting from the settlement on Adolf-Hitler- (Schiller-) Platz, a spacious riverside park was created on the Havel, which is still somewhat preserved.

As part of the design of the Friendship Island, Kölle redesigned both parts of the island on the sides of the Long Bridge by 1935. On the west side he removed the small-scale plants by Ferdinand Jühlke (1887), and on the east side he cleared the allotments and laid out the large lawn with the two flanking ramp paths that still exist today and on which the perennial plants created in 1938-39 are attached from Hermann Mattern .

In 1935, Kölle created the permanent allotment garden on the Pfingstberg. The allotment gardeners who had been expelled from the Friendship Island were initially settled here. "A self-contained allotment garden settlement is to be created here, which (would) mean a gain for the cityscape through the uniformity of its layout, surroundings and the buildings to be built." Accordingly, the design was of the highest garden design standard, which can still be traced today. Two further permanent colonies, Oberförsterwiese and Waldwiese, were started on rubbish dumps, but were not completed as planned due to the war.

Naturally, special care was taken in the landscaping of Friedrichsstadt, which was intended for "the poorest of the people". Karl Foerster took over the execution . There were playgrounds in the inner courtyards. A “cottage garden” was created at the ferry station. At the end of Hermann-Göring- (today Schiller-) Straße leading from Adolf-Hitler- (today Schiller-) Platz at the train station to the Uferpark on the Havel, a lookout bastion was built. It hid 2 pumps inside, which were used to irrigate the facility. The footpaths, the space on the bastion and small walls were made of polygonal Weser sandstone, as it was used in the perennial garden on the Friendship Island.

The Saarlandanger

Of Kölles Siedlungsgrün, next to Schillerplatz, what is best preserved today is the so-called Saarlandanger (today Eduard-Claudius-Str.), The Nazi war-damaged settlement on Drewitzer Strasse by Paul Emmerich (1936). The settlement was seen as an “architectural realization of the German folk idea.” Small houses surround an irregular “village green” with an emphatically “homely” design.

During the war, Kölle tried with all his might to keep mowing the lawn and planting flowers. In 1943, however, splinter trenches were dug in parks, squares and green strips. In May 1944, Kölle wrote his last annual report. Against his opposition, the last public jewelry complexes that were not disfigured by splinter trenches, namely the Friendship Island and Wilhelmsplatz, were released as grave land in 1944.

The Potsdam urban green has not been able to regain the extent and state of care that it had achieved under Kölle.

Directory of important works in Potsdam

The city heath

• 1907 Bismarckplatz
• 1908 place in front of the Church of the Redeemer
• 1910, 1938 enclosures around the Eisenhardt monument
• 1911 Küssel- and Tornowspitze
• 1911 Kurfürstenstrasse school garden
• 1912, 1936 room place
• 1913, 1925–27 airship port
• 1914 facilities at the Werner-Alfred-Bad
• 1917 War cemetery Neuer Friedhof
• 1919 Stadtheide
• 1926 Emmaushaus
• 1928 Wilhelmsplatz
• 1929/30 hospital garden at Türkstrasse
• 1930–32 Sonnenlandanger
• 1930 Steubenplatz
• 1931 Urnenhain new cemetery
• 1933 Eisenhartsche Heilanstalt
• 1934 forecourt of the power station and other facilities on Zeppelinstrasse
• 1934 plantation
• 1936 Rückertstift
• School yard Realgymnasium Hohenzollernstrasse
• 1934 Surroundings of the Garde-du-Corps monument at the New Garden
• 1935–36 Schützenplatz
• 1934–35 Friendship Island, area at the Long Bridge
• 1934 forecourt of the New Cemetery

The Schillerplatz in Potsdam in the former Friedrichsstadt

• 1935–38 Friedrichsstadt with Adolf-Hitler-Platz, observation tower and ring promenade
• 1935 allotment garden colony on Pfingstberg
• 1934 Bassinplatz
• 1935 Leipzig Triangle
• 1935 Luisenhof, Uferweg am Tornow
• 1935 Drewitzer Strasse settlement for the disabled
• 1935–36 Bornstedt school area
• 1935 Schlageterplatz
• 1935–36 Bornstedt war cemetery
• 1936 War School Potsdam, new planting of poplar avenue
• 1937 Seekrug restaurant
• 1937–39 permanent allotment garden area Waldwiese Templiner Straße
• 1936–42 permanent allotment gardens Oberförsterwiese
• 1939 Lutherplatz
• 1939 Luisenplatz
• 1941 Foundlingsplatz in Großbeerenstraße

swell

• CA Wimmer: Potsdam's city garden director Hans Kölle (1880-1950) . In: City and Green . 50, 2001, pp. 251-257.