Hansaplatz (Cologne)

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Hansaplatz is the name of a park on the southeast side of the Hansaring in Cologne's old town north , which is bordered by a 113 meter long remnant of the medieval city wall and the Gereonsmühle .

Hansaplatz - city wall at Hansaring (March 2005)

History of origin

Hansaplatz - around 1886

Like the Cologne Rings, the Hansaplatz is also laid out on the open space created by the demolition of the city wall. The remains of the wall were deliberately planned as a focal point on the large squares on the Ring ( Chlodwigplatz , Rudolfplatz , Hansaplatz, Ebertplatz ). But not only the city wall was largely dismantled. Until 1886, the "Hof Reuschenberg", named after the noble family Reuschenberg , stood at this point on the city side behind the city wall . The courtyard, which was first occupied in 1395, was later also called "zum Hirsch" or "zum Hirschenkümpchen" due to the antlers attached to the manor house. This was probably the basis for the later street name Am Kümpchenshof.

City architect Joseph Stübben had already planned Hansaplatz as a green area when concretising his “Kölner Neustadt” project. Adolf Kowallek took over the horticultural design of the Hansaplatz as well as that of the Deutsches Ring and Sachsenring. The green area was built between 1896 and 1900, had an original size of 1.18 hectares and is now 1.02 hectares. The jewelry systems at Gereonsmühle had an original size of 16,100 m². The Hansaplatz got its name from the immediately adjacent Hansaring, which was named on May 4, 1882, an avenue street with three rows of plane trees as well as footpaths and bridle paths on the median strip .

On June 29, 2017, the Cologne District Representation 1 decided to upgrade the Hansaplatz park to make it a monument.

Buildings on Hansaplatz

Hansaplatz - Museum of Applied Arts and Schnütgen Museum, on the right the Hansaplatz (around 1910)

On the initiative of Stübben, the city reserved a piece of land in March 1899 for a new building in front of the Gereonsmühle, which was part of the city wall, in order to build the new arts and crafts museum there. In addition, the city received a donation of 400,000 marks from textile manufacturer Otto Gustav Andreae on December 24, 1895 "for the construction of a arts and crafts museum worthy of the city and its collections". In February 1896, the city council decided on the property on Hansaplatz, in September 1896 Franz Brantzky received the building contract.

At the north end of the square, the Kunstgewerbemuseum was built in Hansaring 32 (opening on May 2, 1900) and the Schnütgen Museum as an extension in No. 32a, the foundation stone of which was laid on November 4, 1908 and its inauguration on October 26, 1910. The private East Asian art collection of Adolf Fischer (1856–1914) was initially housed in the extension of the Kunstgewerbemuseum on Hansaplatz until it was housed in its own Museum for East Asian Art (Adolf-Fischer-Straße (formerly Bremer Straße) / Gereonswall) in 1913. After laying the foundation stone on January 24, 1911, the building was opened on October 25, 1913. The collection, comprising 900 exhibits, was saved from the war damage in 1944 and only made accessible again on December 2, 1977 in what is now the Museum of East Asian Art . All of the museum buildings on Hansaplatz were designed by Franz Brantzky. In Cologne, an impressive museum focus was thus created on Hansaplatz. The museums were destroyed in air raids in April 1944.

Hansaplatz - Monument "Woman with the Dead Child" (1959)

Between 1933 and 1945 the Hansaplatz was called “Spangenbergplatz” because SA man Walter Spangenberg was shot here on February 24, 1933 around 11:30 p.m. by communists “in the fight for the national uprising”. Due to a city resolution of April 21, 1945, the square was given its old name again.

On May 25, 1945, seven corpses (forced laborers) that the Gestapo had buried there were recovered from the Klingelpütz site . A memorial plaque in the Hansapark reminds of this, is Cologne's oldest memorial for the victims of National Socialism and has remained the traditional place of commemorations for May 8th 1945 for many years since 1945. The plaque (“Here rest seven victims of the Gestapo / Germany's most shameful time, 1933 –1945 ”) is the grave slab of a grave in which the 7 bodies discovered on the Klingelpütz site were buried on June 3, 1945. The inauguration with a ceremony on took place on the same day with 1,500 spectators. On the edge of a square made of stone slabs, a bronze sculpture "Woman with the dead child", unveiled on May 22, 1959, depicts a mother with her dead child, which was made by the Dutchman Marie Andriessen. It is the second cast of a group of six figures that Andriessen created for Enschede between 1946 and 1953 and that was erected there in 1953 to commemorate the liberation from the German occupation. In Dutch , the sculpture was originally called bomb war victims ( Dutch "Bomslachtoffer" ).

Hansaplatz has been a listed building since July 1, 1980 . In the biotope mapping of Cologne carried out in 1983, the remains of the city wall at Hansaplatz were included as a habitat worthy of protection .

location

The Hansapark is bounded in the west by the Hansaring, in the north by Adolf-Fischer-Straße, in the east by Gereonswall and in the south by the Kümpchenshof. The Klingelpütz and the Klingelpützpark form its extension . Together with the Klingelpützpark, the Hansapark is of outstanding importance in the open space structure of Cologne city center. At Hansaplatz and Kaiser-Wilhelm-Ring , the ring is 114 meters wide , otherwise an average of 32 meters. The Cologne city railway serves Hansaplatz with the nearby Christophstraße / Mediapark and Hansaring underground stations .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hiltrud Kier, Cologne: Kunstführer , 1980, p. 129.
  2. ↑ Fred Kaufmann / Dagmar Lutz / Gudrun Schmidt-Esters, Cologne street names: Neustadt and Deutz , 1996, p. 53.
  3. ↑ Tamara Felicitas Hufschmidt / Adolf von Hildebrand, Adolf von Hildebrand: Architektur und Plastik seine Brunnen , 1995, p. 157.
  4. ↑ Henriette Meynen, Die Kölner Grünanlagen , Volume 1, 1979, p. 161.
  5. ↑ Eberhard Gothein / Georg Neuhaus, The City of Cöln in the First Century under Prussian Rule 1815 to 1915 , Part 1, 1916, p. 231.
  6. ↑ Fred Kaufmann / Dagmar Lutz / Gudrun Schmidt-Esters, Cologne street names: Neustadt and Deutz , 1996, p. 59.
  7. ↑ initiative Stadtoasen Cologne
  8. ↑ Sybille Fraquelli, in the shadow of the cathedral: Architecture of the Gothic Revival in Cologne 1815-1914 , 2008 S. 277th
  9. ^ Assembly of city councilors on December 27, 1895, p. 335
  10. ↑ Werner Baecker, Cologne and his buildings 1928-1988 , 1991, p. 348.
  11. ↑ Marion Werner, From Adolf-Hitler-Platz to Ebertplatz , 2008, p. 26.
  12. ^ Greven's address book from Cologne and the surrounding area, 1941/1942, p. 883
  13. ↑ Bruno Fischer, Cologne and the surrounding area 1933-1945 , 2012, p. 14.
  14. ^ Geographical Institute of the University of Cologne, Kölner Geographischearbeiten , edition 82, 2004, p. 43.
  15. ^ City of Cologne, inventory of the Klingelpützviertel , November 2007, p. 6.

Coordinates: 50 ° 56 ′ 48 ″  N , 6 ° 56 ′ 50.1 ″  E