House of Heineken
The Heineken house in Sandstrasse 3, right next to the Bremen Cathedral , is one of the last old Bremen town houses with a late Gothic structure and has the oldest preserved painted wooden ceiling in Bremen . It has been a listed building since 1973.
Demolition plans
The house at Sandstrasse 3 has housed the State Office for Monument Preservation Bremen (LfD Bremen) since March 1974 . Two years in advance, the building was supposed to be demolished - although it was a listed building - and a parking garage was to be built on the Wilhadistraße / Violenstraße / Sandstraße area. A demolition was also initially approved by the Monument Office and a "reconstruction" of No. 3 in Oberneuland was proposed as an alternative, but after renewed negotiations and with the support of the Bremen press, the preservation of monuments prevailed against the parking garage planning. Not only historical and art-historical arguments came into play - Sandstrasse 3 as one of the last five old Bremen town houses with late Gothic buildings - but also the possible endangerment of the cathedral from car exhaust fumes and vibrations.
With the project “Revitalization Sandstrasse” - the last cell in the old town next to the Schnoor - not only house no. 3 was saved, but numbers 5, 4, 4A and 2 could also remain. Only house no. 1, located across Buchtstrasse, had already given way to the expansion of Violenstrasse. The preservation of the houses Sandstrasse 5, 4 and 4A, known as Haus Vorwärts , also left an important document of Bremen's intellectual history in the cityscape; The Vorwärts association is one of the oldest workers' education associations in Germany.
In January 1973, the city council rejected the multi-storey car park project in the originally planned form. In March of the same year the decision was made about the future users of Sandstraße 3 and the necessary funds were made available for the first fundamental renovation work.
The monument office moved in on March 1, 1974, but initially only used the rooms in the front part of the house that had been renovated in the first construction phase. The two rooms on Violenstrasse, of which the lower one had been used by a printing company for decades, initially remained in an unrenovated or unrestored condition due to lack of funds.
history
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The Mayor of Bremen Christian Abraham Heineken (1752–1818) was the most famous resident of the house at Sandstrasse 3. After him, the building became popularly known as the Heineken House . But he was not the first resident of this former cathedral chapter curia, which is still preserved in its older parts, the first documentary mention of which dates from 1744. The time before that is only very sketchily documented.
According to an inscription that was once attached to the house and has been handed down to us, the archbishop chancellor Gideon Eggeling carried out a thorough repair and expansion of the dilapidated gabled house in 1579. It is not known whether he then moved into the new premises himself or only acted as the client of the now Protestant cathedral chapter.
According to a note from the archivist Hermann Post (1693–1762), another resident is said to have been the Swede Georg Bernhard von Engelbrechten († 1730), who was chancellor for Bremen and Verden for the Swedish king and whose sarcophagus - a work by the Bremen sculptor Theophil Frese (1696–1763) - stands in the lead cellar today.
In the document from 1744, a member of the von Galen family is named as the previous occupant of the house . The brothers Jost (Jodochus) and Dietrich (Theodorus) von Galen were canons of Bremen between 1570 and 1561 and 1601/1602. Their common epitaph is located in the cathedral on a pillar of the central nave opposite the pulpit. Direct descendants of the brothers cannot be proven by sources, but in the church records of St. Ansgarii and St. Petri Cathedral , several of Galen's burials up to 1748 can be found. It is possible that the residents of Sandstrasse 3 mentioned in 1744 were descendants of these two canons.
Knowledge about the residents of the house, secured by written documents, is only found in the Bremen State Archives for the beginning of the 18th century. They document the sale of the property " Cathedral Chapter Curia No. 30" and the two associated booths No. 28 a. 29 ”through the cathedral structure to the municipal lawyer and office director Everhard Otto (1685–1756).
The next owner from 1759 was the judge and later mayor Diedrich Smidt (1711–1787), a second uncle of the mayor Johann Smidt (1773–1857).
In 1787 the senator and later mayor Christian Abraham Heineken bought the house. Heineken was already a councilor at the age of 27, from 1792 he held the office of mayor and from 1802 he was eldest mayor. For several decades, Heineken and his descendants had a neighbor who is still known today in Sandstrasse, the doctor and astronomer Wilhelm Olbers (1758–1840); his house was opposite the Heineken.
The heirs of Senator Friedrich Wilhelm Heineken (1787–1848) and his widow Anna Theodora, b. In 1897 the Oelrichs sold Sandstrasse 3 to the Heinrich Bremer company, Domshof 14. The address book from 1893 shows that the Heineken heirs were no longer living in it themselves at that time. One of the tenants named in the address book was the well-known Bremen architect Johann Georg Poppe (1837–1915), who had his “office” here.
In 1898 the house was transferred to the Vorwärts association . The city of Bremen later bought it from him.
In 1917 the house was designed by Paul Ludwig Troost . After it had ceased to be the home of a large family, the upper floor had been converted into rental apartments. Handicraft businesses had their domicile on the ground floor. From the 1920s until shortly before the preservation of monuments moved in, the house in Sandstrasse was the seat of the Adolf Willers printing company.
Building history
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There are only sparse sources on the building history of the house at 3 Sandstrasse, from which three main building phases can be derived.
The oldest preserved part of the house is the first of the two basement rooms as seen from Sandstrasse. It has a simple barrel vault and probably belonged to a so-called stone work , the fire-proof part of a half-timbered house due to its construction material . Valuable household items and documents were kept in such a component. During an excavation in the front part of the house due to renovation work, one not only found "rubbish" from the 18th century, including many shards of Chinese porcelain, but also late medieval wall remains and parts of a paving - possibly there was once a gate at this point.
Road construction work in Sandstrasse in 1985 also uncovered the remains of a 62.5 cm thick wall made of cloister format stones running parallel to the facade of No. 3 . From all these puzzle pieces, however, no conclusive picture of the oldest construction phase can be created. It was probably a half-timbered house with the gable facing the Sandstrasse.
In 1579, as mentioned above, the house was thoroughly repaired by the Archbishop Chancellor Gideon Eggeling. The house remained gable facing Sandstrasse, but was extended by a large room, a ballroom, in the direction of Buchtstrasse (today Violenstrasse). The time when this rear part of the house was built is supported by a dendrochronological examination of the age of beams in the roof structure and the ceiling of the hall carried out in 1987 . The wood was felled between 1576 and 1578. The rear gable, now visible from Violenstrasse, has been preserved from this period, as is the second, groin-vaulted cellar room, which has a remarkable detail: As an early form of insulation from moisture penetration, small pieces of glass became scale-like incorporated into the plaster of the wall. This "renovation measure" can be ascribed to the 18th century.
The house got its present form - at least in its external appearance - with the renovation after the sale to Syndikus Everhard Otto. In the contract of December 2, 1744, it was stated that the foundations of the house at that time had so disintegrated " that it was no longer worth any major reparation and had to be completely rebuilt ". Apparently Otto had this new building carried out, but only reshaped the rear part of the house. The front house was a now eaves constant in an L-shape at the rear of adjoining new building will replace. For this, the two booths No. 28 and 29 soft. Probably the back of the house wasn't as dilapidated as the files say. In any case, it remained. The ballroom was redesigned and received a rococo stucco ceiling. On the back wall there was an oven niche and a decorative blind door. The windows facing Violenstrasse, which are now available again, had been walled up.
From the Otto period, a “Butze” now used as a broom closet has been preserved on the ground floor: a tiny room below the stairs to the upper floor, which probably served as a sleeping place for a maid. The door could be locked from the inside; Remnants of an imitation marble have been preserved on the door frame. "Replicas" were made for other doors in the house based on the example of the original door handle that still exists here.
Part of the property was also a baroque garden, the basic structure of which was initially made recognizable by the preservation authorities through the shape of the courtyard paving. The construction of a parking garage, which was later implemented in a smaller form, then removed their traces.
Redevelopment
The renovation of the building was carried out in three construction phases. The first section in 1973/74 comprised the front and middle rooms facing Sandstrasse and the floorboards on the first and second floors of the building from 1745. While there were doors on the ground floor that can be attributed to the Heineken era, the apartments were on the first floor a hodgepodge of doors from the turn of the century to the post-war period. Several 18th century door leaves from demolitions in the old town of Bremen were available from stocks of the monument office and could be built into the new office; the corresponding frames were missing, however.
The second construction phase comprised the renovation of the two rear rooms in 1979. For a static investigation, the rococo stucco ceiling from the second half of the 18th century, which was already badly damaged at the time, was opened (reconstruction by E. Otto) and an extremely detailed ceiling painting from the Renaissance period was discovered. The remaining parts of the damaged stucco ceiling were then secured and removed in order to transfer them to the room above. Remnants of individual threads were found above a colored wooden plinth cladding, which presumably came from an ornamentally designed burlap covering. With the uncovering of the ceiling in 1580, plans were then discarded to shorten the house by an axis at the rear on the ground floor and to adapt it to the changed traffic routing of Violenstrasse with an arcade for pedestrians.
In the course of a third section, which was spread over a longer period, the floors on the ground floor were renovated and the masonry, especially the basement masonry, the main cornice, the roof and finally the walls of two Renaissance windows were repaired. The renewal of two dormers , which had been abandoned during repairs after the war, had to be dispensed with. The formerly not free-standing gable to Violenstrasse was deliberately left in its raw state.
Ceiling pictures
The painting, dated 1580, is the oldest surviving painted wooden ceiling in Bremen. It is older than the two Renaissance ceilings in the Blomendal house and much older than the ceiling of the upper town hall from 1612. The glue paint was applied to unprimed oak beams and softwood floorboards.
In an excellent state of preservation, the ceiling painting shows fifteen medallions with allegorical representations typical of the time , framed by fittings and scrollwork , acanthus tendrils and animals. The themes of the allegories, embodied by female figures, are the five senses , the seven cardinal virtues and two of the seven liberal arts . The fifteenth medallion falls out of the frame, here a man is playing the bagpipes - perhaps an indication that the room was used as a ballroom. One of the medallions contains the date of the painting: the year 1580. A picturesque, decorative wall design belonged to this ceiling mount, but only a small remnant has been preserved.
execution
The former garden hall, located on the ground floor, is traversed by six large ceiling beams, which form five fields with the main parts of the painting that extend over the entire room. The painting of the newly found ceiling has largely been preserved and the quality and richness of its iconographic program in Bremen has not yet been found in comparable ceiling paintings. Except for minor damage, where the painting surface has flaked off the wood, the painting is surprisingly well preserved, which is also thanks to the fact that the 400-year-old ceiling was well protected for more than half of this time.
The picture strips formed by the bars are structured by painted fittings that surround a rhombic picture field in the middle and an oval cartridge on each side . In each field a figure with its attributes is shown in front of a landscape. All beams are also painted with fittings that alternate between oval and rhombic fields. The areas that remain free between the fittings are filled with plant ornaments. The colourfulness is concentrated on earth tones, on an ocher-yellow tone that is now a little pale and that originally looked like gold. The figures and landscape in the picture cartouches are painted with black and a little brown and heightened with white. On the beams, the background between the fittings is black, the tendril ornament on it is white.
The pictures are characterized by a fine brushstroke, the ornament, on the other hand, is looser, with a wider brush and a stronger swing. The weakly plastic ornament of the fittings runs out in rolled-up tape ends, the so-called scrollwork. These forms, adopted from blacksmithing, became particularly popular in the second half of the 16th century. Due to the ornamental engraving in the master books, especially by the Dutch such as Cornelis Floris , Cornelis Bos or Hans Vredeman de Vries , fittings and scrollwork as well as the grotesque were quickly spread and popular.
Allegories
The iconographic meaning of the individual picture fields is evident from the figures and their attributes. It is almost exclusively women. They embody allegories, symbolic personifications of human activities and behavior. Seven picture cartouches represent the cardinal virtues, two more belong to the seven liberal arts. Except for the “ rhetoric ”, all women sit on a kind of stage in an open space, with a landscape in the background. Their emphasis indicates Dutch influence. Animals are represented on five other picture medallions with a wealth of attributes. These allegories embody the five human senses, a subject that is still very new in art around 1580.
The last picture with the man playing the bagpipes falls out of the scope of the series of paintings. As the only male figure, since she is shown standing, she is also smaller than the other seated persons. Their meaning could point to the allegory of “music” or “dance” (“chorus” - round dance, round dance). The motif goes back to an engraving by Albrecht Dürer (1514), which was not known for a long time.
The iconological meaning of the ornamental surroundings of the picture cartouches refers to Christ and the virtues with the fruit hangings . For example, they are attached to the pulpit of the Ansgarikirche , which Hermen Wulff created in 1592, below the allegories of virtue. Here they frame the cardinal spiritual virtues. The monkey, on the other hand, is the symbol of evil and vice, it points to the sinfulness of man and the flawedness of his deeds. The dog is also usually a negative symbol with which fornicators, murderers and other evildoers are compared who are not accepted into paradise. In the figure with the dog on his lap, he symbolizes “loyalty”.
Client and artist
So far nothing is known about the owner of the house belonging to the cathedral monastery, the commissioner of the painting or the use of the hall. The fact that “rhetoric” and “ dialectic ” were chosen from the allegories of the liberal arts could indicate a clergyman.
The artist is also unknown because a signature or a craftsman's mark has not yet been found on the ceiling. At that time, arts and crafts in Bremen were still exclusively in one hand, but at least in a workshop. Like the stone carvers and "snitkers" (carpenters), they saw themselves primarily as craftsmen. As long as they didn't feel that they were artists, they rarely signed their work.
Individual evidence
- ^ Monument database of the LfD
- ↑ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Margarethe Haberecht: Haus Heineken, Sandstrasse 3 in Bremen houses tell history
- ↑ a b c d e f Hans-Christoph Hoffmann: EXPLORE · CARE · PROTECT · MAINTAIN
- ↑ a b c d e f g h Rolf Gramatzki: The newly discovered wooden ceiling from 1580 in the Heineken house . In: Bremisches Jahrbuch
- ↑ Kirsch (see discussion: Note LfD)
literature
- Detlev G. Gross and Peter Ulrich: Bremen houses tell history . Döll Edition, 3rd edition 1998, ISBN 3888082455
- State Archives Bremen (Ed.): Bremisches Jahrbuch . Self-published by the Bremen State Archives, Volume 57, 1979, ISSN 0341-9622
- Hans-Christoph Hoffmann: EXPLORE · CARE · PROTECT · MAINTAIN. A quarter of a century of monument preservation in the Free Hanseatic City of Bremen. A look back . Hauschild Verlag , Bremen, 1998, ISBN 393178567X
Web links
Coordinates: 53 ° 4 ′ 30.6 ″ N , 8 ° 48 ′ 39.1 ″ E