Hochbunker Körnerstraße (Cologne)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hochbunker Ehrenfeld (2011)

The high bunker Körnerstraße is a former air raid shelter in Cologne 's Ehrenfeld district . It was built in the 1940s next to the destroyed Ehrenfeld synagogue . After the war it was used by bombed-out families as living space and the fire brigade as a warehouse. Today it is a place for culture and memory as bunker k101 .

The construction

The bunker is a three-storey, free-standing building with an extended rectangular floor plan. It measures 50.3 by 15 meters, with the long side parallel to the road. It consists of exposed reinforced concrete and has a pan-roofed hip roof. The reinforced concrete ceiling under the roof is 1.4 meters thick, as is the bunker floor; The walls in the basement are 1.8 meters thick and 1.1 meters thick on the upper floors. The usable area of ​​the bunker is 1700  square meters .

The bunker was supplied with fresh air through multiple angled openings on the upper floors. The ventilation created a slight overpressure in the bunker, which prevented gas from entering the interior; there was also a gas lock to the outside. The holes were blocked from the inside during an air raid . The electricity was connected to the public power supply, and in the dark due to a power failure, phosphorescent markings showed the way.

The bunker Körnerstraße (between house numbers 91 and 113) has been a listed building since April 25, 1995 (No. 7443).

history

Mural on the north corner of the bunker
Transparent against racism and another mural

Construction and use as a bunker

In the course of the November pogroms in 1938 , the Ehrenfeld synagogue in Körnerstrasse was destroyed down to the outer walls on the night of November 10, 1938. The parish had acquired the property on which the synagogue had stood in 1926 from a private individual who had bought it from the former Koenemann gold molding and frame factory. The adjacent, vacant garden property was owned by a son of Koenemann in 1938, who had emigrated to Great Britain before 1915 and who, as a British citizen, had taken the name Frederick Francis Kennedy . It was expropriated and foreclosed in 1939; In December 1940, the order was issued to the new owner to make the property available to the " emergency guide program ".

In 1942/1943 the bunker was built on this property, probably completed in February 1943. The architect was Hans Schumacher from Cologne , who planned a total of seven bunkers in Cologne. It is not known whether the construction was initially planned on the site of the destroyed synagogue: Bunkers in other cities were often built on the sites of synagogues that had been desecrated and demolished by the National Socialists .

In the last two years of the war, the bunker served the civilian population as protection against air raids; Ehrenfeld was the target of Allied bombings 55 times. It had 1,500 places, but like many other facilities of this type, it was often overcrowded by a multiple, at times with up to 7,500 people. The residents had a bunker pass on which they were assigned a place; However, the organization of access to the bunker, which was initially regulated, became increasingly disorderly in the course of the air war . Jews , Sinti and Roma and forced laborers were not allowed to seek protection in the bunker. Two members of the Cologne Edelweiss Pirates , Franz Rheinberger and Bartholomäus Schink , met in this bunker in 1944, which subsequently served the group as a meeting point alongside other locations.

Mass housing and camp

After the end of the war, the bunker initially served as accommodation for released prisoners of war and then, until the mid-1950s, as an emergency shelter for those who had been bombed out. Different people, many of them traumatized by the war, were crammed into this mass accommodation; there were frequent conflicts, including under the influence of alcohol. The hygiene options were poor, so that head lice , for example, quickly spread among the residents. Used furniture was then stored in it. In 1964, a plaque was put up on the street side of the bunker, which reminds us of the synagogue in Körnerstrasse, destroyed by the Nazis on November 10, 1938. 93 remembered. This plaque erroneously gave the impression that the bunker had been built on the site of the synagogue. This false assumption solidified over the years; in the meantime the board has been removed and a new one shows the correct former location of the synagogue.

First events

In 1962 and 1983/84 the bunker was upgraded as a nuclear shelter . The Cologne fire brigade was the tenant of the bunker, which now belonged to the federal government , and art and memorial projects were organized. The first demonstrable artistic use took place in 1981: Daniel Spoerri , then a professor at the Cologne Werkschulen , carried out the art action Promenade sentimentale together with his students as part of the Theater der Welt festival . In 1988, an initiative of various social groups was founded with the aim of transforming the bunker into a memorial to the pogrom against the Jews in Ehrenfeld. In the summer of 1989 radical right-wing slogans were found at the bunker: "Get rid of the Turkish filth in (sic!)". The Cologne youth ring then put up a banner with the inscription "Ehrenfeld gegen Kraft und Racismus". In September 1991 the “Initiative Gestaltwechsel” took part in the “TATA West - Art on the Belt Line” of the Ehrenfeld Art Association with an exhibition of 90 children's drawings from the Theresienstadt concentration camp in the bunker.

Commitment to preservation

In 2003 the fire brigade announced that it would use the entire bunker as a storage room in the future, and that it would no longer meet the current requirements for public events. Investments by the district council and the cultural office in fire protection measures enabled public use of the ground floor again from 2007, where further exhibitions were held in the following three years. In 2007 the bunker was decommissioned as a shelter. After the lease with the Cologne fire brigade had expired, the Federal Agency for Real Estate Tasks (BIMA) requested the handover of the building in order to sell it in 2011 . Thereupon the project group Hochbunker Körnerstraße from Ehrenfeld artists collected around 2000 signatures, also from prominent supporters. They appealed to the city to buy or rent the bunker in order to keep it as a memorial and cultural site.

In 2012 the “Förderkreis Hochbunker Körnerstraße 101” was founded as a registered association that rented the bunker from the federal government. The primary goal is to preserve the high-rise bunker Körnerstraße and to “promote regional, transnational and international artistic and cultural endeavors”. In 2013 the building was reopened to the public as bunker K101 . In 2014, the support group presented installations by Gunter Demnig , Felix Droese (“ I killed Anne Frank ”) and others, “contemporary art in the context of its importance as a historical place of remembrance”. Artists living in Ehrenfeld regularly exhibit in the bunker; Electronic art is now a focus.

Web links

Commons : Hochbunker Körnerstraße (Cologne)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e The bunker and the Ehrenfeld synagogue. In: bunkerk101.de. Retrieved November 3, 2019 .
  2. ↑ a b From war to art. High bunker Körnerstrasse 101 . S. 12 . (pdf)
  3. ^ Hochbunker Körnerstraße 1943 to 2013. City of Cologne, accessed on November 3, 2019 .
  4. ^ The Gazette , June 11, 1915. (PDF file)
  5. ^ Barbara Becker-Jákli : The Jewish Cologne. History and present. A city guide. Emons Verlag, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-89705-873-6 , p. 336.
  6. ^ Wolfram Hagspiel : Cologne and its Jewish architects . JP Bachem, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-7616-2294-0 , p. 404 .
  7. ↑ From war to art. High bunker Körnerstrasse 101 . S. 5 . (pdf)
  8. ↑ From war to art. High bunker Körnerstrasse 101 . S. 16 . (pdf)
  9. ↑ From war to art. High bunker Körnerstrasse 101 . S. 13 . (pdf)
  10. ↑ Edelweiss Pirates (Ehrenfeld). In: museenkoeln.de. October 4, 1944, accessed November 10, 2019 .
  11. ↑ From war to art. High bunker Körnerstrasse 101 . S. 15 .
  12. ↑ From war to art. High bunker Körnerstrasse 101 . S. 18 . (pdf)
  13. ↑ From war to art. High bunker Körnerstrasse 101 . S. 2 . (pdf)
  14. ↑ Day of the Open Monument® 2019. In: tag-des-offenen-denkmals.de. September 8, 2019, accessed November 3, 2019 .
  15. ^ Anne Caplan: Sentimental Urbanity. The creative production of Heimat (= art and design studies. 3). transcript, Bielefeld 2016, ISBN 3-8376-3299-7 , p. 245, ( limited preview in Google book search).
  16. ↑ a b Art Initiatives Cologne - bunker k101. In: aic.cologne. May 26, 2019, accessed November 4, 2019 .
  17. ↑ From war to art. High bunker Körnerstrasse 101 . S. 24 . (pdf)

Coordinates: 50 ° 57 ′ 3.5 ″  N , 6 ° 55 ′ 28.5 ″  E