Justice building on Appellhofplatz

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The justice building on Appellhofplatz is a historic building in Cologne's old town on Appellhofplatz . The altered, preserved building has been a listed building since December 22, 1983 .

history

The courthouse is an example of the legal development in the Rhineland, starting with French law ( Code civil ) under Napoleon through Rhenish law in Prussia to our current legal system. This legal development can still be traced in the architecture today. The street name “Appellhofplatz” and the abbreviation “Appellhof” for the courthouse, which is still common today, go back to the Rhenish Court of Appeal . The establishment of this court of appeal in Cologne was necessary in 1819 after the Congress of Vienna in 1815 awarded the Rhineland to Prussia and the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm III. had approved the continued validity of the Napoleonic law books valid up to then as Rhenish law . This raised the question of the seat of an appeal court for the scope of Rhenish law. Cologne, already at that time the largest city in the Rhineland and centrally located, was ideal.

First building

The Rhenish Court of Appeal in Cologne (1826)

Since Prussia refused to take on financial burdens for the special route of Rhenish law and correctly assumed that Cologne would be interested in the prestigious court of appeal, the city of Cologne - supported by a substantial subsidy from the local Chamber of Commerce - agreed after lengthy negotiations to accept the new courthouse to provide both the property and to bear the construction costs almost entirely alone. The "Rhenish Court of Appeal in Cologne" was created according to plans by government architect Johann Peter Weyer , who presented the first floor plans for the semicircular courthouse on June 20, 1819. In 1824, construction began on this judicial building in the best inner city location on the site of two earlier monasteries, namely on the property of the Augustinian convent "Zum Lämmchen", which burned down in 1805, and in the vineyard of the former Cistercian convent St. Mariengarten an der, which was laid down in 1802 as part of the secularization street of the same name. The new judicial building was opened on November 6, 1826. In the vernacular, the building of the Court of Appeal was soon shortened to “Appellhof”, the name also prevailed for the square to the south and was finally adopted as the official street name. A plan to beautify the area was presented on July 6, 1825.

In addition to the Rhenish Court of Appeal, the building accommodated almost all of Cologne's other judiciary. In contrast to Prussian law with its filing process, Rhenish law had adopted the progressive procedural principles of the public and oral practice from the French era. The court and those involved in the litigation should be able to speak to one another directly in the interests of unfiltered investigations of the facts and thus the establishment of the truth, the regularity of the proceedings up to the verdict should be transparent for everyone. That is why five large conference rooms in the previous building on Appellhofplatz already offered the interested public the opportunity to come to the court and follow the verbally negotiated processes.

The jurisdiction of the Rhenish Court of Appeal as an appeal instance ranged from Saarbrücken via Trier, Koblenz, Cologne and Düsseldorf to Kleve on the Lower Rhine. As a result, Cologne, the largest city in the Rhineland, had the important provincial institution that was so urgently desired. The expansion of legal matter through the Reich Justice Laws of 1879 and the sudden increase in Cologne's population through the beginning of industrialization ultimately made the Weyer court building too small for the needs of a large city.

Second building

Appellhofplatz - Court of Appeal (around 1900)

Therefore, after the old building was demolished in two construction phases from 1884 to 1893, today's, considerably larger judicial building was rebuilt in the same place for the Royal Higher Regional Court (i.e. the renamed Court of Appeal), the regional court and the public prosecutor's office.

Like their predecessor Weyer , the planners, Government Building Councilors Paul Thoemer and Rudolf Mönnich , attached particular importance to a generous amount of space for the public and easy access for listeners. The inauguration of the northern wing of the building in September 1887 was followed by a southern wing, which alone cost 1.48 million marks. The concave courthouse, built in the Dutch Renaissance style, was opened on July 8, 1893. The hope expressed by the speakers at the inauguration ceremony in the jury room, including the Justice Minister von Schelling, that the new office building would "be able to cope with the ever-growing traffic of the city, which is in a new, mighty bloom for the next few decades", was not fulfilled - despite the relief Cologne's 1906 establishment of the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court. The result was the temporary accommodation of the Cologne District Court and District Court in up to ten different rented buildings.

Therefore, in October 1911, the Higher Regional Court and the civil chambers of the Regional Court moved into a new court building also designed by Paul Thoemer , the justice building on Reichensperger Platz . After that, the Appellhof served exclusively the criminal justice system until April 1981. It was at this time that the image of “their” roll call court was shaped for the Cologne population. Spectacular trials in which, in particular before the jury, accused murderers, poisoners or robbers were found guilty or innocent, attracted masses of spectators into the large conference rooms. Some of the Cologne newspapers reported from the Appellhof in extra editions.

Modern times

South facade with main entrance on Appellhofplatz
Front side: castle wall

After the National Socialists seized power in 1933, so-called “ special courts ” met in the Appellhof until 1945 . They were able to judge practically without being bound by law and order in the sense of the Nazi regime and did so to an increasing extent: By the end of the war, these special courts had passed more than 120 politically motivated death sentences in the Appellhof, some for trivial reasons with the sole aim of deterring people. The occasional thesis (e.g. through an earlier version of this page) that an underground passage connected the justice building with the Gestapo headquarters opposite in the EL-DE building is not supported by any verifiable sources. In particular, as far as can be seen, there are no publications indicating that traces of the alleged corridor were found in one of these two buildings. Such traces might have had to be found, for example in the cellar renovations carried out in the two buildings in recent years or in the construction of the subway in Neven-DuMont-Strasse.

After a partial destruction by bombing in the Second World War , the building was rebuilt from 1945 without its previously existing roof towers and its rich facade decoration with simple materials and a simple look. Since April 1981 the Cologne Administrative Court and since November 1995 the Cologne Finance Court have been housed in the building complex on Appellhofplatz. Before that, some of the Senates of the Finance Court were already located in the Appellhof as a branch of the FG with its headquarters in Adolf-Fischer-Straße. The traditional justice building still does without a house number today . The street name, after which a subway station on site is named, is sufficient for localization.

The fact that the Cologne population is well aware of the constitutional tradition of their oldest courthouse was shown when, after the death of Heinrich Böll in 1985 , the district council responsible for street names wanted to rename Appellhofplatz to Heinrich-Böll-Platz. This was probably due to the astonishing misunderstanding by some district representatives that the name derives from a place of military appeals. The threatened erasure of the memory of the Rhenish Court of Appeal from the street directory and thus of the progressive Rhenish law wrested from the Prussians drove not only Cologne lawyers to the barricades. In an opinion poll, the renaming was only supported by 17 percent of Cologne's citizens and ultimately failed in the city council.

architecture

The southern part of the building, which once housed the district court, is a three-storey, free-standing, multi-wing building with a gable roof , the stepped plan of which is semicircular. This is due to the fact that the new building had to be adapted to the shape of the plot of the abandoned Weyer building. The curvature of the semicircular arch from 1826 can still be clearly seen today from the parking lot bollards on the west side of the building (Neven DuMont Street). The entire building encloses an inner courtyard , which originally could be approached from the castle wall via two passages (today only one), e.g. B. also of prisoner transports in the so-called Green Minna . The facade to the castle wall has side risalites and a central risalit (rebuilt after the Second World War). The south facade is characterized by the two-step projecting central wing (portal 1950s), entrance hall and staircase. There are stair towers protruding on five sides on the east and west facades . Courtyard and street facades are made of brick with tracery windows and dividing elements made of natural stone. The building has two caretaker apartments on the ground floor next to the entrance on the south side.

As in the previous building, clear traces of ideas from the French Revolution can still be seen in the architecture today: In keeping with the principles of publicity and orality of court proceedings, incentives were created to make it easier for the public to access the courtrooms. In addition to the two main entrances on the north and south sides of the building, there are two - now closed - side entrances through which spectators could each reach a staircase directly from the street that led to the meeting rooms on top of each other. The glass-roofed atrium offers space for more than 400 people for events organized by the Cologne judiciary, but also for art and history exhibitions. Wide, bright corridors reinforce the impression of a citizen-friendly courthouse. When it was completed in 1893, the court had two different modern heating systems, namely hot water and hot air. In summer, two large fans were able to pump cold air from the basement into the conference rooms, which were then air-conditioned. The historical demonstration cells and the prisoners' stairwells (spiral staircases) that lead from there to the meeting rooms, which were intended to prevent contact between prisoners and the public as well as any escape attempts, are still preserved.

After the regional court and the public prosecutor's office moved to the new Cologne Justice Center in April 1981, the historic Appellhof underwent the most extensive renovation and restoration work to date from 1988 to 1995, after years of preliminary planning, taking into account monument protection. Not only did hidden war damage and post-war makeshifts have to be removed and a modern equipment standard created (e.g. all workplaces were networked with fiber optic cables for IT use back then). In addition, new office space was created through two extensions in the inner courtyard and through conversions in the attic. These construction measures also expanded the main usable area to around 7,000 m² and created the prerequisites for housing the Cologne Administrative Court and the Cologne Finance Court with a total of 134 judges and 151 other employees in both courts at a cost of around DM 32 million . Recently, the construction and real estate company of the state of North Rhine-Westphalia BLB, as the current owner and landlord of the property, has made high investments to modernize the building and make it future-proof. An elaborate fire protection concept was implemented in 2011 with a sum of millions, the heart of which is a smoke extraction system in the atrium. The glass roof was renewed and the statics strengthened. In 2013/2014, extensive thermal insulation work was carried out in the attic.

location

The justice building on Appellhofplatz is located in the north of Cologne's old town and can be reached with the Cologne tram ( Appellhofplatz underground station ).

literature

  • Wilhelm Kick (Ed.): Modern new buildings , 2nd year, Stuttgart architecture publishing house Kick, Stuttgart 1898.
  • Norbert Klein: Murderer, City Councilor and FC - Cologne court stories about the Appellhof , BoD - Books on Demand, Norderstedt 2019, ISBN 978-3-7481-1772-8
  • Udo Mainzer / Petra Leser (Eds.): Architecture Stories , JP Bachem Verlag, Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-7616-1281-8
  • Dieter Strauch / Joachim Arntz / Jürgen Schmidt-Troje (eds.): The Appellhof zu Köln - A Monument of German Legal Development , Bouvier Verlag, Bonn 2002, ISBN 3-416-03024-9

Web links

Commons : Justice building on Appellhofplatz  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Hiltrud Kier : List of monuments Cologne old town and Deutz . Ed .: State Conservator Rhineland . tape 12.1 . Rheinland Verlag, Cologne 1979, ISBN 3-7927-0455-2 , p. 34 .
  2. ↑ Dieter Strauch: French law in the Rhineland in: Dieter Strauch / Joachim Arntz / Jürgen Schmidt-Troje (eds.), The Appellhof zu Köln - A Monument of German Legal Development , Bouvier Verlag, Bonn 2002, ISBN 3-416-03024-9 , Pp. 30-31.
  3. ^ Adolf Klein, The Rhenish Justice and the Rule of Law in Germany , in: Josef Wolffram / Adolf Klein (eds.), Law and Justice in the Rhineland , Wienand Verlag, Cologne 1969, p. 154
  4. ↑ Dieter Strauch, French law in the Rhineland , in: Dieter Strauch / Joachim Arntz / Jürgen Schmidt-Troje (eds.), The Appellhof zu Köln - A Monument of German Legal Development , Bouvier Verlag, Bonn 2002, ISBN 3-416-03024-9 , Pp. 32-33, there fn. 85-90
  5. ↑ Petra Leser, The Building History of the Rhenish Court of Appeal in Cologne , in: Udo Mainzer / Petra Leser (Eds.), Architektur-Histories , JP Bachem Verlag, Cologne 1996, ISBN 3-7616-1281-8 , pp. 183 ff.
  6. ↑ Adolf Klein, The Rhenish Justice and the Rule of Law in Germany , in: Josef Wolffram / Adolf Klein (eds.), Law and Justice in the Rhineland , Wienand Verlag, Cologne 1969, p. 147 ff.
  7. ↑ Centralblatt der Bauverwaltung, Volume 13, No. 28, 1893, p. 295
  8. ^ Adolf Klein / Kurt Pilling: From the Praetorium to the Paragraph Tower - A View of 2000 Years of Cologne Judicial History , Wienand Verlag, Cologne 1986, ISBN 3-87909-165-X , pp. 47–48
  9. ↑ Joachim Arntz: The Appellhof zu Köln - data and facts in: Dieter Strauch / Joachim Arntz / Jürgen Schmidt-Troje (eds.), The Appellhof zu Köln - A Monument to German Legal Development , Bouvier Verlag, Bonn 2002, ISBN 3-416- 03024-9 , p. 53
  10. ↑ Franz Josef Ploenes: Justice without space in: (ed.) Adolf Klein / Günter race Justitia Coloniensis , Greven Verlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7743-0192-1 , pp 320-322
  11. ^ Adolf Klein: Hundred Years of Files - Hundred Years of Facts in: Adolf Klein / Günter Rennen (eds.), Justitia Coloniensis , Greven Verlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7743-0192-1 , pp. 89–194
  12. ^ Adolf Klein / Kurt Pillmann, From the Praetorium to the Paragraph Tower - A look at 2000 years of Cologne judicial history , Wienand Verlag, Cologne 1986, ISBN 3-87909-165-X , p. 81; Joachim Arntz, Der Appellhof zu Köln - data and facts , in: Dieter Strauch / Joachim Arntz / Jürgen Schmidt-Troje (eds.), Der Appellhof zu Köln - A Monument to German Legal Development , Bouvier Verlag, Bonn 2002, ISBN 3-416- 03024-9 , p. 55
  13. ^ Survey by the "Kölnische Rundschau", article from October 24, 1985
  14. ^ Resolution of the Council of the City of Cologne of January 28, 1986, in Kölnische Rundschau of January 29, 1986, quoted from Dieter Strauch / Joachim Arntz / Jürgen Schmidt-Troje (eds.), Der Appellhof zu Köln - Ein Monument deutscher Rechtsentwicklung , Bouvier Verlag, Bonn 2002, ISBN 3-416-03024-9 , p. 123
  15. ↑ Franz Josef Ploenes: Justice without space in: (ed.) Adolf Klein / Günter race Justitia Coloniensis , Greven Verlag, Cologne 1981, ISBN 3-7743-0192-1 , S. 319
  16. ^ State Building Authority Cologne II: Extension, reconstruction and restoration of the Cologne Administrative and Finance Court - Appellhofplatz , brochure on the occasion of the completion, Cologne 1996
  17. ↑ Press releases by the President of the Cologne Finance Court and the President of the Cologne Administrative Court on August 20 and 21, 2014
  18. ↑ In- house communications from the Cologne Finance Court , December 2011
  19. ↑ In- house communications from the Cologne Finance Court , December 2013

Coordinates: 50 ° 56 '26.2 "  N , 6 ° 57' 5.4"  E