Kohlhof (Heidelberg)

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Kohlhof in winter. In the foreground the housing estate, in the background the rehabilitation clinic.

The Kohlhof ( listen ? / I ) is a loose collection of 10 properties in the Königstuhl area in the city forest of Heidelberg . The Kohlhof is located in the Bergstrasse Mitte landscape protection area and is part of the outdoor area under building law in accordance with Section 35 of the Building Code . Administratively it belongs to the Altstadt district . Audio file / audio sample

The place emerged in the early 18th century as a clearing settlement, in which fields were initially farmed and later fruit growing. Since the early 20th century, agriculture in the area of ​​the Kohlhof was increasingly abandoned and the remaining buildings were converted for residential purposes, mainly by artists and intellectuals. At times there were several inns at the Kohlhof, so that it was also a popular destination. From 1950 a spa hotel opened in 1890 became a rehabilitation clinic for cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, which takes in around 2000 patients annually.

Location and climate

The Kohlhof (dark red) compared to the city of Heidelberg (red)

The Kohlhof is located on a cleared island less than half a square kilometer in size about 3 km outside the actual city of Heidelberg , but administratively belongs to the old town .

Due to its exposed location, the Kohlhof has a special position and was not taken into account , for example, in urban district plans or applications for UNESCO World Heritage status . The Boxberg is closer than the old town in the southwest, to whose scope it used to be. Neighboring are the community of Gaiberg in the south and the village of Waldhilsbach, which belongs to the urban area of Neckargemünd, in the southeast and Neckargemünd itself in the east.

The Kohlhof lies in 430- 480  m above sea level. NHN on the left slope and on the valley floor of the flat, eastward trough of the Michelsbrunnengraben , which runs out to the upper Hilsbach, a good one and a half kilometers south of the Königstuhl summit. The weather often differs from that of the lower urban area, of which large parts are located at an altitude of only 110  m above sea level. NHN lie. So it can happen that the sun is shining on the Kohlhof while the rest of Heidelberg is foggy . Conversely, in the winter months, clouds coming from the west accumulate on the surrounding mountain ranges, which leads to frequent fog .

There is a 400 meter thick layer of sandstone under the Kohlhof . The upper layers of the earth on the cleared island consist of loamy loess . The sandstone comes to light on the nearby northeast slope of the Königstuhl, the so-called sea of ​​rocks. In the depression of the Kohlhof and its surroundings, numerous springs arise that flow down to the Elsenz Valley, including the Michaelsbrunnen and the Busenbrunnen.

history

Establishing a settlement

Barn of the Old Kohlhof from 1798

In the early modern period, the mountains stretching south-east of Heidelberg's old town were used more intensively than they are today. In views from the 17th century, Königstuhl and Gaisberg appear almost unwooded. The name Gaisberg refers to the intensive grazing by goats , which could be the reason for the treelessness of the mountain at that time. With the approval of Eberhard Friedrich von Venningen, chief hunter of the Electorate of the Palatinate, and the city of Heidelberg, the clearing of the municipal Allmendwald on the site of today's Kohlhof began in 1706 in order to create fields. The courtyard built by the city on this site and given to tenants was initially called the Busenbronner Hof because of the well that rises there. The current name Kohlhof only established itself in the course of time and probably testifies to the charcoal burning in the nearby Kohlwald, especially on the Großer Kohlplatt .

In 1748 around 58 hectares of forest at the Kohlhof were cleared, plus a few leasehold meadows in a side valley towards Gaiberg . In 1789 there were 14 leaseholders , the number of inhabitants of the Kohlhof should have been around 100 at that time.

Until a new connecting route was built in 1903, the only route from Heidelberg to Waldhilsbach (Alter Hilsbacher Vizinalweg) led across the useful areas of the Kohlhof. The core areas of the courtyard, partly following the course of the trout stream, were walled and enclosed to prevent damage from game, so that gates had to be passed on the way through the Kohlhof grounds. The south-eastern gate of the enclosure, the Hilsbacher Tor, was preserved on Hilsbachertorweg.

Forest house from 1896

The Kohlhof was discovered as an excursion destination possibly as early as the late 18th century, but at the latest in the early 19th century. At first it was z. B. Church consecration societies who took the arduous path from the old town up into the wooded mountains.

In 1831 there were 13 leaseholders . However, from the middle of the 19th century, many families emigrated and the population decreased. At the beginning of the 20th century, only one of the several farms was operated. The fallow land was converted into meadow orchards or reforested. Many rural buildings were demolished and houses for foresters and forest workers were built in their place. In addition, there were two inns in the 19th century, including a small dining room in the oldest farm at Busenbrunnen (No. 5), which before 1854 was also used as a school with a teacher's apartment.

Beginning tourism

Simultaneously with the exodus of farmers from the Kohlhof and its structural change , with the rediscovery of Heidelberg Castle by the Romantics and with the construction of the observation tower on the Königstuhl in 1832, the plateau southeast of Heidelberg was used for tourism. As early as the 1830s , the then innkeeper of the Kohlhof tried to attract guests from Heidelberg. Around 1840 the building was redesigned after a fire.

Heidelberg citizens founded the Kohlhof Aktiengesellschaft , which bought the property from the city of Heidelberg at a favorable price to the northeast above the old settlement , on which the Kohlhof spa hotel was built in 1889 . The construction of the spa hotel provided an important impetus for the construction of the Heidelberg mountain railway, which had been planned for some time . After the spa hotel opened in 1890 , which soon enjoyed an excellent reputation and attracted numerous prominent guests, the old inn at the Busenbrunnen was named Alter Kohlhof .

A separate power station was built for the spa hotel in 1910 .

Weimar Republic and World War II

Especially since the First World War, the Heidelberg Kohlhof has been a place where artists and intellectuals met and settled, especially in summer. This was optically reflected in the building Kohlhof 9 ( Villa Braunbehrens ) built for Anna Braunbehrens in 1912/14 . Ms. Braunbehrens was related to the Folkwang founder Osthaus and had her summer house, which dominates the estate, built in the Art Nouveau style. In the early 1920s, the sculptor Otto Schliessler also had a summer house built in the Kohlhof.

The Russian painter and sculptor Igor von Jakimow (1885–1962) lived in Heidelberg from 1931 until his death and also spent several months at the Kohlhof in spring and summer, which was reflected in many of his pictures. The city of Heidelberg has acquired numerous Jakimow paintings with Kohlhof motifs.

During the Weimar Republic, the spa hotel had mainly Jewish guests. In the time of National Socialism , it quickly fell into disrepute as a “Jewish hotel” and was in economic difficulties. It came through a foreclosure auction to the Bezirkssparkasse Heidelberg, which operated it itself.

When the National Socialists resurrected the previously economically unsuccessful Heidelberg Festival as the Reich Festival from 1934 and brought numerous important actors to Heidelberg, many of them were quartered in the Kohlhof. Henry George , Gustav Knuth , Werner Hinz and Gisela Uhlen lodged in the then still the Old Kohlhof counting Villa Camembert .

While the Alte Kohlhof was still an excursion restaurant in the war years, the district savings bank was no longer able to run its spa hotel economically after the start of the war in 1939. In 1940 IG Farben acquired the Kohlhof Hotel and used it as a rest home for employees until 1945. IG Farben also rented the Villa Braunbehrens and saw the property as a possible alternative location should the headquarters in Ludwigshafen be destroyed by war damage. In 1944 parts of the IG Farben works archive were relocated to the Kohlhof and many members of senior employees sought protection from the bombing there. In addition, during the war years on the grounds of the Kohlhof Hotel under the cover name Schornsteinfeger, IG Farben made secret attempts to provide submarines with a camouflage coating and to make them invisible to radio measurement beams (radar). The test facility was relocated to Messelhausen in 1944 .

Celebrity residence

The destruction of their former apartments during the war, the housing shortage after the end of the war and other circumstances led to numerous celebrities settling in the Kohlhof soon after the end of the Second World War.

In 1945 , mayor Carl Neinhaus , who had been relieved of his office, moved into a building on the Kohlhof to prepare his denazification process there . Neinhaus was re-elected as mayor in 1952, he lived in the Kohlhof until 1958.

Sculptor Schliessler, whose studio in Karlsruhe was destroyed during the war, moved into his Kohlhof summer house permanently after the war.

By the winter semester of 1946 at the latest, the composer Wolfgang Fortner also moved into an apartment in the Villa Braunbehrens , where he gathered and taught the composer group known as the Kohlhof Club until 1950 , including Hans Werner Henze , Hans Ulrich Engelmann , Günther Becker , Ernst -Ulrich von Kameke and Wolfgang Ludewig counted.

Other artists and intellectuals have settled in the Kohlhof up to the present day. In 1979 the artist Pieter Sohl (born 1933), son of the painter Will Sohl , moved into the Kohlhof building built by the sculptor Schliessler. House No. 9 (Villa Braunbehrens) has been owned by the city for a long time and was rented from 1985 to 2015 to the sculptor Klaus Horstmann-Czech (born 1943), a student of Bernhard Heiliger . The former federal board spokeswoman for the Greens, Manon Andreas-Grisebach , lived in the Kohlhof from 1989 to 1999 and organized her own cultural program there in her modernized barn.

Construction of the rehabilitation clinic

After the Second World War, the Kohlhof Hotel was initially confiscated by the US Army and used as a soldiers' home. When it was returned to BASF in 1947, it was no longer interested in further use of the facility and leased the hotel to the Inner Mission, which began to set up a TB clinic for children in it. However, the currency reform in 1948 caused the plans to fail, so that in 1949 the hotel was sold to the state insurance company, which converted it into a specialist clinic for heart and circulatory diseases.

Since the rehab clinic opened in the 1950s, it has been the defining component of the Kohlhof. The Gasthaus Alter Kohlhof , which was particularly popular in the immediate post-war period , was modernized in 1957, and from around 1960 to 1970 there was also the Café Ehmann run by a well-known Heidelberg restaurateur in the Villa Braunbehrens . The catering establishments benefited from the patients of the rehabilitation clinic, from their visitors and from other day trippers.

The buildings and expansion of the rehabilitation clinic now clearly surpass those of the housing estate.

present

Intensive fruit growing took place on the Kohlhof until the 1980s, and some of the buildings were still used by the municipal fruit tree supervisors. However, fruit growing was largely stopped. The regular grid of some of the remaining fruit trees only rudiments of the once large fruit-growing areas; a large part of the orchards was added to the rehabilitation clinic as a park area and partially reforested. The former urban economic and service areas of foresters and fruit tree maintenance were privatized and converted for residential purposes.

Historic Buildings

The composer
Wolfgang Fortner lived in the Villa Braunbehrens , later the Café Ehmann was located there .
Numerous celebrities frequented the former Alter Kohlhof inn .
Posseltslust

Apart from the building stock of the rehabilitation clinic, which has changed many times since 1951, the Kohlhof comprises ten residential buildings and three barns. Seven of the buildings date from the 18th and 19th centuries. The Posseltslust observation tower is also located on the edge of the clearing island .

  • Kohlhof 1 ( forester's house ) . Built in 1896 as the official residence of the forester of the Kohlhof district and the municipal fruit tree maintenance facility.
  • Kohlhof 3 ( Villa Camembert ) . Farmhouse from the 18th century with associated barn from 1756. In the first half of the 20th century, the building was at times the guest house of the Alter Kohlhof inn. The joke name of Villa Camembert goes back to this time , which probably comes from the people there at that time enriched cheese bread. Several well-known actors stayed in the house during the Reich Festival from 1934 to 1938, later the painter Igor von Jakimow was a regular guest there. After the Second World War, it served as a municipal forester's house for several decades. In 1989 it came into the possession of Manon Andreas-Grisebach , who held regular cultural events in the associated barn from 1991 to 1998, but sold the property again in 1999 when she moved to Switzerland.
  • Kohlhof 4 . A barn built in 1796, which was used as a farm building for the forester and fruit tree maintenance until 1985. The building has been privately owned since 1985 and was built with a cellar in the years up to 1995 and converted into a residential building.
  • Kohlhof 5 ( Old Kohlhof ) . The property is the oldest settlement of the Kohlhof, the original Busenbronner Hof . Before 1854, this was also where the settlement's school was located. The property has been used as an inn since the 19th century and received its common name Alter Kohlhof after the construction of the Kohlhof spa hotel . The main building was completely modernized in 1957 and 1997, only the base area of ​​the historical building remained intact. The property was owned by the city until 1997. The inn was run by a winemaker from Rauenberg until 2014 and had numerous regular guests, including the writer Hilde Domin and the Nobel Prize winner Günter Grass , who in 2005 suggested creating a chronicle of the historic farm. After the inn closed in 2014, the property was sold on. Since January 2017, the restaurant above the chef Robert Rädel , who was awarded a Michelin star in 2019 , has been on the premises .
  • Kohlhof 6 . The former forest workers' house from 1748 is the oldest building on the Kohlhof. The Heidelberg mayor Carl Neinhaus lived there from 1945 to 1958 .
  • Kohlhof 9 ( Villa Braunbehrens or Café Ehmann ) . Built in 1912/14 for Anna Braunbehrens, a cousin of the art patron Karl Ernst Osthaus , who got to know the Kohlhof during a spa stay. The building, built in Art Nouveau style by a student of Henry van de Velde , is located north of the rest of the settlement. The client lived there until 1940, after which the villa was rented to IG Farben. The composer Wolfgang Fortner lived there from 1945 to 1950 . The Ehmann café was set up in the villa from around 1960 to 1970 , after which the building came into the possession of the city of Heidelberg and was inhabited by the sculptor Klaus Horstmann-Czech from 1985 to March 2016 . It has been empty since then.
  • Kohlhof 13 ( pump house ) . The building was built in the 19th century as a well . In 1953 it was converted into a house, in which the Heidelberg pump master Maier lived for several years. Today there is a sideline snack for hikers and day trippers.
  • Posseltslust . The Posseltslust, not far south of the Kohlhof, is a pleasure house with a lookout tower that was founded in the will of the Heidelberg academic Louis Posselt (1817–1880) . The complex, planned by city architect Gustav Schaber and built from regional red sandstone, was inaugurated in 1881. It consists of an arcade hall, from which a spiral staircase in the tower leads to a terrace and from there to a 15 meter high observation tower. The listed complex was once surrounded by a park with a pond and grotto.

Rehab clinic

The rehab clinic goes back to the Kurhotel Kohlhof, which opened in 1890, was used by IG Farben during World War II and came to the LVA in 1949, which then converted it into a rehab clinic. Since after the Second World War there were also plans to accommodate a TB clinic in the hotel complex, the LVA had to commit to the then Mayor Hugo Swart not to treat any infectious diseases in the planned clinic. This was followed by a rehabilitation clinic for cardiovascular diseases, which was opened in 1951 after a fundamental renovation of the existing building. The clinic has been expanded several times, including a sports hall and a swimming pool. From 1991 to 2001 the clinic was extensively rebuilt again. About 2000 patients pass through the clinic annually.

The Kohlhof as a local recreation area

The Kohlhof is a popular starting point for hikes and walks in the orchards and in the nearby forest. The area is also a popular hunting ground . The Posseltslust observation tower is on the edge of the clearing island.

In the period after the Second World War, the Kohlhofwiese became the most popular winter sports area in Heidelberg. The Kohlhof was the starting point for cross-country skiing competitions and a ski jump built in 1948 offered practice opportunities for competitive athletes, who were supposed to discover the region’s winter sports talents on annual youth ski days. skiing in particular experienced its decline by the end of the 1950s. The winter sports areas in the Black Forest and in the Alps became accessible to motorized society and the facilities at Kohlhof soon no longer met the requirements. The ski jump was torn down again and the competitions ended. Today it is mainly tobogganers from the region who use the snow-covered meadows.

The bus route 39 of the Heidelberg local transport , which goes to the Königstuhl summit every hour, also serves the Kohlhof.

Personalities

References and comments

  1. http://www.die-stadtredaktion.de/2017/01/rubriken/politik/cdu-politik/rueckkauf-alter-kohlhof-cdu-unterstuetzt-rueckkabaltung-der-stadt-heidelberg/
  2. In a picture of such a society at the Kohlhof dated 1780, researchers are divided as to whether it is the Heidelberg Kohlhof; such a church fair scene at the Heidelberg Kohlhof is confirmed by a collotype by Paul Münich from 1823 .
  3. Three stars for Heidelberg in the Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung of February 27, 2019.
  4. Is the Villa Braunbehrens an alternative? Rhein-Neckar-Zeitung , March 27, 2018, accessed on the same day.

literature

  • Georg Stein (Hrsg.): The island in the forest - 300 years Heidelberg Kohlhof . Palmyra Verlag, Heidelberg 2006, ISBN 3-930378-71-X .
  • Claudia Baer-Schneider: "Posselts-Lust". Lookout tower in the Heidelberg city forest. In: Preservation of monuments in Baden-Württemberg. Volume 40, Issue 3, 2011, p. 174 f. ( PDF )

Web links

Commons : Heidelberg-Kohlhof  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 49 ° 23 ′ 13.5 ″  N , 8 ° 44 ′ 9 ″  E