New red house on the market
The New Red House on the market - in contrast to the Red House on the Zeil and the Old Red House directly to the east , which contained the entrance - was a half-timbered house in the old town of Frankfurt am Main, probably built in the 14th century . It was located in the middle of the market , the old town passage leading from Domplatz to Römerberg , the former coronation route of the emperors of the Holy Roman Empire . To the north of the building was the chicken market , to the south the Gasse Tuchgaden opened up, to the southwest the Lange Schirn; the street address was Markt 17 .
With its ground floor construction consisting essentially of only three oak wood columns, which carried the entire weight of the three-story building above, the building was unique in the entire German half-timbered landscape and an attraction known far beyond the city. It was considered an outstanding example of medieval urban planning and public spirit. For centuries it was known as the Schirn , where the famous Frankfurter sausages were sold.
In March 1944, the New Red House burned almost completely after the Allied bombing raids on Frankfurt, as did the rest of the old town. The Technical City Hall , built on the site from 1973 to 1974, was demolished from 2010 to 2012; According to the resolution of the city council of 2007, the New Red House and the Old Red House were reconstructed true to the original from 2013 to 2018 as part of the Dom-Römer project .
history
The construction of the 14th century
In a document from 1322 for the first time there is talk of a "Rodinhus" and a "eckekram und die sehes schirnen gein dem Rodin hus". In its place, a building already existed in 1322, on which a large number of screens were built. A few decades later, a document about an inheritance from 1360 describes a "hus und gesezse called daz Rodehus obbir den Gewantgadin und den fleisschirnen layin" as well as on "nuchten Suln", i.e. a red house standing above Schirnen on "new" pillars, it was evidently not very old in 1360.
The obvious peculiarity of the house, that it was built on pillars, was noticed and explicitly recorded in writing. The hereditary series of 1360 is the beginning of a long tradition of documented mentions that repeatedly mention that unique structural feature. The first building of the house can be scheduled between 1322 and 1360. The neighboring house, referred to as the Old Red House to distinguish it, must have existed before because of its attribute, especially since the New Red House, without a ground floor, required an extension to access its upper floors. In the neighboring house there were two stairwells: the western one opened up the house on the pillars, the eastern one the upper floors of the house itself.
However, it is not only documentary evidence that makes a building in the 14th century seem credible. A confirmation of this can also be sought in analogies to other half-timbered buildings of the Hessian-Franconian style. Although the Red House, like all other buildings on the market, had been plastered since the second half of the 18th century, the detailed photos that have been preserved clearly show the structural detail of a flattened transom - to stiffen the storey against horizontally attacking forces - below the windows of the first floor. An almost identical structural detail can be found e.g. E.g. on the house Kuhgasse 5 in Gelnhausen, dendrochronologically dated to 1348, or the house Hersfelder Straße 10/12 in Alsfeld from 1375, which is more similar in its dimensions to the New Red House.
Only when the documentary evidence and the structural details coincide, from today's perspective, a building site in the first half of the 14th century appears certain. How much of the original construction was preserved until 1944 is questionable. The art historian and connoisseur of Frankfurt's old town, Fried Lübbecke, wrote in 1926: “It is generally assumed, at least seduced by the stylistic shapes of the columns, that it was only built in the 15th century. […] In our opinion, these oak columns date from the 14th century, even if one or the other headband was replaced later. […] Of course, the superstructure will have undergone many changes over the centuries. ” Ultimately, the question of the age or the exact differentiation of the construction phases of individual house components could only have been clarified by a dendrochronological examination, which is ruled out because there are not even remnants of the Pillars are present.
Reasons for the construction and the commercial environment
Unique in this form in half-timbered construction throughout Germany - as far as known today - was the construction on columns. There were and are houses of comparable age in which the ground floors are divided into a hall, but not a single example of a total reduction to the most statically necessary elements, as was the case with the New Red House. To understand the reasons for this minimalism, one has to look at the situation in Frankfurt's old town in the middle of the 14th century.
At that time the market was still called Krämergasse. It led to Pfarreisen, the later Domplatz, where the old town hall and the church (currently undergoing Gothic renovation) were. The flourishing of the city in the Hohenstaufen era had quickly led to such a significant concentration of the old town development that in 1333 Emperor Ludwig IV approved a city expansion. The subsequent new town was more of an agricultural area, however, who wanted to participate in economic life needed a house at least within the Staufer city walls built around 1200, which can still be seen today in remnants in the streets in the townscape that bear the suffix -graben.
Accordingly, a wide variety of handicrafts and in 1355 already 14 guilds lived around the cathedral, crowded together, as evidenced by many street names that were abandoned after the Second World War and some of them still exist today. The market was therefore the most important street in medieval Frankfurt in every respect, roughly comparable to today's Zeil. In the middle of the 14th century, the garment makers and wool weavers were one of the most important professional groups, quickly followed by the butchers. The "Frankfurter Tuch" was a standing term and an important export item that gave the city street of the same name, Tuchgaden, its name. In the fire-proof vaults of the houses, the Gaden people, first mentioned in 1215, kept their precious goods for sale.
The Tuchgaden, however, came straight into the market at the site of the New Red House. An ordinary new building would have blocked access to this lifeline of trade and removed the basis for the cloth merchant trade. No written certificates have been received about a dispute between different interest groups; one can assume that the builder had the plan of the construction on pillars right from the start.
The construction not only testified to a mastery of carpentry, which at the time drew less from textbooks than from empirical values, but also a functioning community that was geared towards the coexistence of different social groups. This is even more impressive when the organization of this community, the self-government of the city, only lasted a few decades. Because even if the house was younger than evidence suggests, it was only a copy of a previous building and the urban planning idea associated with it, which already existed in the first half of the 14th century.
Who one has to imagine the client or builders lies in the dark of history. The north-south axis Lange Schirn , which connected the Heilig-Geist-Platz in Saalgasse with the market, was named after the butchers' meat banks in the vicinity of the house . South of the Saalgasse ran parallel to the Main, the Schlachthaus- and Metzgergasse , where the associated profession was traditionally based. The Gothic slaughterhouse, which was built shortly after 1349, was located on the nearby banks of the Main, but it already replaced a previous Romanesque building. Under the New Red House, the guild had now secured an important point of sale that was easy to operate from its quarter, right in the middle of the city's economic lifeline.
Development of the building
The enormous wealth of documents about the house, which is still enormous today, allows the owners of the house to be reconstructed in almost complete succession. This was done in 1939 by the old town researcher Wilhelm Graubert. He did not publish his extensive work; it is a typescript in the Institute for Urban History. For this reason, only the ownership structures already mentioned in the literature or evident from existing documents are to be presented here.
According to a currency letter dated November 9, 1396, which actually deals with a Schirn under the building, the house belonged to a Peter Scheffer and his wife Katharina. The certificate also shows that he inherited it from his father, Konz Scheffer. It is impossible to find out what profession Scheffer pursued; but since, according to the document, he owned an eckkram , i.e. a kind of shop, he was at least a kind of trader. In the holdings of the Holzhausen documents of the Institute for City History, a document dated May 14, 1412 gives further information. Peter Scheffer is described as dead, the neighboring house, the Old Red House, belongs to a Johann Erwin.
(copper engraving by Georg Daniel Heumann after a drawing by Salomon Kleiner )
In 1469, Eberhard Budener, who was also dead at the time of the authentication, is named as the former owner, but Peter Scheffer, who was probably an important man, is also named again. From the middle of the 15th century the house belonged to the goldsmith Herburt Bencker, after his death his widow Christine Hallenberger, her second husband Hans Böbinger von Speyer and from the beginning of the 16th century to the married couple Hans Lot and Ursula Geisler.
In 1533 the goldsmith Barthel Deublinger and his wife Margarethe Bach bought the New Red House from them. The Deublinger family was a cloth merchant family who immigrated from Ulm in the 15th century, their parent company was the Gadeneck house on the corner of Tuchgaden and Krautmarkt. In 1545, Barthel Deublinger carried out extensive renovations on the New Red House. As a visible sign of this, the latter had a corbel with the year 1545 and the coat of arms of the Deublingers until 1944 .
It is a lucky coincidence that the important copper engraver Salomon Kleiner showed a partial view of the New Red House in his work of the city published in 1738, still unplastered. On this, at the level of the first floor, a half-timbered structure from the so-called transition period can be clearly seen, as it was built between 1470 and 1550 in the Central German distribution area, which also includes Frankfurt. The overhang of the 2nd floor and the shape of the roof can also be clearly seen, as could be seen until the Second World War. This means that it is certain that Deublinger's renovation brought the upper floors into the shape they had used up to 1944.
post war period
After the total destruction of Frankfurt's old town in World War II , the area between the cathedral and the Römer was cleared in the early 1950s. The only exception was the zone that adjoins the former location of the New Red House to the east and extends to just before the cathedral tower, where archaeological finds dating back to Roman times were made, but above all the well-preserved remains of those of Ludwig the Pious around 820 established Königspfalz Frankfurt exposed. The cellars of the subsequent high medieval buildings had partly included the excellent Carolingian masonry and are partly still preserved in remains in the west of the area known today as the Archaeological Garden ; but they belong to buildings south of the former New Red House in Tuchgaden .
After the excavation, the area remained undeveloped for almost two decades in the post-war period . The former center of the old town served, among other things, as a parking lot . In 1973/74, following a resolution by the city council of 1969, the Technical Town Hall was built partly to the north and partly along the former market in a brutalist concrete style. For the construction of the Dom / Römer underground station and the excavation of an underground car park between the Römerberg and the Archaeological Garden, the archaeological layers of Frankfurt's nucleus were dredged down to the rising floodplain within a few weeks; accordingly incomplete emergency excavations yielded only a few findings.
From 1983 to 1986 the Kunsthalle Schirn was built south of the former location, roughly along the former Bendergasse , and it took up the popular name of the New Red House, which was common until 1944. The annex buildings on the Ostzeile on the Saturday mountain / Römerberg , also developed by the architects BJSS ( Dietrich Bangert , Bernd Jansen, Stefan Jan Scholz and Axel Schultes ) together with the Kunsthalle, can be understood as reminiscent of the old and new red houses. While the eastern building on the ground floor consists only of columns and walls and is used by the adjacent shops as a sales and catering area, the middle building supplies both the eastern and western buildings on the eastern line with staircase and elevator infrastructure and provides access to apartments in the neighboring buildings on the upper floors over small bridges.
reconstruction
On September 6, 2007 the city council decided with the votes of the CDU , Bündnis 90 / Die Grünen , FDP and Free Voters against the votes of the SPD and Die Linke to rebuild the Dom-Römer area; a decision about the demolition of the technical town hall had already been made. With the new development - for the first time and contrary to all construction activities on the area since the Second World War - "the historical district floor plan should be used as the basis of the planning as far as possible" .
In addition to the true-to-original reconstruction of 15 historic town houses , a further 20 buildings were built in accordance with a design statute passed at the end of 2009 . The houses Markt 15 and Markt 17 were also among the town houses to be reconstructed true to the original . In contrast to the historical tradition, during the reconstruction the former Old Red House No. 15 was sometimes referred to as the New Red House , the former New Red House at Market No. 17 as the Red House. The name change followed the documentation for the old town created in 2006 on behalf of the city of Frankfurt .
The houses Markt 13 (Green Linden) and Markt 5 ( Goldene Waage ) were also reconstructed in the immediate vicinity . Most of the houses were externally finished at the end of 2017. At the end of September 2018, the Dom-Römer-Quartier was inaugurated with a three-day festival.
literature
- Johann Georg Battonn : Local description of the city of Frankfurt am Main - Volume III. Association for history and antiquity in Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main 1864, pp. 189–193. ( Digitized version ).
- Hartwig Beseler , Niels Gutschow: War fates of German architecture. Loss - damage - reconstruction. Documentation for the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany. Panorama Verlag, Wiesbaden 2000, ISBN 3-926642-22-X , p. 829.
- Dietrich-Wilhelm Dreysse, Volkmar Hepp, Björn Wissenbach, Peter Bierling: Planning area Dom - Römer. Documentation old town. City Planning Office of the City of Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main 2006 ( online ; PDF; 14.8 MB).
- Georg Hartmann , Fried Lübbecke : Old Frankfurt. A legacy. Verlag Sauer and Auvermann, Glashütten 1971, pp. 95, 99-103 u. 106.
- Rudolf Jung , Julius Hülsen: The architectural monuments in Frankfurt am Main . Third volume. Private buildings. Heinrich Keller, Frankfurt am Main 1914, p. 81–85 ( digital copy [PDF]).
- Hans Lohne: Frankfurt around 1850. Based on watercolors and descriptions by Carl Theodor Reiffenstein and the painterly plan by Friedrich Wilhelm Delkeskamp. Waldemar Kramer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1967, ISBN 3-7829-0015-4 , pp. 164-169.
- Walter Sage: The community center in Frankfurt a. M. until the end of the Thirty Years War. Wasmuth, Tübingen 1959 ( Das Deutsche Bürgerhaus 2), p. 74 u. 75.
- Walther Karl Zülch : Frankfurt artist 1223–1700. Diesterweg, Frankfurt am Main 1935 ( publications of the Historical Commission of the City of Frankfurt am Main 10), p. 318 u. 319
Web links
- The Red House on the Old Market. altfrankfurt.com
References and comments
- ↑ From Old High German "Scranne", later Middle High German "Schranne", which meant something like open sales booth; in Frankfurt am Main, however, the word has mostly been used specifically for butcher's stalls since the High Middle Ages.
- ↑ Verbatim minutes of the 15th plenary session of the city council on Thursday, September 6, 2007 (4:02 p.m. to 10:30 p.m.). In: PARLIS - Parliamentary Information System of the City Council of Frankfurt am Main. Retrieved January 15, 2010 .
- ^ Lecture by the magistrate to the city council M 112 2007 from June 20, 2007. In: PARLIS - Parliament information system of the city council Frankfurt am Main. Retrieved January 15, 2010 .
- ^ Lecture by the magistrate to the city council meeting M 205 2009 of October 19, 2009. Accessed on January 15, 2010 .
- ↑ Market 15
- ↑ Market 17
- ^ Dietrich-Wilhelm Dreysse, Volkmar Hepp, Björn Wissenbach, Peter Bierling: Planning area Dom - Römer. Documentation old town. City Planning Office of the City of Frankfurt am Main, Frankfurt am Main 2006, House 40 (p. 75) and House 41 (p. 76f.) ( Online ; PDF; 14.8 MB)
- ↑ Market 13
- ↑ Market 5
- ↑ Annex to the municipal submission M 231. (PDF) In: PARLIS - Parliament information system of the City Council of Frankfurt am Main. Retrieved January 11, 2018 .
Coordinates: 50 ° 6 ′ 38.6 ″ N , 8 ° 41 ′ 2.9 ″ E