Niels Gormsen

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Niels Gormsen (born August 9, 1927 in Rottweil ; † July 10, 2018 in Borna ) was a German architect and politician . From 1973 to 1988 he was the mayor of the building department in Mannheim , and from 1990 to 1995 he was town building officer and deputy of the department for urban development in Leipzig .

Life

Gormsen attended high school in Königsfeld in the Black Forest . During the Second World War he was a soldier only for a short time and then spent four years in French captivity . From 1951 to 1958 Gormsen studied architecture at the TH Stuttgart and became an assistant at the chair for urban development. From 1962 to 1972 he was head of the town planning office in Bietigheim . At that time, the later Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg, Lothar Späth, was Mayor of Bietigheim.

1973 Gormsen became mayor of Mannheim , responsible for the building department. After eight years he was re-elected until 1988. However, there was no third term because the Mannheim SPD preferred one of its members to the non-party Gormsen. He was then elected to the Mannheim City Council for the Mannheim list , where he was only active for a short time, because after the fall of the Wall , Gormsen was elected city planning officer and councilor (department for urban development) in Leipzig .

He held this office from 1990 to 1995. During this time, among other things, the renovation of the main train station , the new exhibition grounds and the Paunsdorf Center shopping center on the eastern edge of the city were initiated. For the last two projects mentioned, tram lines were also extended. Gormsen organized funding for the renovation of neglected Wilhelminian-style districts such as the Waldstrasse district . He worked with the building contractor Jürgen Schneider , who had several valuable monuments in downtown Leipzig (e.g. Mädlerpassage and Barthels Hof ) extensively renovated, but who later turned out to be a fraud. In addition, Gormsen was involved in the “Pleiße ans Licht” and “Neue Ufer” initiatives to uncover the Pleiße and Elstermühlgraben , which had been canalized over long distances during the GDR era.

After his retirement, he was responsible for the southern area of the city of Leipzig from 1996 to 1999 and was thus largely responsible for the recultivation of the former open-cast lignite mines, which were transformed into a lake landscape (" New Lake District ") during this time . As a retiree, Gormsen accompanied the further urban development of Leipzig critically. For example, he protested against the demolition of the Kleine Funkenburg in 2005 (in this context he compared his successor Engelbert Lütke Daldrup with Walter Ulbricht , who had ordered the demolition of the Pauline Church ) and campaigned - unsuccessfully - for the construction of a freedom and unity monument.

In January 2017 Gormsen married his longtime companion Hella Müller. He died on July 10, 2018 at the age of 90 in Borna hospital.

Honors

literature

  • Susanne Räuchle: As an architect, always built for the future . Mannheimer Morgen August 9, 2012, p. 20

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Thomas Mayer, Björn Meine: Ex-building mayor Niels Gormsen is dead. In: Leipziger Volkszeitung . July 10, 2018, accessed July 10, 2018 .
  2. ^ A b Mathias Orbeck, Andreas Tappert, Thomas Mayer: A passionate fighter out of love for Leipzig. In: Leipziger Volkszeitung , July 11, 2018.
  3. ↑ Leipzig, son amour. In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , August 9, 2017, page 11.
  4. ↑ Office of the Federal President
  5. ↑ Saxony yesterday and today: Saxon Order of Merit: Niels Gormsen. Saxon State Chancellery, archived from the original on July 1, 2013 ; accessed on July 10, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Gormsen, Niels
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German architect and politician
DATE OF BIRTH August 9, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Rottweil
DATE OF DEATH July 10, 2018
Place of death Borna