Oscar Romero House (Bonn)

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oscar Romero House (2009)

The Oscar-Romero-Haus at Heerstraße 205 is a house managed by students and trainees on the edge of Bonn's old town . It was built as a prison in 1869 and is now a listed building . The name Oscar-Romero-Haus was adopted after the renovation carried out in 1973 and with the establishment of a sponsoring association of the same name in 1982. It refers to Óscar Romero , the Archbishop of San Salvador , who was shot at the altar by a death squad of the Salvadoran military dictatorship in 1980 for his work for the disenfranchised .

history

The building, which was built as a cantonal prison at Viktoriastraße 27 at the time, served as a women's prison from 1894 to 1930. From 1930, the Catholic Caritas Center planned to convert it into a homeless shelter. In 1933 the SS took over the house and set up a prison again in the basement; there the communist Jupp Messinger was tortured to death on July 11, 1933 . In 1938 air raid shelter rooms were expanded.

After the Second World War , the building was initially used by the city administration as an alternative quarter and as a shelter for the homeless. Because demolition was planned in the long term, the building was no longer maintained and deteriorated more and more. From 1973 the house was renovated and inhabited by the student pastor Martin Huthmann together with students from the Catholic university community . In 1982 the newly founded "Förderkreis Oscar-Romero-Haus e. V. “the building.

Projects and initiatives

The house houses a shared apartment on the first and second floor, which guarantee self-management with their interests and skills. The offices of the Latin America Information Center (ila), the Rosa Luxemburg Library and an advice center of the Bonner Medinetz e. V. Since its foundation in 1980 , the ecumenical network Initiative Church from Below has had its office in the Oscar Romero House in Bonn for over 30 years.

The residents of the house have been pursuing various projects since the 1970s. For example, the campaigns of the peace movement in the early 1980s, the ecological redesign of the house in the late 1980s, the “total refusal collective” at the time of the Gulf War in 1990 or the admission of refugee families from Bosnia in the mid-1990s. In the attic of the house, the "Bonner celebrate base community " and "community in the Oscar-Romero-house" services regularly.

Over the years the following initiatives have been taken, among others: the construction of a playground for the children in the neighborhood, the establishment of the Bonn exchange ring and activities at UN climate conferences in Bonn. In 2017 there was the sewing café, a bicycle self-help workshop, cooking and baking workshops “go vegan”, a bow making workshop, the Rhizombar , a free shelf on the ground floor, a pottery workshop and regular pub appointments in the Romero house .

The Oscar Romero Prize

With the Oscar-Romero-Prize, the Bonner Förderkreis Oscar-Romero-Haus eV honors individuals and initiatives from the Cologne-Bonn area who convincingly deal with the excluded and disenfranchised in our society for a fair, solidary and in harmony with creation Use the living world and make our region more humane through their commitment and their role model. The prize is endowed with € 1000.

Previous winners were:

  • 2003 Siegfried Pater (journalist, book author and filmmaker, Bonn, † February 7, 2015)
  • 2006 the Socialist Self-Help Mülheim (SSM, Cologne)
  • 2010 MediNetz Bonn (medical advice and placement office for refugees)
  • 2013 the Latin America Information Center (ila, Bonn)
  • 2019 the antifa Bonn / Rhein-Sieg and Jugend Rettet (division of the price)

literature

  • Förderverein Oscar-Romero-Haus eV (ed.): Where spinners make colorful nets - 25 years of the Oscar-Romero-Haus Bonn, Information Center for Latin America (ila), Bonn 1998 ( ISBN 3-924958-21-1 )
  • Roland Binner, Ursula Bremm, Thomas Gerhards, Christoph Rother, Regina Schnitz-Teske, Norbert Volpert: History of the Oscar Romero House in Bonn, Bonn 1989; The documents for this booklet are in the Bonn city archives under: ALT-BONN Collection No. 428
  • Gert Eisenbürger: Against forgetting. History of the Oscar Romero House in Bonn. In: ila No. 127, July / August 1989, p. 61
  • City of Bonn, Office 61-02, Lower Monument Authority (Ed.) (2012) List of acc. § 3 DSchG NW registered monuments, ground monuments, movable monuments and monument areas of the city of Bonn (as of January 1, 2012). P. 24, Bonn.
  • Georg Milz: The "Oscar Romero House" Bonn. A chance of survival for the Christian awakening. In: N. Arntz, R. Fornet-Betancourt, G. Wolter (eds.): Workshop “Kingdom of God”. Liberation theological impulses in practice, IKO-Verlag, Frankfurt 2002, pp. 13–22 ( ISBN 3-88939-638-0 )

Web links

swell

  1. ↑ Roland Binner, Ursula Bremm, Thomas Gerhards, Christoph Rother, Regina Schnitz-Teske, Norbert Volpert: History of the Oscar-Romero-House in Bonn, Bonn 1989
  2. ↑ https://romerohausbonn.wordpress.com/geschichte-des-hauses/
  3. ↑ Gert Eisenbürger: Against forgetting. History of the Oscar Romero House in Bonn. In: ila No. 127, July / August 1989, p. 61
  4. ↑ http://www.general-anzeiger-bonn.de/bonn/Bonner-Integrationspreis-f%C3%BCr-Medinetz-article27028.html
  5. ↑ http://medinetzbonn.de/
  6. ↑ https://romerohausbonn.wordpress.com/leben-im-haus/
  7. ↑ https://romerohausbonn.wordpress.com/kneipe/
  8. ↑ http://www.ssm-koeln.org
  9. ↑ http://www.medinetzbonn.de
  10. ↑ Press release FörderkreisOscar-Romero-Haus.V. from June 15, 2019; accessed on June 17, 2019

Coordinates: 50 ° 44 '8.1 "  N , 7 ° 5' 13.3"  E