Rheingauwall

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Cavalier Prince Holstein of the Rheingau Wall

The fortifications around the city of Mainz disabled after 1860 the expansion of the city, as well as the dispersal of industries strong. Since 1868, the Mainz local politicians have therefore tried to expand this belt, i.e. to place it further outside the city so that the city could expand further.

Only after the Franco-Prussian War of 1870/71, when Metz, now part of Germany, became a border fortress in Lorraine (→ Metz Fortress ), these efforts were successful. In 1872 a contract between the city of Mainz and the fortress government was concluded in which the garden field front in the northwest was to be abandoned. In return, a new fortress was to be built around the Neustadt , which the city had to pay dearly at the time with 4 million guilders.

The Rheingauwall on a city map from 1898

This new part of the fortress is the Rheingauwall , it was built between 1872 and 1879 in the New Prussian fortification manner. This means that the ramparts are rectangular and have no bastions . The wall extended over the northern part of today's Mainz district of Hartenberg-Münchfeld to the border with the then independent municipality of Mombach and the Mainz Neustadt. The individual components of the wall include:

The Rheingauwall connected to the old city fortifications via Fort Hauptstein, now serving as a cavalier, at the Alexander bastion . The end point was the newly built Rheinfort, which replaced the old flood jump . The bank of the Rhine, which was newly filled up, has also been fortified.

In later years the wall was continued on the Ingelheimer Aue and the opposite bank of the Rhine with a few forts and fortifications. The Kaiserstrasse was laid out on the site of the old garden field front . Many barracks - such as the Alice Barracks and the New Golden Ross Barracks (Dragoon Barracks ) - and infrastructure facilities such as storage rooms for the military administration and the army canning factory were built in the Neustadt .

Despite this expansion of the city, Mainz still suffered from a lack of space. On March 18, 1904, Kaiser Wilhelm II ordered the dissolution of the Rheingau Wall, which had only been completed 25 years earlier. At the same time, all building restrictions were lifted and the way to the construction of extensive industrial plants was clear. The entire baroque south-west front, consisting of the forts Karl, Elisabeth, Philipp, Joseph and Hauptstein, was abandoned. On parts of the area in front of Fort Josef, the municipal hospital (today the university clinic ) was built in 1911-14 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Reading sample from the book Bollwerk Mainz (PDF)


Coordinates: 50 ° 0 ′ 45.6 ″  N , 8 ° 14 ′ 40.5 ″  E