Schwabentor (Freiburg im Breisgau)
The Schwabentor (also called Obertor in the Middle Ages ) is the younger of the two still preserved city gates (→ Martinstor ) of the medieval city fortifications of Freiburg im Breisgau .
history
The gate tower , built around 1250 , originally had a kennel in the direction of the city moat and was open to the city side, it was not closed to the city until 1547 with a stone wall. In 1572 a stair tower was added. 100 years later Mathäus Schwäri painted a picture of a merchant with a wagon on the side of the city center, about whom the legend of Swabia originated in the 19th century , who came to Freiburg with two barrels of money to buy the city. He was laughed at, but the laughter was even greater when it turned out that the barrels only contained sand and pebbles - his wife had secretly exchanged the money for the worthless filling before he left.
The Schwabentor remained largely unchanged until the end of the 19th century. While parts of the citizenry now demanded the demolition of the two remaining city gates for traffic-related reasons, the Lord Mayor Otto Winterer campaigned to preserve and refurbish them. In June 1896 a competition began among German architects to select a design for the design of Martins- and Schwabentor. The Krauss private house on the side towards the Schlossberg could have been redesigned for this purpose, as could an old fire engine house on the other side. An “effective” and “contemporary” design was required for the upper end of the tower. In addition to Winterer, Josef Durm , Carl Schäfer , Max Meckel and a member of the city council acted as judges. However, none of the competition entries were implemented. Instead, the city administration of Meckel and Schäfer asked for offers because the program conditions had changed. In 1899 it was decided to build the electric Freiburg tram , which required the relocation of the private houses that bordered the two towers. Schäfer suggested increasing the Schwabentor from 26 to 65 meters, and at Martinstor from 22 to 66 meters. As a reason he named the higher houses in the area. His design combined the existing components from the early 13th century with late Gothic structures from the 15th century. In the summer of 1901 the renovation was carried out by the Freiburg construction company Geis & Bauer and the raised Schwabentor was given a stepped gable based on the model of north German city towers. On August 28, 1901, the topping-out ceremony was celebrated at both city gates, before they were completed on October 14 with the commissioning of the tram.
In 1903 Fritz Geiges added the image of the Freiburg city patron Saint Georg as a dragon slayer on the outside . The renovations came to an end in 1913 with the construction of outbuildings in a historicizing style. In 1954 the renovation was partially reversed, and the Schwabentor was given a simpler tent roof, similar to the original state, with a bell tower with an onion dome . In 1999, low-vibration tram tracks were installed.
The Schwabentor has been renovated since summer 2012. After removing the plaster, it became apparent that the damage was greater than expected. The earlier elevation of the building had cracked the stones and the foundation was not stable enough that it had to be reinforced. To check the latter, test drilling was carried out in April 2013. These showed that only the southeast corner of the tower is founded on solid Black Forest gravel, while the other areas of the foundations are on medieval embankments. Steel lances were therefore pushed under the peat foundations and cement milk was pressed through to harden the foundations and the subsoil. This was done during the renovation of the tram tracks at Bertoldsbrunnen in summer 2014, because there were no trams going through the gate. Steel strips were laid around the inside of the masonry at five to seven meters spacing for stabilization. During the preparatory drilling, different types of rock were encountered and the drill heads broke. Then the drilling was wet, which took longer. In November 2015, the state government decided to support the renovation with 210,000 euros from the third tranche of the state's monument funding program. The scaffolding was removed in December 2015.
architecture
The building on a square floor plan has a side length of eleven meters and has three floors above the ogival gate opening. Towards the outside, the thickness of the walls set off on the individual floors is more than 3.5 meters below and two thirds of that on the top floor. The lower part of the stone work consists of heavy humpback blocks made of red sandstone, and the top of quarry stone with strong corner bosses .
Above the keystone of the side of the archway facing the city is a Romanesque representation of the " thorn extractor ", a figure that is known from antiquity , but is interpreted here in a Christian way: man carries the thorn of original sin within himself, which is why a warning is given to those walking out of the gate.
traffic
The Schwabentor stands on the border of the inner city pedestrian zone and is only used regularly by tram line 1 when going out of town. In the direction of the city, trams, cyclists, taxis, delivery traffic and residents of the city center are only allowed to pass through the gate of the annex to the east. The rest of the traffic is led past the gate on the right. It is one of four historic city gates in the German-speaking area that trams pass through. In addition to the Martinstor in Freiburg, there are also the Nauener Tor in Potsdam and the Käfigturm in Bern .
museum
_jm54234.jpg)
Since 1969, part of the Schwabentor has housed a small private museum, the " Zinnfigurenklause ". In dioramas , scenes from the freedom movements in southern Germany ( battle of Sempach , peasant wars , 1848 revolution ), but also from the time of the Reformation, are depicted using around 9,000 hand-painted tin figures .
Among the dioramas there is a scene at the Schwabentor which shows the storm on Freiburg on Easter Monday 1848. A memorial plaque on the (unofficially so called) place of the last barricade from 1848 next to the gate commemorates the events of the revolution .
See also
literature
- Peter Kalchthaler : Freiburg and its buildings. An art-historical city tour. Revised 4th edition. Promo-Verlag, Freiburg (Breisgau) 2006, ISBN 3-923288-45-X , No. 41: Schwabentor.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Heiko Haumann , Hans Schadeck (Ed.): History of the City of Freiburg im Breisgau, Vol. 1, p. 117
- ^ A b Leonard Korth: The old Freiburg . In: Baden Architects and Engineers Association, Upper Rhine District (Ed.): Freiburg im Breisgau. The city and its buildings . HM Poppen & Sohn, Freiburg im Breisgau 1898, p. 201-202 ( Scan - Wikisource ).
- ^ Jutta Schuchard: Carl Schäfer 1844–1908. Life and work of the neo-Gothic architect , Prestel, Munich 1979, ISBN 3-7913-0373-2 , p. 311 f.
- ↑ a b Simone Höhl: Freiburg: Schwabentor continue with scaffolding , suedkurier.de, October 29, 2013, accessed on November 21, 2013
- ↑ Schwabentor will remain partially scaffolded until the end of 2013 ( memento of the original from January 24, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , freiburg.de, December 27, 2012, accessed on May 25, 2013
- ↑ Nocturnal noise from working on the Schwabentor
- ↑ Cracks in the Schwabentor - renovation lasts until the end of 2013 , Badische Zeitung, December 27, 2012, accessed on April 13, 2013
- ^ Simone Höhl: Freiburg: Renovation: Work on the stonework of the Schwabentor takes longer than planned. Badische Zeitung, August 20, 2015, accessed on December 13, 2015 .
- ^ Freiburg: State money for the Schwabentor. Badische Zeitung, November 14, 2015, accessed on December 13, 2015 .
- ^ Joachim Röderer: Freiburg: Case for the ax: Obere Linde: Freiburg's landmark is terminally ill. Badische Zeitung, December 19, 2015, accessed on December 20, 2015 .
Coordinates: 47 ° 59 ′ 35 ″ N , 7 ° 51 ′ 15 ″ E