Soers house

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The Soers house, view from the south

The Soerser Haus , also called Soerserhaus and Soerser Burg , is a mansion in the Laurensberg district of Aachen . The former moated castle gave the Aachen Soers its name. It stands directly on the southern edge of Autobahn 4 from the Dutch border in the direction of Cologne and is only open to the public for events.

The complex is under monument protection and is one of the oldest preserved architectural monuments in Aachen. However, due to the thin and at the same time unclear document situation caused by the great Aachen city fire in 1656 , their history was often confused with the history of the neighboring Bütershöfchen and even with that of the Soerser Hochkirchen house . Even today it is not possible to assign some of the mentions in sources to one of the three houses with certainty.

history

The Soers house was probably founded around 1290 as a moated castle. At that time it was far from the gates of the city of Aachen, but belonged to the Aachen Empire . One possible owner was the Puls family, first mentioned in a document in 1219 (also spelled Poels), who changed their name from "Poels von der Soerse" to "von Soersen" in the 13th century. In the 13th to 15th centuries, the von Soersen played an important role in Aachen's history as subordinates , mayors and lay judges . They must not be confused with members of another family of the same name, from which Engeram von Soersen came. In the 15th century it was owned by the farmyard, which was formerly part of the Soers house and is now called the Bütershöfchen. It was split off from the main house in the Middle Ages and became a fiefdom of the male chamber of the Aachen Marienstifts . The Soers house, however, remained Allod . Engeram's childless son Adam Engeram gave the farm to his sister Liesbeth von der Soerse and her husband, the Aachen citizen Johann Buiter (also written Buyter) on September 8, 1461. The current name, which developed from Buitershof to today's form, comes from his family.

Shortly after 1400, the mansion and the associated farm buildings seem to have belonged to four parties: the Colyn families (also spelled Colin), von Moirke, von Wittem / von Palant and von Hochkirchen. Because the property was often also called Ponthof in documents, it can be assumed that it was previously owned by the von Pont family at times. Katharina Colyn transferred her quarter on August 25, 1415 to Johann von Petersheim. This part came as an inheritance to his widow Barbara von Moirke, who herself owned a quarter of the Soers house and thus united half of it. She brought this part to her second husband Johann the Elder of Palant in 1418 . On March 16, 1427 he sold half of his house “op der Surse” for 1,600  guilders to the Aachen Vogt Wilhelm von Linzenich . In 1426 he had already sold the Hasselholz estate to him for 1575 Rhenish guilders. On June 9, 1428, Wilhelm von Linzenich sold his share again. The buyer was Johann von Wittem, a nephew of Johann the Elder von Palant. When his mother Margarethe von Palant died in 1459, Johann von Wittem inherited another quarter of the Soers house and later became the sole owner, because before 1470 his uncle Reinhard von Palant also transferred the quarter he had acquired from the Hochkirchen family.

Johann von Wittem sold the property to his relative Dietrich von Palant in 1470. Later, in addition to the von Aussem family, the von Linzenich family again owned the facility. Perhaps, as the previous owner, she had exercised her right of first refusal when the von Palants sold the Soers house. Wilhelm von Linzenich's son Johann from his marriage to Agnes von Hochkirchen had a son named Wilhelm von Linzenich zu Dürboslar . His daughter Maria von Linzenich zu Dürboslar, who married Johann Hoen von Cartils and inherited the Soers house, arose from his marriage to Elisabeth von Mirbach in 1520. Via her daughter Elisabeth, the property and 100 Aachen acres came to the family of her husband Johann von Schwartzenberg in the 17th century .

The Soers house on a watercolor from 1794

Johann and Elisabeth's son Johann Wilhelm was colonel of the imperial cavalry and Drost von Wittem . Several daughters came from his marriage to Barbara von Honseler. The second oldest daughter Eva Wilhelmine, who had been married to Johann Theodat von Gulpen since 1657, was supposed to inherit the Soers house, but after the daughter's death Johann Theodat treated his mother-in-law so badly that she disinherited him in 1681 and instead her eldest, who was still unmarried at the time Daughter Henrica Margaretha appointed heiress. She and her husband Christian Friedrich von Witschel (married in 1683) went into debt and had to sell the house on February 28, 1718 to Henrica's relatives, the future baron Johann Carl Melchior von Broich , son of Aachen mayor Werner von Broich . In 1747 he had the old castle house changed in a baroque style. Among other things, the old drawbridge was demolished. A round arch portal to which it led was walled up and replaced by a new gate . From then on, a newly built three-arched bridge led to this . A coat of arms stone with the corresponding year above one of the entrances to the Soers house testified to the work for a long time. It showed the alliance coat of arms of Johann Carl Melchior von Broich and his wife Anna Jakobine von Dunckel zu Maubach towered over by a barons crown.

Illustration of the Soers house and the Buitershof on the Tranchot card

Johann Carl Melchior's eldest son and heir Werner Edmund died after only a short marriage to Dorothea von Hertwig zu Broich . On November 9, 1769, she married Baron Philippe de Witte de Limminghe for the second time . When the couple began to harass Caspar Melchior, the latter withdrew the previously granted usufructuary right to the Soers house from his daughter-in-law and in 1770 appointed his grandson Carl Heinrich von Broich as heir. Carl Heinrich did not live in the Soers house, however, but at Broich Castle in Montzen . After his death on February 15, 1834, his six children divided the inheritance among themselves. The property in the Soers went to the son Arnold Carl Maria, who, however, did not live in the Soers house either, but used Schönau Castle in Laurensberg as his residence. His wife, Sophie von Wyels, died early, and when his children came of age, three of them asked for the maternal inheritance to be paid out in cash. In order to meet this demand, Arnold Carl Maria sold the Soers house with more than 122 Prussian acres of land on February 28, 1861 for 20,000 Prussian thalers to the Aachen pork butcher Joseph Bohs. From his widow Elisabeth Greffrath, it came to the manor owner Adolf Bischoff in 1896 , who also owned the Linde estate in Aachen. He had the property repaired around 1900. The mansion was sheathed with a retaining wall made of quarry stone and supported with buttresses.

Haus Soers was used for agriculture until the 1990s, before the owner Mariele von Detten sold it to an investor who wanted to convert the property into a residential complex. Before that, it almost fell victim to the wrecking ball in the 1960s, because when the first plans for the A4 autobahn were planned, the manor house would be abandoned in favor of the course of the road. Protests by the population prevented this, however, and the route was relocated instead . After the sale in the 1990s, extensive renovation and restoration work began . The baroque gate at the manor house was demolished and today's entrance gate was built on the west side of the area. But then the construction work stalled before it was finally stopped completely. In January 2015 there was a foreclosure auction at which Manfred Gaspers acquired the plant. Together with the friends' association “Burg Soerser Haus”, which was founded at the end of 2015, the new owner would like to preserve the building and revitalize it with culture.

description

Site plan of the Soers house in the 19th century

Haus Soers consists of a multi-part manor house and a three-winged outer bailey to the south of it with a stable made of broken wood and an old barn made of brick and half-timbered houses . Access to the area is provided on the west side by an approximately five-meter-wide, double-winged iron gate between two brick- built gate pillars . Until the 14th century, the Buitershof (today Bütershöfchen), located southeast of the manor, was part of the property as a farmyard. The torrent that used to feed the 20-  foot- wide moats flows through the area of ​​the house . Only a small pond is left of these today, as the trenches were largely filled and leveled in the 19th century. Accordingly, the former arch bridge to the former portal from the 18th century no longer exists .

The core of today's manor house is a residential tower with an almost square floor plan. It probably dates from the 15th century and has three floors. Until the first decade of the 21st century, it had a final crenellated wreath , which, however, was not original, but a historicist ingredient from the 19th century, when the high tented roof was replaced by today's flat roof . The masonry on the ground floor of the tower is made of ashlar from Eschweiler coal sandstone , the upper floors were made of quarry stone. The windows of the tower are framed by a house . After the arched main entrance on the south side of the tower was walled up for a long time, it is in use again today. There is a single large room on each of the three floors. All three are accessed via a partly stone spiral staircase in a stair tower on the north side .

The tower is adjoined on the west side by two early modern wings made of quarry stone and slate slabs at right angles to one another . They were in the 16./17. They were built in the 17th century and are equipped with cross-bar and cross-bar windows. Its two storeys stand on a high base and are closed off by a hipped roof that replaced a previous gable roof . Together with the residential tower, the wings surround a small inner courtyard . The year 1654 can be found above a late-Gothic , arched door of the western wing. Above an opposite entrance, later added to the residential tower, was the stone alliance coat of arms of the von Broich and von Dunckel families, the thief that year from the uninhabited one at the time Stole house. On the ground floor of the west wing there is a large room with a beamed ceiling , in which two chimneys and some stucco decorations have been preserved. A small altar niche there shows that the room was also used for sacred purposes in the past .

  • Manor house, view from the southwest

  • Outer bailey

  • Room on the ground floor of the west wing

  • Room on the upper floor of the north wing

literature

  • Carl Arnold Freiherr von Broich, Peter Bertram: On the history of the Soers house. In: "People and Landscape" (= Laurensberger Heimatblätter. Issue 6/7). Laurensberger Heimatfreunde, Aachen 2015, pp. 85–94.
  • Holger A. Dux , Dirk Holtermann: The Aachen Castle Round. Cycling between Wurm and Inde. Walter Rau, Düsseldorf 2000, ISBN 3-7919-0749-2 , p. 86 ( online ).
  • Karl Emerich Krämer : Castles in and around Aachen. 1st edition. Mercator, Duisburg 1984, ISBN 3-87463-113-3 , pp. 24-25.
  • Joseph Lennartz: The Soers House. A contribution to metropolitan history. Reprinted separately from the Politisches Tageblatt . La Ruelle, Aachen 1891 ( digitized version ) - partly very out of date.
  • Heribert Reiners : The art monuments of the district of Aachen (= The art monuments of the Rhine Province . Volume 9, Section 2). L. Schwann, Düsseldorf 1912, pp. 153-154.

Web links

Commons : Soerser Haus  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ History on burg-soers.de ( Memento from August 15, 2003 in the Internet Archive ).
  2. ^ Entry on the Soers house in the private database "Alle Burgen"., Accessed on September 10, 2015.
  3. ↑ a b c C. A. Freiherr von Broich, P. Bertram: To the history of the Soers house. 2015, p. 86.
  4. ↑ a b c d C. A. Freiherr von Broich, P. Bertram: To the history of the Soers house. 2015, p. 89.
  5. ↑ Information on Soers at aachen-soers.de , accessed on September 11, 2015.
  6. ↑ CA Freiherr von Broich, P. Bertram: To the history of the Soers house. 2015, p. 88.
  7. ↑ a b c C. A. Freiherr von Broich, P. Bertram: To the history of the Soers house. 2015, p. 87.
  8. ^ Gisela Meyer: The Palant family in the Middle Ages. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2004, ISBN 3-525-35852-0 , p. 176, note 16 ( digitized version ).
  9. ↑ a b C. A. Freiherr von Broich, P. Bertram: To the history of the Soers house. 2015, p. 90.
  10. ↑ a b Wolfgang Schindler: History and line of succession of the Heistermann family (Heistermann von Ziehlberg). In: Westphalian magazine. Journal of Patriotic History and Antiquity. Volume 158, 2008, ISSN  0083-9043 , p. 319 ( PDF ; 66 MB).
  11. ↑ a b c d H. Reiners: The art monuments of the district of Aachen. 1912, p. 154.
  12. ↑ a b c d C. A. Freiherr von Broich, P. Bertram: To the history of the Soers house. 2015, p. 91.
  13. ↑ a b J. Lennartz: The Soers house. A contribution to metropolitan history. 1891, p. 48.
  14. ↑ a b c H. A. Dux, D. Holtermann: The Aachen Castle Round. Cycling between Wurm and Inde. 2000, p. 86.
  15. ↑ CA Freiherr von Broich, P. Bertram: To the history of the Soers house. 2015, p. 85.
  16. ^ City of Aachen (ed.): Aachener Fahrradsommer 2008. On the green route through the Wurmtal. Selbstverlag, Aachen [2008], p. 4 ( PDF ; 45 kB).
  17. ↑ a b C. A. Freiherr von Broich, P. Bertram: To the history of the Soers house. 2015, p. 92.
  18. ^ J. Lennartz: The Soers house. A contribution to metropolitan history. 1891, p. 5.
  19. ^ Entry by Jens Friedhoff on the Soers house in the " EBIDAT " scientific database of the European Castle Institute
  20. ↑ a b J. Lennartz: The Soers house. A contribution to metropolitan history. 1891, p. 4.
  21. ↑ Gustav Grimme: Monuments of the homeland. Castles, palaces, manors and farms in Laurensberg. In: Heimatblätter of the district of Aachen. Vol. 7, No. 3, 1937, pp. 26-33.

Coordinates: 50 ° 48 ′ 13.1 ″  N , 6 ° 5 ′ 37.1 ″  E