City Bridge (Görlitz)
Coordinates: 51 ° 9 ′ 1 ″ N , 15 ° 0 ′ 3 ″ E
| City bridge | ||
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| Official name | John Paul II Bridge | |
| use | Pedestrians, cyclists, motor vehicles up to 7.5 t, buses | |
| Subjugated | Lusatian Neisse | |
| place | Goerlitz , Zgorzelec | |
| construction | Girder bridge | |
| vehicles per day | 5,400 vehicles (2007) | |
| opening | 1875 | |
| closure | 1945-1958 | |
| location | ||
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The Pope-Johannes-Paul-II.-Brücke , also known as the city bridge , is the only inner-city bridge for car and bus traffic across the Lusatian Neisse and at the same time the border crossing between the German town of Görlitz and the neighboring Polish town of Zgorzelec . The bridge connects the Görlitz city center at the city park with the Wilhelminian-style district of Zgorzelec.
history
The bridge was opened in 1875 as a stone arch bridge under the name Reichenberger Brücke at a former ford through the Neisse. At that time, it was the only Neisse crossing in the city besides the old town bridge. The Reichenberger Brücke was supposed to relieve the old town bridge from the increasing traffic and promote the development of the Oststadt. Since December 1897, the Görlitz tram also crossed the bridge on its journey from the district station on Rauschwalder Strasse to the Gasthof Stadt Prag in Oststadt. Another three years later, the tram continued to the still independent village of Moys .
In 1906, construction work began on the town hall on the western bridgehead , which was completed in 1910. At the turn of the century, an extensive Wilhelminian-style district and numerous public buildings, such as the community school VIII (1894), the building trade and engineering school (1898) and the Upper Lusatian Hall of Fame (1902) on Friedrichsplatz , were built on the eastern bridgehead . In 1926 the power station was built north of the bridge.
The military presence also increased after the new barracks were built in 1890 and in the 1930s with the Kleist barracks and the Winterfeldt barracks . After the new construction of the old town bridge as a truss bridge , both bridges remained the only bridges on the Neisse for road traffic until the end of the Second World War .
On the evening of May 7, 1945, all the Neisse bridges in Görlitz were blown up by the Wehrmacht . Thus, the connections between the eastern parts of the city and the western core city were initially broken. The Red Army , advancing on May 8, 1945, first built a temporary wooden bridge in place of the Reichenberger Bridge. Only the pillars remained from the former stone arch bridge.
Since the end of the war, the Lusatian Neisse has separated the city of Görlitz into a German western and a Polish eastern part according to the Oder-Neisse border , which was decided by the victorious powers in the Potsdam Agreement . The eastern part of the city developed after 1945 as an independent Polish city of Zgorzelec.
In the following period, the temporary bridge was mainly used by the Red Army and German refugees from the now Polish areas east of the Oder and Neisse rivers. On July 6, 1950, the delegation of the German Democratic Republic, under the leadership of Prime Minister Otto Grotewohl, crossed the makeshift bridge to sign the Görlitz Agreement in the former Upper Lusatian Hall of Fame. The bridge has been called the Bridge of Friendship since the agreement on the Oder-Neisse peace border .
It was not until October 1, 1958, that the two neighboring states declared the bridge an official border crossing . However, a visa was required to cross the border . In 1971, the GDR and the People's Republic of Poland decided on visa-free travel between the two states, which came into force on January 1, 1972. Visa-free travel was lifted on October 30, 1980 following the riots in the Solidarność movement in Gdansk . After the political change in the GDR and the fall of the Berlin Wall , the conditions for traveling to Poland eased, but a visa was still required. Visa-free travel between Poland and the Federal Republic of Germany was introduced on April 8, 1991.
Traffic increased sharply after the reunification of Germany, as the bridge was the only road traffic border crossing between Zittau in the south and Podrosche in the north. Only in 1996 the inner-city border crossing was the opening of the highway border crossing Ludwigsdorf / Jędrzychowice the Federal Highway 4 relieves the north. Above all, the heavy traffic and the long backlogs at the border crossing put a heavy burden on the city center.
The bridge was renovated in 2006 and was officially named Pope-John-Paul-II Bridge on May 18, 2006 . At both bridgeheads there is a plaque in memory of the Pope on the sidewalk. With Poland's accession to the Schengen Agreement, stationary border controls have been discontinued since December 21, 2007. Customs controls were suspended three years before that when the country joined the EU .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Richard Jecht: History of the city of Görlitz. 1st edition. tape 1 , half volume 2: Topography . Verlag des Magistrates der Stadt Görlitz, 1934, p. 716 .
- ^ Verkehrsgesellschaft Görlitz GmbH Information about the company. Retrieved May 23, 2012 .
- ↑ Wolf-Dieter Fiedler: The Görlitzer Stadthalle . Senfkornverlag, Görlitz 2010, p. 8 .
- ^ Richard Jecht: History of the city of Görlitz . 1st edition. tape 1 , half volume 2. Verlag des Magistrates der Stadt Görlitz, 1934, p. 653 .
- ^ Ernst Kretzschmar: Görlitz as a Prussian garrison town . 1st edition. Stadtbild-Verlag, 2005, p. 80, 86 ff .
- ^ Conrad Heese: From the diary of Justizrat Conrad Heese - Görlitz 1945 . 2nd Edition. Heese - Patzelt, Oldenburg 2008, ISBN 978-3-00-025160-3 , p. 73 ff., 106 f .
- ↑ a b c d borderwiki.info: Görlitz City Bridge - Zgorzelec Most Miejski . (No longer available online.) Archived from the original on August 31, 2010 ; Retrieved May 23, 2012 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ Ernst Heinz Lemper, Walter Wolff: Görlitz . Sachsenverlag, Dresden 1959, p. 100 .
