Federal Chancellor Adenauer House Foundation

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Headquarters of the Federal Chancellor Adenauer House Foundation, in the background on the top right the Adenauer House Memorial (2008)

The Federal Chancellor Adenauer House Foundation is a federal foundation that has maintained a memorial for the first German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer since 1978 .

She is housed in and around the former home of the Chancellor, who died in 1967, in Rhöndorf , a district of Bad Honnef near Bonn . It is the oldest of today's six political memorial foundations in Germany and one of the most visited sights in the Siebengebirge region . The permanent exhibition was reopened in 2017.

location

The former home of Adenauer is on 85- 90  m above sea level. NHN above the exhibition building of the foundation on a promising hillside location on the Knelingshardt hill in the east of Rhöndorf. After Adenauer's death, the street below the house was renamed from Zennigsweg to Konrad-Adenauer-Straße .

Foundation, endowment

Origin and history

Konrad-Adenauer-Straße 17, seat of the management, archive, edition and museum education

Konrad Adenauer died on April 19, 1967 in his house in Rhöndorf. The streams of visitors arriving after the funeral and a continuing interest in Adenauer's life gave rise to the desire to keep his long-standing and last home as a memorial. In December 1967 the property became the property of the Federal Republic of Germany, which at the same time promised to set up a foundation to preserve the memory of Konrad Adenauer. First, an dependent foundation was established for which the federal government had acquired important assets. It took its seat in a building (today Konrad-Adenauer-Strasse 17/19), which was built in 1950/51 as a residence for members of the British High Commission . The first guided tours through the house began in 1970, at the foot of which a museum building designed by the Cologne architects Karl and Gero Band was inaugurated in 1975 , in which a permanent exhibition about Adenauer's life is set up.

On November 24, 1978, the German Bundestag finally passed the “Law on the Establishment of a Foundation Federal Chancellor Adenauer House”, with which the foundation came into being in its current form. On the occasion of the 30th anniversary of Konrad Adenauer's death, the exhibition building was redesigned and opened on April 19, 1997. From May 2014 to summer 2015, the roof and facade were renovated and converted under the direction of the Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning, which is responsible for construction work on the property, and the permanent exhibition was then redesigned from 2016 to 2017. The modernized exhibition has been open to the public again since April 2017. It bears the title "Konrad Adenauer 1876 to 1967. Rhinelander, German, European".

tasks

One of the purposes of the foundation: The care of the grave in the Rhöndorfer Waldfriedhof

According to the establishment law, the foundation should preserve the memory of the extensive achievements of Konrad Adenauer and thus u. a. make a contribution to the understanding of the emergence of the Federal Republic of Germany. For this purpose, the written legacy of Adenauer is to be collected in an archive, maintained and also prepared for scientific research . The exhibition in the house gives an insight into the private life of the first Federal Chancellor. Events, lectures and the publication of "editions" ensure that the Federal Foundation is involved in public life. According to the foundation's statutes, another purpose of the foundation is to look after the grave of Konrad Adenauer at the Rhöndorfer Waldfriedhof , which is regularly visited by the political leaders of the Federal Republic on important anniversaries.

Foundation form

The Federal Chancellor Adenauer House Foundation is a legally competent and federal foundation under public law. After being in the area of ​​responsibility of the Federal Ministry of the Interior for years , it has been subordinate to the Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media since 1998 . It receives around 1.1 million euros annually from the budget of the Federal Commissioner and employs 22 people. The foundation is managed by a five-person board of trustees and the board of directors, who are advised by a scientific advisory board. The federal government and the heirs of Adenauer each propose two members of the board of trustees, the fifth member is chosen by the federal president.

Residential building

Building history

Konrad Adenauer's house
Glance into the living room
View into the "cabin"
Glance into the garden pavilion
Federal Chancellor Adenauer House, aerial photo (2015)

Konrad Adenauer had changed his place of residence several times after his removal from office as Mayor of Cologne , until he finally moved to Rhöndorf with his family in the spring of 1935 and rented the house at Löwenburgstrasse 76. In 1936 he used the compensation for his house in Cologne, which had been confiscated by the National Socialists , to purchase property on the outer western slope of the Siebengebirge, which was previously used as a vineyard . By Christmas 1937, a house designed as accommodation for an extended family was built there at Zennigsweg 8c (today Konrad-Adenauer-Straße) based on a design by his brother-in-law Ernst Zinsser . A garage and a fruit cellar were built by the following spring . As a result of Adenauer's election as Federal Chancellor, after building permission from October 26, 1949, a guardhouse made of prefabricated wooden parts was built next to the garage according to plans by Hans Schwippert's office .

The first renovation of the house took place in 1955, when the lattice windows on the west facade were pulled together to form a large, lattice-free window. Further renovations followed by 1956: the replacement of all lattice windows, a new kitchen and the removal of two small dormers on the south facade in favor of a large one, the partial conversion of the balcony into a winter garden and the creation of a roofed platform that spanned the west facade. The changes were made with the aim of improving the view of the Rhine Valley and guaranteeing it at all times of day and weather. In March 1961, the construction of a tea house according to plans by Adenauer's son-in-law and architect Heribert Multhaupt was approved, and a pavilion , also planned by Multhaupt , was built in its place from November 1963 to May 1964 ( shell acceptance ) . The demolished tea house was replaced by a new one behind the house, which was removed at the same time as the pavilion.

description

The Adenauerhaus is a three-storey, white plastered residential building on an L-shaped floor plan , the upper end of which is formed by a sloped roof . On the ground floor is the spacious living room with a view of the Rhine valley to the west. Here on the south side of the house are the dining room and a platform originally used as a terrace, but later partly covered and partly integrated into the house. On the first floor, which is inaccessible to visitors, there is the study and next to it the bedroom in which Adenauer died on April 19, 1967. The furnishing of the rooms - unchanged since Adenauer's death in 1967 - comes mainly from his time as Cologne mayor. The living room is adorned with some old paintings from the family as well as gifts of various kinds.

As a center of life for the head of government of the Federal Republic of Germany, the house has not remained untouched by Adenauer's political aura. The so-called Rhöndorfer Conference took place there on August 21, 1949 , at which the foundations for the political structure were laid after the first federal election and Adenauer was able to assert himself as the CDU / CSU's candidate for chancellor. Towards the end of his term as chancellor, two meetings between Adenauer and the French President Charles de Gaulle took place in the house.

The house of Konrad Adenauer is including gazebos since September 8, 1983 as a monument under monument protection . In the garden there are life-size bronze statues of Adenauer and Charles de Gaulle by the Hungarian sculptor Imre Varga from 2001.

archive

The foundation maintains an archive in which Konrad Adenauer's estate is kept. The holdings go back to the time of Adenauer as Lord Mayor (1917–1933), with the period of Federal Chancellor (1949–1963) being in the foreground. It was built up mainly from the documents of the secretariat in the Rhöndorf residential building and the Chancellor's office in Bonn's Palais Schaumburg , at that time the headquarters of the Federal Chancellery . The written estate is divided into four collections. These include u. a. Speeches, discussions, interviews, government statements , minutes of meetings, press reviews and a large number of other documents. The extensive image archive includes around 8,000 photographs and 200 photo albums. The archive can be viewed by the public under the conditions of the Federal Archives Act and the usage regulations. Since Konrad Adenauer held a large number of offices and positions in various authorities during his lifetime, important information is also available in other archives.

The creation of an archive was an essential task of the Federal Chancellor Adenauer House Foundation from the start. The heirs of Adenauer instructed the newly established foundation to do this when the property was transferred to the Federal Republic of Germany. During the 1970s, the material passed from the Adenauer family into the hands of the foundation. First of all, the free use of the written estate affecting activities in federal politics was restricted by the 30-year blocking period . In the meantime, this period has expired for all stocks, so that today, after an archival review, almost all documents can be presented. A large part has been microfilmed since the early 1990s and is stored as a backup in the Barbarastollen near Freiburg im Breisgau.

literature

Web links

Commons : Bundeskanzler-Adenauer-Haus  - Collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Helmut Vogt : Guardians of the Bonn Republic: The Allied High Commissioners 1949–1955 , Verlag Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2004, ISBN 3-506-70139-8 , p. 99.
  2. ^ Heinz Firmenich (revised by Karl Günter Werber ): City of Bad Honnef (= Rheinischer Verein für Denkmalpflege und Landschaftsschutz : Rheinische Kunststätten , issue 12). 3rd, revised edition, Neusser Druckerei und Verlag, Neuss 1987, ISBN 3-88094-541-1 , p. 28.
  3. Section III B 1 Project Management UNO, BMELV, BMG, BMAS. Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning
  4. ↑ The exhibition building in Rhöndorf becomes a construction site . General-Anzeiger , April 9, 2014
  5. ^ Federal Chancellor Adenauer House Foundation - renovation and conversion of the exhibition building. ( Memento from April 23, 2014 in the web archive archive.today ) Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning
  6. ^ Federal Chancellor Adenauer House Foundation - renovation and conversion of the exhibition building. Federal Office for Building and Regional Planning
  7. The statute in the version of May 6, 2013 was published by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media in the Joint Ministerial Gazette (GMBl.) 2014, p. 834 ff.
  8. Three-day visit - Federal President Steinmeier recalls Bonn's history . general-anzeiger-bonn.de, August 29, 2018; accessed on August 30, 2018.
  9. a b c d e Carola Maria Werhahn: Konrad Adenauer's house in Rhöndorf - building history and special features.
  10. List of monuments of the city of Bad Honnef , number A 35
  11. Wolfgang Ruland (ed.), Karl Günter Werber (text): Bad Honnef [illustrated book]. Wolfland Verlag, Bad Honnef 2007, ISBN 978-3-936414-25-7 , p. 48.

Coordinates: 50 ° 39 '27.9 "  N , 7 ° 13' 4.5"  E