Tower keeper

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The tower keeper - keeper of the city (Wittenberg, 1911)
Tower apartment in the tower of St. Mary's Church in Rostock
Tower room in St. Peter in Munich (replica)

Türmer (also tower guard or tower blower ) is the name for a guard who observes the surroundings from a tower or a tower room .

tasks

Towers generally had the task of warning the city or castle of dangers from the highest tower .

The dangers to be reported included approaching troops and gangs , but also fires , which were very dangerous due to the narrowness of the cities, the widespread timber construction and the peat , which has long been used as fuel , the ash of which glows for a relatively long time.

Depending on the circumstances, church towers or towers of the city ​​fortifications were used; within the castles it was usually the keep . To warn the citizens, the tower keepers either used a watchman's horn , a bell , signal flags or, in the dark, lamps. It was quite common for towers to live in the tower as well. If there was an increased risk of fire, they had to stay up on the tower uninterrupted, sometimes for many weeks. Another task of the tower keeper could be the hourly striking of a bell to indicate the time.

The chorale blowing from the tower is a purely Protestant tradition that only emerged with the Reformation. The blown chant was of particular importance, as it represented a kind of sermon that was carried across the houses to the people. The congregation heard the chorale and was able to sing or pray along at home or in the street. This is closely interwoven with tower blowing .

Today tower keepers are mainly employed in the context of tourism .

Social position

In the Middle Ages , the job of the tower keeper was considered " dishonorable " and thus a dishonest profession . In the urban estates of the Middle Ages, children from families of towers were therefore mostly excluded from being accepted into other guilds . It was not until the middle of the 16th century that the imperial laws of 1548 and 1577 gave them the opportunity to learn another craft.

Historical lore

In 1467 the tower of the Salvatorkirche in Duisburg burned down after the tower guard fell asleep next to a burning candle.

The tower keeper of St. Reinoldi in Dortmund had a tragic fate in 1661 when the church tower collapsed after an earthquake . According to the city chronicles, he managed to warn passers-by below the tower, but the guard himself was killed.

In the Hamburg Church of St. Michaelis , the tower keeper already performed his office in the first large St. Michaelis Church, which was destroyed by lightning in 1750. The then tower keeper Hartwig Christoffer Lüders wrote:

“On March 2nd, 1750, I started work, but only managed it for eight days, because on March 10th of the same year the church and tower were buried in ashes by an unfortunate ray of weather. In the year of 1778, September 14th, by the grace of God, I experienced that the button and wing of the newly erected tower were put back on and played songs of praise and thanks with the most heartfelt joy. "

Just one month after the great accident, the city council had a 20-meter-high wooden bell tower built on the Großneumarkt, in which the bells of the small St. Michaelis Church, which had been demolished shortly before due to dilapidation, were hung. The tower keeper then blew his chorale from this tower every morning at 10 a.m. and in the evening at 9 p.m. until he could do this service again from the tower. Incidentally, until the second half of the 19th century, he and his successors had to ask for part of their income from parishioners with a can.

Image of a tower keeper from 1433 from the house book of the Nuremberg Twelve Brothers Foundation

From 1534 to 1955, tower keepers were on duty in the tower room of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, reporting the fires in the city of Vienna first to the military facilities and later to the fire station .

In Koblenz at the latest in the 18th century and until 1893, two tower guards performed their duties in one of the towers of the Liebfrauenkirche . The four night watchmen around the Liebfrauenkirche - a total of ten night watchmen were out here every night - alternately reported to the towers every quarter of an hour by pulling the tower bell and were addressed by them through a call pipe. The tower guards' duty lasted from ringing the “police bell ” at 10 p.m. - the ringing of the “ rag bell ” in Liebfrauen reminds us of this - until 3, 4 or 5 a.m., depending on the season. With the horn they blew the quarter of an hour. If they saw a fire or a night watchman reported a fire, they gave a fire alarm with a fire bell and horn. Through the call tube on the tower, they could report to the fire department downstairs where it was burning.

A tower keeper (houseman) lived with his family on the Petriturm in Freiberg at least since the first half of the 16th century . The last tower keeper left the tower on July 1st, 1905. The crowd guards (tower guards - always two part-time jobs, who took turns regularly, and journeymen and other assistants), who, like the tower keeper, were always employed by the city council for one year, still lived on the tower and were able to extend this service from year to year. Thanks to the city piping, the profession in Freiberg was one of the eight best paid.

Türmer today

Even today, towers or chorale players are used in some places:

Germany

Switzerland

Poland

  • The watchman on the north tower of St. Mary's Church in Krakow still fulfills the duty to strike the clock every hour . He also blows a trumpet ( Hejnał ) signal in all four directions.

Tower Museum

  • The first German tower museum is located in Vilseck , a town in the administrative district of Upper Palatinate in Bavaria .
  • A museum was set up in 1994 in the tower house of the Nikolaikirche in Siegen .
  • In the tower of the parish church in Güstrow , the community's own work group “Türmerwohnung” set up a small museum in the former office of the tower keeper.

Tower keeper in literature

Eulenspiegel as a tower keeper,
woodcut from the people's book from 1515
  • In the people's book " Till Eulenspiegel " by the chronicler and writer Hermann Bote (around 1450 - around 1520), Eulenspiegel, as a tower warden, has the task of signaling the approach of enemies with trumpet signals.
  • In Switzerland, the " song of the Munot bell " is known, which describes the heartache of the Munot watchman.
  • A famous tower warrior's song is that of Lynkeus, the tower keeper in Goethe's Faust II : " Born to see, ordered to look, sworn to the tower, I like the world ". Goethe also described the fate of a tower keeper in the ballad " Der Totentanz ".

Other meanings

The verb "to tower" means: "to escape from a situation". In another context ("to pile up") it means a vertical accumulation of individual parts.

See also

literature

  • Peter Bahn: "You people listen and let me tell you ...". The story of the tower keeper and night watchman. Book accompanying the exhibition of the museum in the Schweizer Hof, Bretten. Bretten 2008, ISBN 978-3-928029-47-6 .
  • Barbara Polaczek, Johann Wax: The sound of the bell and the sound of the horns. Tower keeper in the Upper Palatinate. Buch & Kunstverlag Oberpfalz, Amberg 2002, ISBN 3-924350-95-7 .
  • Friedrich Scheele (Ed.), Martina Glimme: Slaept niet die daer wakes: from night watchmen and towers in Emden and elsewhere. Accompanying volume for the exhibition of the same name, publications by the Ostfriesisches Landesmuseum and Emder armory 11. Isensee, Oldenburg 2001, ISBN 3-89598-761-1 .
  • Fires - storm chimes: city fires in Frankfurt am Main. The history of the city tower keepers and fire alarm technology. Exhibition for the 1200th anniversary of the city of Frankfurt am Main and for the 120th anniversary of the professional fire brigade Frankfurt am Main from July 29 to October 30, 1994 in the parish tower of St. Bartholomew's Church ("Kaiserdom") . Frankfurt 1994

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Jost Schneider: Social history of reading: on the historical development and social differentiation of literary communication in Germany . Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2004, p. 154. ISBN 3-11-017816-8
  2. ↑ German Encyclopedia or General Real Dictionary of All Arts and Sciences. Volume 18. Varrentrapp and Wenner, Frankfurt am Main 1794, p. 277
  3. ↑ Thomas Parent: The Ruhr Area: From the "golden" Middle Ages to industrial culture. P. 76
  4. ↑ Thomas Parent: The Ruhr area: From the "golden" Middle Ages to industrial culture , p. 178
  5. ↑ Website of the Hamburg Church of St. Michaelis
  6. ↑ The “fire station” at the tower of St. Stephan ( memento from May 17, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) by Heinrich Krenn, curator of the Vienna Fire Brigade Museum
  7. ↑ Josef Eisenach: Die Nachtwache in Koblenz, in: Koblenzer Heimatblatt, 2nd year, No. 36 (September 5, 1926), Manfred Böckling: Simply top! - Koblenz, Gudensberg-Gleichen 2015, p. 12 f., And Manfred Böckling: Dark stories from Koblenz - Schön & schaurig, Gudensberg-Gleichen 2018, p. 66–71.
  8. ↑ See volume 68 (Freiberg's music history) and volume 70 (The Petriturm - the highest landmark of the city of Freiberg) of the messages of the Freiberg Antiquities Association
  9. ^ The tower keeper from the Kaiserpfalz wiesbadener-kurier.de, June 8, 2010
  10. ↑ The tower keeper doesn't think about towers badische-zeitung.de, October 22, 2008
  11. ↑ Bad Wimpfen: toll booth at 32 meters height wz-newsline.de, May 19, 2010
  12. ^ Anne Losemann: Life on the church tower - The tower family of St. Annen in the Erzgebirge. ZDF, October 11, 2009, accessed November 27, 2011 .
  13. ↑ Türmer-schwarzenberg.de
  14. ^ WDR : Neue Türmerin für Münster ( Memento from December 7, 2013 in the Internet Archive ), December 4, 2013
  15. ↑ Why does Münster need a tower keeper. DW, June 22, 2009, accessed July 4, 2012 .
  16. ↑ First German watchman Museum
  17. ↑ Study by the “Türmerwohnung in der Pfarrkirche” working group at www.stadtgeschichte-guestrow.de, accessed on February 9, 2017
  18. ↑ Hermann Bote: An entertaining book by Till Eulenspiegel from the state of Braunschweig. Insel, Frankfurt 1978, ISBN 3-458-32036-9
  19. ↑ tower , on duden.de
  20. ↑ towers , on de.wiktionary.org

Web links

Commons : Türmer  - Collection of images, videos and audio files