Villa Cahn
The Villa Cahn is a villa in Plittersdorf , a district of the Bad Godesberg district of Bonn . It is located above the banks of the Rhine on Am Büchel and borders the readers' park . The villa stands as a monument under monument protection .
The neo-Gothic , castle-like villa designed by the Hanoverian architect Edwin Oppler was built for the Jewish banker Albert Cahn from 1868 to 1870. In the building Cahn brought together a valuable art collection with valuable Dutch and old German paintings as well as ceramics, weapons and glass paintings; the furniture in the house was costly new productions based on the architect's drafts or copies of old pieces, so that an elaborate work of art was created. Since he had no descendants, Cahn bequeathed the property to his sister's family, to whom u. a. the ethnologist Paul Readers belonged to. According to his own instructions, Cahn was cremated after his death (which was still extremely unusual at the time) and the urn was buried in the park of the villa.
According to Cahn's wish, the house should become the “ancestral home” of the family, so his heirs took great care to keep it as unchanged as possible. During the "Third Reich" the owner family had to flee Germany because of their Jewish descent and opposition to National Socialism . At that time, parts of the art collection had to be sold to finance the escape, the rest was taken away and some of them were also sold later. During the Nazi era, the builder's grave was desecrated; the remains of the tombstone are now in the Jewish cemetery in Frankfurt. After the Second World War, the confiscated by the Nazis and largely looted property of the family has been reimbursed, but only partially occupied and later sold after even the unrealistic plan had shortly to the villa to the US translocate .
The building had been left to decay, unused, for good, as demolition and redevelopment of the site were planned; Large parts of the internal fixtures were lost due to theft and vandalism, and further damage was caused by a renovation that was not in line with listed buildings and was ultimately abandoned in the early 1980s. All of the plaster inside was removed, so that the wall paintings (which had recently been painted over) were destroyed, and almost all of the remaining parts of the wall-mounted fittings such as doors, floors and wooden paneling were removed. After all, the roof was renewed and the windows of the building were locked so that it was initially secured. Part of the former park was built on in the period that followed, the rest was named after the former owner family, the readers' park .
However, since no further work was carried out and the villa was left to its own devices, it fell into disrepair until the current owner, Frank Asbeck , bought the approximately 10,000 m² site in 1997 and saved the villa from ongoing deterioration through extensive renovations. Windows, ceiling paintings, wood carvings and fixtures (if they still exist) have been restored or reconstructed. The entire sanitary and heating area was also renewed. The old heating system consisted of several open chimneys, which could also supply remote rooms of the villa with warm air by means of air shafts. In the winding cellar with its connections from very narrow corridors, a wellness and bathing area with whirlpool was built. Since the renovation, the actual villa inside the fully fenced property is no longer visible to passers-by from any side.
literature
- Wolfgang Brönner : The Villa Cahn. A "German house" on the Rhine. JP Bachem, Cologne 1991, ISBN 3-7616-1001-7 . (= Contributions to architectural and art monuments in the Rhineland , Volume 31.)
- Olga Sonntag : Villas on the banks of the Rhine in Bonn: 1819–1914. Bouvier Verlag, Bonn 1998, ISBN 3-416-02618-7 , Volume 3, Catalog (2), pp. 21-25. (also dissertation University of Bonn, 1994)
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ List of monuments of the city of Bonn (as of March 15, 2019), p. 4, number A 911
Coordinates: 50 ° 41 ′ 34.8 " N , 7 ° 10 ′ 10.9" E