Citadel Mainz

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The Mainz Citadel: Commanders' Building
The commanders' building
The main gate of the citadel
The Drusus Stone on the Drusus Bastion
The citadel moat, the "protected landscape component" of the complex

The Mainz Citadel is located on the Jakobsberg on the edge of today's old town and in the immediate vicinity of the Roman Theater train station . The fortress was built in its current form around 1660 and was part of the Mainz fortress .

history

Jakobsberg, on which the citadel was built, has been the location of the Benedictine monastery of St. Jakob since it was founded in 1050 . Halfway up was the stage theater of the Roman Mogontiacum , the remains of which were still visible at the time. Jakobsberg was not enclosed in the ring of the city wall and was only very lightly walled. This location directly in front of the city gates left a strategic gap open, since an attacker could have used the hill to invade Mainz or for a bombardment. The construction of the "Schweickhardtsburg" under the direction of the cathedral capitular Adolph von Waldenburg in the years 1620-29 closed this gap for the time being and connected the hill with the city fortifications. The pentagonal, irregular weir system got its name from the client, the Elector of Mainz, Johann Schweikhard von Kronberg .

Around 1655, Elector Johann Philipp von Schönborn ordered the walling of the entire city of Mainz with French-style bastions . In the course of this fortress construction, the Schweickhardtsburg was expanded into the regular, square citadel as we know it today. The Jakobskloster and the Drususstein standing on the Drusus bastion were left untouched within the fortress.

A building for the fortress commanders was built above the gate facing the city in 1696 under Elector Lothar Franz von Schönborn . Antonio Petrini's gate system, which had been in existence since 1660 , was cleverly integrated into the new building. Inside the citadel, the Jakobskloster still stood until the siege of Mainz (1793) , but most of it was destroyed by the heavy bombardment. The abbots and foreigners' building that remained standing was from then on only used for military purposes. In the southern part of the courtyard a baroque garden was laid out, which can still be seen on a plan from 1804.

From May to October 1813 it also served as a station on the optical telegraph line to Metz .

When Mainz became a fortress of the German Confederation in 1816 after the Wars of Liberation , Prussians and Austrians moved into the citadel and used it as barracks. For this purpose, the Austrians built the Citadell Barracks, which was then bomb-proof in 1861; The little building next to her served as a casino and kitchen.

Location of the citadel on a map from 1898

The double company barracks were built on the citadel in 1914; the last remains of the monastery had to give way. However, numerous architectural elements from the abbot's and foreigner's building were integrated into the barracks. During the First World War and the Second World War , the citadel served as a prisoner of war camp. From 1940 until the end of the war, the officers ' camp ('Oflag') XII B.

With the peace treaty of Versailles of 1919 - and the associated abandonment of the fortifications in and around Mainz - the military history of the Mainz citadel, which, with its size of around 340 by 320 meters, is one of the most important large fortresses in Rhineland-Palatinate, ended. In the pre-war years from 1933 up to and including 1936, the Rhein-Mainische site for education , a supraregional training center for the National Socialist ideologization of teachers and students, was housed here. During the Second World War, parts of the Mainz population sought protection from the bombing in the underground passages of the Drusus bastion, which had been converted into air raids.

The citadel today

After the Second World War, the French occupying forces confiscated the facility (until 1955). Today the citadel belongs to the city of Mainz and houses numerous municipal offices. The Mainz Citadel already stands since 1907 under monument protection . The moat in the southern part of the citadel has been under landscape protection as an "anthropogenic biotope" of "nationwide importance" since the mid-1980s . Today the City History Museum is housed in Building D in front of the Drususstein .

The citadel and its surroundings document the history of the city of Mainz in the smallest of spaces: from the Roman Drususstein memorial to the barracks built during the federal fortress in the 19th century to the air raid shelters of the Second World War.

The OpenOhr Festival has been taking place at the Citadel every year over Whitsun since 1975 , a thematically oriented youth culture festival with discussion forums and workshops, cabaret and live concerts.

In October 2015, the Mainz Citadel received the Hague Plaque from UNESCO , which marks the building as protected. In the event of damage caused by armed acts of war, the International Court of Justice would take over the prosecution here if the German government were no longer able to do so.

literature

  • Initiative Zitadelle Mainz eV (Ed.): Citadel Mainz. 2000 years of Mainz history in a very small space. Mainz 2004.
  • Stefan Schmitz (ed.): Mainz. The citadel on the Jakobsberg. A cultural monument on the move. Mainz 2017.

Web links

Commons : Citadel Mainz  - Collection of images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ among others was Fernand Braudel interned here.
  2. ↑ State capital Mainz: The green of the citadel Mainz. accessed on May 14, 2017.
  3. ↑ Mainz Citadel receives Hague Plaque from Unesco , Allgemeine Zeitung of October 30, 2015, accessed on December 16, 2015.

Coordinates: 49 ° 59 ′ 35 ″  N , 8 ° 16 ′ 27 ″  E