From Charlemagne to the Kitchen Boy: Reading the Hamburg Rathaus
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Architecture The Hamburg Rathaus tells the story of its city in more than a hundred small details, and this is my walk through them.
The Rathaus was one of the first things I photographed in Hamburg.
The picture is still in my camera roll, taken on 6 July 2017, five days after I arrived for an internship.
Like most visitors, I was impressed by its size and its tower, but what I kept coming back to was the roof.
Why was it turquoise, and why were so many other roofs in the city the same colour?My first Rathaus pictureThe answer turned out to be chemistry. The roof is copper, and copper slowly reacts with oxygen, water and carbon dioxide in the air. Over the decades this forms a green layer called patina, so the roof I was looking at wasn't the colour the builders had seen.That was the first time the Rathaus made me curious, but not the last.
On a city tour with Robin and the Tour Guides, our guide pointed out the emperors on the façade, the Phoenix and the Hanseatic coats of arms.
We only heard a little about each, but it was enough to make me look at the building differently.Later, I decided to build a digital 3D model of the Rathaus, which meant photographing it from every side. Zooming in, I kept finding faces, figures and coats of arms I had never noticed from the square. Reading about them one by one, I realised the Rathaus can be read like a book about Hamburg's history.In this article, I'd like to take you around the building and share what I found.A building that rose from the ashesThe Rathaus we see today isn't Hamburg's first.
It's probably the sixth, and fire runs through the story of the ones before it.
An early Rathaus, built after the old town and the new merchant town joined in 1216, was most likely lost in the city fire of 1284.
Around 1290, a bigger brick Rathaus was built next to the Trostbrücke, and it stood there for more than 550 years.The old Rathaus, 1700Then, in the night of 5 May 1842, the Great Fire broke out.
The flames spread quickly through the narrow streets, and on the morning of 6 May the people of Hamburg blew up their own Rathaus with 800 pounds of gunpowder, hoping to stop the fire.
It didn't work, and the fire went on for days.
Today the Haus der Patriotischen Gesellschaft stands where the old Rathaus once was.It took 55 years until Hamburg had a new Rathaus. The foundation stone was laid on 6 May 1886, exactly 44 years after the old one was blown up, and the building opened in 1897.
Its front is 111 metres wide, and its tower is 112 metres high, almost exactly as tall as the building is wide.The fire is remembered right on its front. High on the tower, between the clock and Hamburg's coat of arms, sits a Phoenix, the bird that rises again from its own ashes, with wings more than 2 metres wide.
Below it, a gilded medallion shows the old Rathaus and the word "Resurgam", meaning "I will rise again".
In 1892, exactly 50 years after the fire, the Phoenix was pulled to the Rathaus by four black horses.The PhoenixIn the summer of 1943, the bombing raids of Operation Gomorrah destroyed large parts of Hamburg.
This time the Rathaus was spared.
It was one of the few historic buildings in the centre to survive, and that's why we can still read every detail on its façade today.The emperors on the façadeAbove the main entrance, two emperors stand on either side of the balcony: Charlemagne on the left and Friedrich I Barbarossa on the right.
Between them, in the background, Hammonia looks down from a golden mosaic made in 1896, holding out a wreath.
She is the goddess who stands for Hamburg, much like Britannia does for Britain, and she represents the city's values: freedom, peace, trade and prosperity.HammoniaIt might seem strange that a city so proud of its freedom puts emperors on its town hall.
But Hamburg never had a king of its own.
Over the centuries, the Dukes of Saxony, the Counts of Holstein and later the Kings of Denmark all claimed power over the city, and Hamburg's answer was always the same: it answered only to the emperor, the head of the Holy Roman Empire. When Denmark claimed Hamburg in 1618, the city added emperor statues to its old Rathaus to make that point, and the new Rathaus carries on the tradition.Around them are a few more details.
Above Charlemagne is a small coat of arms with a black eagle on gold, the eagle of the empire. Above Barbarossa are three black lions on gold, the arms of his family, the Staufer. And on the columns next to the statues are the letters SPQH, short for Senatus Populusque Hamburgensis, "the Senate and the People of Hamburg".
It's a copy of the SPQR of ancient Rome, and a reminder that even standing next to the emperors, the city was run by its own citizens.Charlemagne (left) and Barbarossa (right)Charlemagne (768–814) is where Hamburg's story begins. He was crowned emperor in 800, and in his time the area around the Alster and the Elbe came under Frankish rule. According to old stories, he also started the first church here. So it makes sense that the whole line of emperors starts with him.Barbarossa (1152–1190) is there for a very different reason. On 7 May 1189, he is said to have given Hamburg the right to sail down the Elbe to the North Sea without paying any tolls. This is seen as the birth of the port, and the city still celebrates it every May with the Hafengeburtstag, the harbour's birthday.The twist is that the document is a fake. Count Adolf III, who ruled Hamburg at the time and joined Barbarossa on his crusade, most likely did get some kind of promise from him.
But Barbarossa died on the crusade, and there was no written proof.
Decades later, the people of Hamburg wrote the charter themselves, with everything they wanted in it, and got it sealed with the seal of Barbarossa's grandson, Friedrich II.
Historians have known this since 1907, but the city celebrates anyway.
I find it funny that one of the biggest ports in the world partly owes its start to a clever trick.Hamburger Barbarossa-Freibrief 1189.
Von Uwe Rohwedder - Eigenes Werk, CC BY-SA 4.0The other 18 rulers stand in the niches between the first-floor windows, and Charlemagne and Barbarossa split them in time.
Charlemagne leads the older rulers on the left, and from him the line moves forward in time until Lothar III, who died in 1137.
Barbarossa, who became king 15 years later, leads the newer ones on the right, and from him the line continues all the way to Franz II, the last emperor, in 1806. Strictly speaking, not all of them belong to the Holy Roman Empire: the first five ruled before the empire began in 962, in the Frankish empire, but in the 1890s they were seen as the start of the same line.When I was photographing them, I noticed that the emperors stand behind thin nets.
At first they made them look a bit trapped, but I guess the nets are there to keep the pigeons away.
These men once ruled large parts of Europe, and today they need protecting from the pigeons on the Rathausmarkt.Left of the balcony, from Charlemagne outwardsLudwig the Pious (814–840): Charlemagne's son, who made Hamburg the seat of an archbishop around 831.Ludwig the German (843–876): Charlemagne's grandson and king of the eastern Franks, in whose time Vikings burned Hamburg in 845.Konrad I (911–918): Duke of Franconia, chosen as king after Charlemagne's family line died out in the east.Heinrich I (919–936): The first king from Saxony, the region Hamburg belonged to, who fought back the Danes in the north.Otto I, the Great (936–973): Heinrich I's son, whose crowning in Rome in 962 marks the start of the Holy Roman Empire.Otto II (973–983): Otto I's son, during whose last year a Slavic uprising reached Hamburg and burned the town.Konrad II (1024–1039): The first emperor of the Salian family, who added the Kingdom of Burgundy to the empire.Heinrich III (1039–1056): Konrad II's son, so powerful that he removed three rival popes in 1046.Lothar III (1125–1137): Duke of Saxony and later emperor, who gave the area around Hamburg to the Counts of Schauenburg.The EmperorsRight of the balcony, from Barbarossa outwardsHeinrich VI (1190–1197): Barbarossa's son, who added Sicily to the empire through his marriage.Friedrich II (1212–1250): Barbarossa's grandson, who gave Hamburg to the King of Denmark in 1214 and whose seal is on the fake charter.Rudolf of Habsburg (1273–1291): The first Habsburg king, who brought order back after years without a strong ruler but was never crowned emperor.Karl IV (1346–1378): King of Bohemia, who made Prague his capital and wrote the Golden Bull of 1356, the rules for choosing kings.Maximilian I (1493–1519): Known as "the last knight", during whose rule Hamburg was officially counted as a free imperial city in 1510.Karl V (1519–1556): Maximilian's grandson and King of Spain, in whose time Hamburg became Protestant in 1529.Maximilian II (1564–1576): Karl V's nephew, during whose rule the English Merchant Adventurers settled in Hamburg in 1567.Joseph II (1765–1790): Maria Theresa's son, in whose time Denmark finally accepted Hamburg as a free imperial city in 1768.Franz II (1792–1806): The last Holy Roman Emperor, who gave up the crown in 1806 under pressure from Napoleon.The virtues above the emperorsHamburg gave Charlemagne and Barbarossa the place of honour, right above the main entrance.
But above the emperors, the builders placed what mattered even more to them: Hamburg's own coat of arms and the four civic virtues.The coat of arms shows a white castle with three towers on red, with a cross and two stars above it, held up by two stone lions.
You don't often see the coat of arms in this full form, with the lions and the helmet on top.