A vanished piece of Cologne
It was the largest cohesive architectural complex north of the Alps during the Middle Ages: Twelve distinguished city gates, 52 towers, and a 6-kilometre city wall on the land side, constructed between 1180 and 1250, in addition to barbicans and bastions that were added in the following centuries in response to advancements in military technology.
Only four of the gates and two small sections of the wall have been preserved, with all the rest – including the Weyertor gate – reduced to nothing with blast charges and pickaxes between 1881 and 1891.
Mayor Hermann Becker, drunk on progress, declared during the demolition celebration on 11 June 1881, “What our ancestors had to build so that Cologne could grow must now be demolished so that Cologne will not shrink. As we honour how they dug the trenches and built the towers, we also honour our duty to level their works as an obligation that would earn us mockery today and harsh damnation in the future were we to fail.” Talk about misjudgement!
The Weyertor
For his view of the Weyertor, Wilhelm Scheiner (1852–1922) selected a diagonal angle from Pantoleonswall, and the narrow eastern side is visible in the picture along with the field-side flank tower and the lengthwise side facing the city, which had been converted into a two-storey residential block with seven windows each in the 18th century. A bird’s-eye view from 1702 conveys a much different, defensive nature of the gate that was first mentioned in 1232: Instead of the more residential hipped roof and conical rooftops over the side turrets, the flank towers and the (at the time one storey higher) detached middle tract clearly constructed as a gate are topped with merlons.
The Weyertor was Cologne’s highest situated city gate. Ever since the 15th century, it had the strongest successively expanded barbican in Cologne’s outward defences. Scheiner’s father Jakob(1820–1911) was able to give a good impression of this with his watercolour of the field side (not also in the City Museum’s graphic art collection), which depicted the enclosure with the massive Renaissance front gate and reinforced central point of the north flank of the adjoining bastion.
Evidence in paint
Ten years later, the view enjoyed by the younger Scheiner would be no more: The view to the left of the gate underlines the structure’s current isolation. As a free-standing structure in the middle of aresidential complex north of Barbarossaplatz, robbed of its original purpose, its fate was sealed, and Scheiner is showing us the beginning of the demolition process. In the background, you can see the construction crews covering the pent roof of the extension that served as a stairway to the former tower residences. As with all works by the artist, this watercolour is explicitly documentarian in nature, because – aside from the figures in the foreground – it is faithful to a photo Scheiner took that has also been preserved, dated 2 October 1889.
Along with the Hahnentor, Eigelsteintor, and Severinstor, the Weyertor was the most important of Cologne’s city gates until the 19th century. It houses a customs office and served as an entrance point for the city itself, which makes it all the more regrettable that a previously critical gateway has been demolished. When it fell, so did yet another important monument to the Cologne of the past.