Cologne

• 1. Introduction

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  For ten years, from 1880 to 1890, the tallest building in the world stood in Cologne, a city on the left bank of the Rhine in western Germany. Today Cologne is the fourth-most populous city in the country, with nearly 1.1 million people inside its limits and more than 3.1 million in the wider Cologne Bonn region. It is the largest city in North Rhine-Westphalia, and it sits at the heart of the Rhine-Ruhr metropolitan region, the second biggest in the European Union by economic output. Its name began as a Roman title and now lives on in the English language as a generic word. How did a Roman colony grow into a free city that no prince could rule? What happened when bombers left most of its centre in ruins? And why do around a million people pour into its streets on a single Thursday before Ash Wednesday?

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• 2. Roman Colony

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  In 38 BC a Germanic tribe called the Ubii founded the first urban settlement on the ground where Cologne now stands. They called it Oppidum Ubiorum. In AD 50 the Romans established Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium on the Rhine. The name honoured Emperor Claudius and his wife, Agrippina the Younger, who was born there. Over time the word Agrippina was dropped, except in Latin, and Colonia became the city's name in its own right. German turned it into Köln. The French form, Cologne, is the one English adopted.

  In 85 the city became the provincial capital of Germania Inferior, and Roman imperial governors lived there. It grew into one of the most important trade and production centres of the Roman Empire north of the Alps. From 260 to 271 it served as the capital of the Gallic Empire under three rulers named Postumus, Marius and Victorinus. In 310 Emperor Constantine I had a bridge built across the Rhine at Cologne. The city also appears on the 4th century Peutinger Map.

  Faith and law arrived in the same century. Maternus, elected bishop in 313, is the first known bishop of Cologne. In 321 Constantine approved the settlement of a Jewish community with all the freedoms of Roman citizens. His edict is the oldest documented evidence of Jewish life in Germany.

  The Roman city left physical traces. In late 2007 workers near the old wharf area found a Roman boat about 1,900 years old. Parts of the original Roman sewers still survive beneath the modern streets. All of this ended in 462, when the Ripuarian Franks occupied the city and took it out of Roman hands.

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• 3. Archbishops and Free City

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  In 716 Charles Martel commanded an army for the first time and suffered the only defeat of his life. Chilperic II, King of Neustria, had invaded Austrasia, and Cologne fell to him in the Battle of Cologne. Charles fled to the Eifel mountains and rallied supporters. He beat Chilperic at the Battle of Amblève and took the city back that same year.

  The city's churchmen were already players in royal politics. Cunibert, made bishop of Cologne in 623, advised the Merovingian King Dagobert I. Together with Pepin of Landen, he also tutored the king's son and heir, Siegebert III, the future king of Austrasia.

  In 795, under Charlemagne, the bishop Hildebold was promoted to archbishop. Real secular power came in 953, when Otto I, King of Germany, appointed his brother Bruno as duke. Otto wanted to weaken the nobles who threatened his rule, so he gave Bruno and his successors the privileges of secular princes. The result was the Electorate of Cologne, built from the archbishopric's lands. By the end of the 12th century, the archbishop was one of seven electors of the Holy Roman Emperor.

  The city itself broke free after the Battle of Worringen in 1288. Cologne gained independence from the archbishops and became a Free City, and Archbishop Sigfried II von Westerburg was forced to live in Bonn. He kept the right of capital punishment, however. The city council, although politically opposed to him, therefore depended on him for criminal justice. Only his episcopal judge, known as the greve, could hand down a sentence of torture. That arrangement lasted until the French conquest.

  Trade paid for this independence. Even by the middle of the 10th century, merchants in Cologne were known for their prosperity and luxurious living. The Rhine placed the city where east-west routes crossed the main south-north route from Venice to the Netherlands. Before the end of the 12th century, Archbishop Phillip von Heinsberg enclosed the whole city with walls. By 1300 it held 50,000 to 55,000 people. Its weights and measures, such as the Cologne mark, were used across Europe. In 1475 the city was a member of the Hanseatic League, the year Frederick III confirmed its imperial immediacy.

  From the second half of the 16th century, most archbishops came from the Bavarian Wittelsbach dynasty. Because Cologne was free, they were usually barred from entering it, so they lived in Bonn and later in Brühl. They still challenged the city's status repeatedly in the 17th and 18th centuries. The fights were handled through diplomacy, propaganda and the supreme courts of the Empire.

  As a free imperial city, Cologne also kept its own soldiers. Their red uniforms earned them the name Rote Funken, meaning red sparks. The wars against revolutionary France almost wiped out this small force. Today a leading carnival society of the same name keeps the tradition alive as a playful parody of military life.

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• 4. Cathedral and Romanesque Churches

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  In 1164 Archbishop Rainald of Dassel gave the relics of the Three Wise Men to Cologne's cathedral, after they had been taken from Milan. The gift turned the city into a major centre of medieval pilgrimage. Cologne also preserves the relics of Saint Ursula and of Albertus Magnus. Thomas Aquinas studied in the city in 1244 under Albertus.

  The Gothic cathedral was built to house the Shrine of the Three Kings. Work began in 1248, stopped around 1560, and was finally completed in 1880. By then it was meant to be more than a place of worship. It stood as a German national monument celebrating the newly founded German empire and the continuity of the German nation since the Middle Ages. UNESCO named it a World Heritage Site in 1996. Residents like to call it the eternal construction site. It is now the tallest cathedral and third-tallest church in the world, and one of the most visited sights in Europe.

  In 1245 or so the city already had older churches nearby, and twelve of them are Romanesque masterpieces of early medieval architecture. Some began as Roman buildings. St. Gereon was originally a huge mausoleum in a Roman graveyard. St. Maria im Kapitol was built on the substructure of a Roman temple. The Museum Schnütgen of religious art is partly housed in another of the twelve, St. Cecilia.

  Great St. Martin Church stands on the site of Roman warehouses. Before that, the spot held a sports field with a swimming pool, and the walls of that pool can still be seen in the church's basement.

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• 5. Occupiers and Rulers

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  In 1794 French revolutionary troops occupied Cologne, and under the Treaty of Lunéville in 1801 the left bank of the Rhine was incorporated into the French Republic. Cologne became part of the Département Roer, whose capital was Aachen. The French modernised public life by introducing the Napoleonic Code and removing the old elites from power. The Code stayed in use on the left bank until 1900, when the unified Bürgerliches Gesetzbuch replaced it across the German Empire.

  In 1815 the Congress of Vienna gave Cologne to the Kingdom of Prussia. The overwhelmingly Protestant Prussian state and the Catholic Rhineland clashed repeatedly. In 1837 the archbishop, Clemens August von Droste-Vischering, was arrested and imprisoned for two years after a dispute over marriages between Catholics and Protestants. In 1874, during the Kulturkampf, Archbishop Paul Melchers was imprisoned before taking asylum in the Netherlands. The resentment these conflicts created lasted past World War II, when Cologne's former mayor Konrad Adenauer became the first West German chancellor.

  The 19th century also transformed the city physically. Cologne absorbed surrounding towns and had grown to 700,000 inhabitants by World War I. It was turned into Germany's largest fortress, ringed by two fortified belts, and the forts and bunkers kept the city densely built inside. When the British Army of the Rhine occupied the city until 1926, it behaved more leniently than the French troops elsewhere in Germany. Adenauer, mayor from 1917 until 1933, acknowledged the political value of that approach.

  Demilitarisation required the fortifications to be dismantled. Cologne turned the old defences and their fields of fire into two green belts, the Grüngürtel, finished in 1933. In 1919 the University of Cologne reopened, having been closed by the French in 1798, as a replacement for Strasbourg, which had reverted to France. During the Weimar Republic, Cologne's social housing was copied by other German cities, and Butzweilerhof Airport became second in Germany only to Tempelhof in Berlin.

  That progress ended in March 1933, when the Nazi Party and other extreme-right parties won the local elections. The new rulers arrested the Communist and Social Democrat members of the city assembly and dismissed Mayor Adenauer. The Nazis never gained decisive support in Cologne, though. By 1939 the city had 772,221 inhabitants.

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• 6. Bombs and Rubble

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  During the night of the 31st of May 1942, 1,046 heavy bombers attacked Cologne in Operation Millennium, the first 1,000 bomber raid by the Royal Air Force in World War II. They dropped 1,455 tons of explosives, about two-thirds of them incendiary. The raid lasted roughly 75 minutes. It destroyed 600 acres of built-up area, killed 486 civilians and left 59,000 people homeless.

  That raid was only one of 262 air raids by the Western Allies. Together they caused approximately 20,000 civilian casualties and almost completely wiped out the central part of the city. The photographer Hermann Claasen recorded the devastation from 1942 until the end of the war. He presented it in a 1947 exhibition and book titled Singing in the furnace. Cologne - Remains of an old city.

  The American First Army took Cologne in early March 1945 after a battle. The population had fallen by more than 90 percent, mostly because people were evacuated to rural areas. By the end of 1945 it had recovered to around 450,000. The Jewish community fared far worse. Essentially all of the pre-war Jewish population of 11,000 had been deported or killed, and the city's six synagogues were destroyed. The synagogue on Roonstraße was rebuilt in 1959.

  In 1945 the architect Rudolf Schwarz called Cologne the world's greatest heap of rubble. In 1947 he designed the master plan for rebuilding, which included new thoroughfares through the centre, especially the Nord-Süd-Fahrt. Planners already expected a large increase in car traffic, and the ruins made road building easier.

  The loss of cultural treasures was tremendous. Churches such as St. Gereon, Great St. Martin and St. Maria im Kapitol were destroyed, along with other monuments. Only St. Maria Lyskirchen escaped being badly damaged among the Romanesque twelve. Rebuilding them and landmarks like the Gürzenich event hall was disputed among leading architects and art historians. In most cases the wishes of citizens prevailed. The work lasted into the 1990s, when St. Kunibert was finished.

  The population reached pre-war numbers again in 1959. Wilhelm Riphahn's opera house, built in the style of the reconstruction era, is now regarded as a classic of modern architecture, yet its uncompromising look remains controversial. Today around 25 percent of the buildings predate World War II, and the city counts around 9,000 historic buildings.

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• 7. Perfume, Beer and Carnival

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  The perfume known as Eau de Cologne, or Kölnisch Wasser, has been produced in the city since 1709. It was created by an Italian expatriate named Johann Maria Farina. During the 18th century the Farina family exported it all over Europe, and Farina became a household name.

  The name led to a legal tangle. In 1803 Wilhelm Mülhens signed a contract with an unrelated Italian, Carlo Francesco Farina, giving him the right to use the Farina name. Mülhens opened a small factory on Glockengasse. After various court battles, his grandson Ferdinand Mülhens was forced to abandon the Farina name. He chose instead the house number the factory had been given during the French occupation, 4711. Today the Farina family still makes the original in its eighth generation, and Mäurer & Wirtz, which bought the 4711 brand in 2006, makes the other.

  The local beer is Kölsch, which is also the name of the dialect, so locals joke that it is the only language one can drink. The Köln Guild of Brewers was established in 1396. The beer style itself appeared in the 1800s, and in 1986 the breweries created an appellation so that only breweries in the city may use the term. The three largest are Reissdorf, founded in 1894, Gaffel, founded in 1908, and Früh, founded in 1904. Cologne has the most pubs per capita in Germany. In its Brauhäuser, or brewpubs, Kölsch is served fresh from the barrel.

  Those brewpubs are also the best places to meet the local kitchen. Himmel un Ääd, meaning Heaven and Earth, combines mashed potatoes and apple sauce and is served with fried blood sausage. Rhenish herring salad, Heringsstipp, mixes herring with apples, onions and cream. In the Middle Ages, salmon was considered poor people's food, while herring was popular in bourgeois households.

  Beer fuels a fierce regional rivalry with Düsseldorf, which chose Altbier instead. Waiters and patrons will mock anyone who orders Alt in Cologne or Kölsch in Düsseldorf. Düsseldorf also won the political prize, being chosen as capital of North Rhine-Westphalia even though Cologne was the larger city. Cologne benefited from sitting between Düsseldorf and Bonn, the provisional federal capital. The city became home to a number of federal agencies.

  The carnival season begins officially on the 11th of November at 11 minutes past 11 in the morning, and runs until Ash Wednesday. The street carnival starts on Weiberfastnacht, called Wieverfastelovend in dialect, which is the Thursday before Ash Wednesday. On that day Zülpicher Strasse, Neumarkt square and Heumarkt fill with people in costumes, dancing and drinking in the streets. It is one of the largest street festivals in Europe.

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• 8. Media and Modern Life

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  Between 1992 and 2003 Cologne built the MediaPark on the grounds of the former Gereon railway yard. It covers 20 hectares and offers 174,000 square metres of office space. Around 250 companies with about 5,000 employees work there, roughly 60 percent in media and communications. The KölnTurm, a 148-metre tower, anchors the site. Cologne is one of Germany's largest media centres, with around 30,000 to 40,000 people working in the sector.

  The region makes a third of all German television productions, and the city is called Germany's capital of TV crime stories. The public broadcaster Westdeutscher Rundfunk employs around 3,500 people at its Cologne headquarters. RTL moved into the original 1920s trade fair buildings in 2005, after the fair's large extension. The music channel VIVA was founded in the city in 1993. The Cologne Comedy Festival is considered the largest comedy festival in mainland Europe.

  Music runs deep too. Karlheinz Stockhausen worked at the Studio für elektronische Musik, which made the city a hotbed of electronic music in the 1950s. The band Can formed in Cologne in 1968, and WDR helped promote Krautrock in the 1970s.

  Knowledge has long been a local trade. The University of Cologne, founded in 1388, is the largest university in Germany, and the city hosts some 72,000 students. The German Aerospace Center and the European Astronaut Centre are based there. Lufthansa has its main corporate headquarters in Cologne.

  The people are as varied as the industries. About 40.5 percent of residents have a migrant background. Cologne is home to 90,000 people of Turkish origin, the second largest Turkish community in Germany after Berlin. Keupstraße is known as Little Istanbul for its Turkish restaurants and markets. On the 11th of October 2021, Mayor Henriette Reker announced that all 35 of the city's mosques could broadcast the Adhan for up to five minutes on Fridays between noon and 3 p.m. She said the move "shows that diversity is appreciated and loved in Cologne".

  The Rhine remains a danger to all of this. Cologne is regularly flooded and is considered the most flood-prone European city. After a 1993 flood caused heavy damage, the city agency Stadtentwässerungsbetriebe Köln redesigned its flood control system. Today it combines permanent and mobile flood walls, pumping stations, and monitoring and forecasting systems.

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