Cologne Cathedral

A torso with a crane on top

Cologne Cathedral was begun in 1248, and its choir was finished in 1322. Building then crept westward until 1473, when work on the south tower stopped at the level of the belfry. Around 1560 construction ceased altogether.

For almost three centuries the city lived with a torso. The Gothic choir, with its tall traceried windows, flying buttresses and pinnacles, stood at full height. The nave and transept reached only about half their planned height under makeshift roofs, and the north tower was a low stump.

On the stump of the south tower, about 59 metres up, stood a medieval wooden crane more than 25 metres tall. It stayed there for four hundred years and became part of the city's skyline.

A Protestant king, a Catholic stone

On 4 September 1842 the Prussian king Frederick William IV and the coadjutor Johannes von Geissel laid the foundation stone for completing the cathedral. The stone was to be hoisted up to the south tower and walled in there.

The coadjutor stood in for an archbishop sidelined by the state. Clemens August Droste zu Vischering had been arrested by Prussia in 1837, in a quarrel over mixed marriages, and Geissel, named coadjutor in 1841, had taken over the running of the archdiocese in March 1842. The cathedral gave the Protestant king and his Catholic Rhineland a cause they could share.

That year also saw the founding of the Central Cathedral Building Society, which raised money from donors across Germany.

The tallest building in the world, for four years

Completion took 38 years. The transept facades were finished in 1855, and on 15 October 1880 the cathedral was complete. Its twin spires, 157 metres high, made it the tallest building in the world until the Washington Monument overtook it in 1884.

The celebration had a sour note. The completion had become a symbol of Prussian-led national unity, and in 1880, in the middle of the Kulturkampf, the Catholic archbishop stayed away.

Why Germans treat it as their own

Cologne Cathedral is Germany's most visited landmark, drawing an average of six million people a year, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1996. It came through the Second World War despite fourteen hits by aerial bombs.

Its completion was the great national project of the nineteenth century. Paid for by donors across the country, it was begun almost three decades before there was a German state, and it brought Germans of every class and both confessions behind a single building.

Sources

• Wikipedia (de): Kölner Dom
• domradio.de
• Wikipedia (de): Zentral-Dombau-Verein zu Köln
• Wikipedia (en): Cologne Cathedral