Back in the first plague winter of 2020-21, I entertained myself with a blog series on the "lost cities" where my recent ancestors used to live - until the 1960s when my parents and grandparents (separately) thought it was a good idea to live in the sticks and embrace a car-dependent lifestyle. The series was born out of research for my musical family history memoir when I realised that Heinrich the cellist and Frieda the pianist each lived in several cities that I quite liked, and never, ever, in the country (while old Heinrich was in the military, his regiment was moved to the small town of Dieuze as a punishment, that was as close as they got).
This focus on Heinrich and Frieda obviously biased my first set of 10 lost cities (to which I then appended one from the inlaws side), so I always thought I might one day continue with a few more. It only took me four years, but now I think I have another 9 or 10 at hand to carry on. I'll include Hamborn in the list as number 11 and continue counting so here comes Bonn as number 12.
I initially didn't include Bonn, because my grandparents only moved there to study, so it was kind of an ephemeral presence our family had there. Then again, they first met there, and they both studied in other universities before doing their final years at Bonn, so history could have turned out differently, and their separate decisions to come to Bonn were kind of crucial for my existence to happen. And come to think of it, that's pretty much the same level of importance as Strasbourg has, where Heinrich and Maria met a generation earlier. Although I don't recall anybody having a romantic attachment to Bonn, in contrast to the Strasbourg affinity that has been passed down several generations.
Bonn doesn't need much of an introduction, as it served as the federal capital of West Germany for some four decades. (It also happens to be twinned with Oxford.) Just to note that before the war it was mainly the home of a well-respected university, which had been set up in 1818 after Bonn became part of Prussia. Located on the main north-south axis along the river Rhine, it was much more convenient to reach by rail than many of the smaller historic university towns such as Göttingen or Marburg. In the 1930s, it had around 100,000 residents.
What happened was that Heinrich's son Richard, after studying two semesters in Göttingen and one in Vienna, arrived in Bonn in 1929. Ruth moved to Bonn in the summer of 1930, after studying in Freiburg, Münster, and Freiburg again. In choosing Bonn, both moved closer to their parents, based at Wuppertal and Rheydt, respectively. They took their exams in 1933 and 1934, respectively. They finished more quickly than planned as they feared the imminent removal of some of their profs who were Jewish, including the mathematician Felix Hausdorff and the chemist Heinrich Rheinboldt.
There are lots of photos of Richard and Ruth from their student days in Bonn, of which I have included a few in my "every picture" series (eg: Richard, Ruth), although they don't offer much of a sense of place. I'm not sure if their correspondence from the student days has survived - if so I haven't seen it yet - so I don't even know the addresses where they lived in Bonn. So, more or less randomly, I picked an old postcard of the market square, because it is still recognisable today:
And here is a view I really like of the Poststrasse:
After preparing this entry, I revisited Bonn and realised this view is just a few metres away from the main entrance of the main station Bonn Hbf, so this is basically what you see when you come out of the station and cross the road (or pass through the tunnel, choose exit "Poststrasse"). The cigar shop on the right was obviously destroyed and rebuilt in the same contour but without the decorative elements. It is now a Macdonalds. The building on the left appears to have survived (probably the reason why the same contour was rebuilt on the right, to keep the symmetry).
I also visited the Macke-Haus, where expressionist painter August Macke lived and worked until the first world war. Will rave about that separately.
Previously, I had visited the city a few times in the 2010s, as one of my children was studying there for a couple of years - back then the Macke Haus was closed for major refurbishment, but I did enjoy the Kunsthalle and the Arithmeum, two of the modern museums in the south of the city where the government quarters used to be.
Previously in the #lostcities series:
- Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
- Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
- Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
- Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
- Rheydt 1923 - 1935
- Königsberg 1935 - 1945
- Aachen 1936 - 1940
- Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
- Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
- Würzburg 1961 - 1968
- Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015
NB I have now added a second end date to the cities where other family members stayed on after the direct ancestors died. So far, that is the case for Minden, Bad Nauheim and Hamborn.
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