Preserving values

The diversity of German World Heritage

This sound is infernal. Two stone centaurs look as if they are playing an ear-piercing perfect fourth, while the displacing power of the water forces the notes through metal pipes. When this horn announcing the end of world resounds down the incline, everything is already in motion. Then masses of water spray up over tuff cliffs at the foot of the statue of Hercules – the Statue of Liberty in New York is said to have been based on this gigantic thin-walled design. Then the 12-metre jet erupts from the giant’s mouth. A crowd of people – school groups, pensioners, tourists – push their way down the steep steps on both sides of the roaring cascade, so as always to be slightly ahead of the water and the games it plays. After eight-and-a-half kilometres of Baroque flood fantasies, the torrent of water divides into far-flung Romantic forest brooks that, on reuniting, crash down the cliffs beneath Teufelsbrücke, course through another section of woodland and meadows only to jet off the edge of the aqueduct and arc 34 metres to earth. The triumphal conclusion of this feat of water engineering is a 54-metre-high fountain, in its day a world record. In 2013, the water races in the Berg- und Schlosspark Wilhelmshöhe in Kassel and the water reservoir in the Habichtswald forest behind them were added to the UNESCO World Heritage list.

Many see it as a competition: Germany’s 38 World Heritage sites make it one of the countries with the most entries on the UNESCO World Heritage list, after China, Italy, France and Spain. Given the size of the country, the sheer number seems extraordinary, but is related to the history of this central European country which, like Italy, only became a nation in the late 19th century. As late as 1800 what is today the territory of the Federal Republic of Germany was made up of hundreds of small sovereign states. On top of which there were 51 free imperial cities. These princedoms rarely formed coherent territorial units. Each ruler laid down laws, had coins minted, levied taxes and determined measurements, weights and the time. Each ruler had family ties with other rulers throughout Europe and established political and economic alliances as he saw fit. In terms of culture there was stiff competition. Individual aristocratic patrons supported the arts in order to 
enhance their own glory, taking their cue from the cultural achievements of the other courts of Europe. Landgrave Carl von Hessen-Kassel, who had Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe planned in 1689, was a typical ruler of such a small princedom. Margravine Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, the sister of Frederick II of Prussia, was another passionate patron with a vision for her fiefdom: 
she had a new opera house built to mark her daughter’s wedding in 1748; it was designed by the then world-famous architect and theatrical designer Giuseppe Galli Bibiena. This wooden gem in a remote little town in Franconia, the prototype for all later stand­alone downtown opera houses, was described by the World 
Heritage Committee at its 2012 annual convention as having 
“outstanding universal value”.

Germany’s polycentric history also explains why today all 
16 states have sovereignty over their own cultural affairs – and they include the three city-states of Hamburg, Bremen and Berlin. Each of the states has its own monument preservation laws and each devises its own proposals for the World Heritage list, whereby the Standing Conference of Cultural Ministers decides which are forwarded to UNESCO. Needless to say, each state wants to have at least one item in its territory on the World Heritage list, and this is a matter not only of prestige, but of creating tourist magnets. In 1976, the Federal Republic of Germany ratified the UNESCO World Heritage Convention. The first building to be included on the list was Aachen Cathedral, back in 1978. The building is at core Carolingian, but consciously borrows from ancient Roman and Byzantine architecture, and to this day it symbolizes the attempt to unite Europe at an early date under Charlemagne. While initially it was individual buildings, and above all churches or castles, that were incorporated in the World Heritage list, the idea was soon extended to embrace entire building complexes, and unusually well preserved old towns. In 1987, the astonishingly numerous ancient Roman edifices in the city of Trier were in­cluded on the list. In the year 300, the small city on the banks of the Mosel was one of the most important towns in the Roman Empire, with some 8,000 inhabitants, and the largest capital north of the Alps. The Hanseatic City of Lübeck has had the same footprint since the 12th century, and in 1987 its historical centre was the first in northern Europe to be added to the World Heritage list. In 1992, the World Heritage Committee deemed the mines of Rammelsberg and the completely preserved medieval town of Goslar as worthy of inclusion. The ore mines in the Rammelsberg and the ingenious water management system devised by Cistercian monks to enable extraction of the ore have shaped the face of the countryside and the town since the 13th century. Silver from Rammelsberg made the German emperors and the city of Goslar rich. Around 30 kilometres of artificial water channels, 100 ponds that served as water retaining basins, large underground water wheels, huge mine systems and even the processing plant erected in 1930 by industrial architects Schupp and Kremmer attest to a mining tradition that ran seamlessly for 700 years. Following the inclusion of the Upper Harz Water Management System under the same listing in 2010, the World Heritage site covers a developed area of over 200 square kilometres. And anyone wandering around the Harz region will soon realize that the spruce forests are also the result of mining. They were all planted when the old mixed forests had been felled to build mine shafts, water pipes and wheels.

Among all the parks recognized as World Heritage sites, the Garden Kingdom of Dessau-Wörlitz, with its 140 square kilometres of grounds, is the most touching. The decidedly peace-loving and enlightened Prince Leopold III Friedrich Franz of Anhalt-Dessau declared his small fiefdom a garden kingdom and granted all his subjects free access to recreation and education. Modelled on an English landscaped garden, the prince introduced a joyful classicism to Germany. That said, the UNESCO World Heritage Committee is also interested in more recent monuments. For example, six large 1920s housing areas in Berlin were added to the list in 2008 as paramount examples of social urban planning in an age of crisis and housing shortages.

Although the states are responsible for guaranteeing the integrity of the World Heritage sites by issuing monument preser­vation laws, the Federal Government is strongly committed to maintaining and advertising them out of an awareness that owners of local and regional listed properties are often not able to discharge all the relevant obligations. The major foundations that the Federal Government helps to finance are in a superlative position. One example is Klassik Stiftung Weimar, which despite its name is not only responsible for the museums that are dedicated to the life and work of Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Friedrich Schiller in the city, but also Weimar’s Bauhaus heritage. Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, which seeks to preserve and develop the singular experimental Modernist buildings in the city and enable the public to access them in what is a contracting industrial town, likewise received federal funding. The Bauhaus blazed the trail worldwide thanks to the international reach of the design and architectural college and its leading lights, whom the Nazis forced into exile abroad.

Also under federal jurisdiction is the elaborate repair and modernization of Berlin’s Museum Island – a unique museum world that formed a bourgeois centre of education in the heart of the capital and was developed under commission to the king from 1810 onwards and focused on all epochs and cultures. The Federal Commissioner for Culture and the Media has initiated a 
Valuable National Cultural Monuments Programme, which, among other things, has secured long-term funding for the Völklingen Ironworks World Heritage site. This gigantic steel plant was founded in 1873 and is an unprecedented machine park boasting countless innovations in industrial technology, but needs to be protected from rusting now that the equipment is 
no longer in operation.

The special programme for the Promotion of Investments in the National UNESCO World Heritage Sites is perhaps one of the 
most impressive Federal Government initiatives to support the World Heritage sites. It is run under the auspices of the Federal Ministry of Building and Transport as an instrument of urban development policy. The Federal Government is making available 220 million euros for the programme from 2009 until 2014. Among other monuments, the medieval Stone Bridge in the 
former Free Imperial City of Regensburg, which has been badly damaged by traffic, will be restored. In Quedlinburg the unstable Schlossberg will be structurally strengthened. And in the large palatial ensembles and parks of Potsdam and Berlin there are many small pleasure buildings that are in need of repair as highlights of the various gardens.

The programme also provides grants for new building work intended to strengthen public perception of the World Heritage sites – for example, new entrance buildings, new guidance systems and information centres. The small monastery of Lorsch in Hesse, for example, is struggling hard to be noticed as a member of the list. This is because the ruins of the monastery, which once supplied the whole of Europe with literature, are rather inconspicuous and somewhat enigmatic. The small town with half-timbered houses on the edge of the Odenwald forest is also difficult to reach by public transport and has no noteworthy hotels 
or restaurants. This demonstrates how a small community can easily find having a World Heritage site somewhat taxing. Taking World Heritage seriously means shouldering responsibility on behalf of humankind as a whole, which is proud of its creative and scholarly cultural achievements across all nations. Not one of these monuments would have been conceivable without cultural exchange, irrespective of how small the state once was on whose territory it was erected.

World Natural Heritage is the result of global geological interdependences. The prehistoric horses in what was once an oil shale pit in Messel near Darmstadt are just as much part of Mother Earth’s heritage as is the Wadden Sea, which extends along the North Sea coast from the Netherlands to Denmark, or the last beech forests in Europe to survive the thirst for energy of its growing cities. Germany has surprising sites to offer in this regard, too, you simply have to take the time to discover them for yourself.