Watching on the Rhine

by Violet R. Markham

In the Wallraf-Richartz Museum fresco the foundation stone of the new building has been well and truly laid. Brawny workmen in the foreground haul about imposing blocks of stone and deal purposefully with a huge floral decoration. Frederick William, on a platform raised above the assembled company, is looking heavenwards with rapt expression, as though following through the clouds the flight of some fiery chariot. Particularly impressive is a row of city fathers in full evening dress, wearing decorations, who with hands tightly clasped across their stomachs stand meek and simpering in the royal presence.

This ludicrous painting is an unworthy memorial of what was in fact a high and spirited adventure. The completion of the Dom after centuries of failure and decay was a great task, finely conceived and finely carried through. The wave of national feeling and national self-consciousness, which developed and spread through Germany, from the middle of the last century onwards, found a practical symbol to which it could rally in this work of reconstruction. As year by year columns and towers rose higher on the banks of the Rhine, and the great neglected fane began to assume the lines dreamt of centuries before by its long-dead architect, the German saw in this miracle an image of the resurrection of his own country. Germany had been a ruin, destroyed and at the feet of a conqueror. Germany too had triumphed over destruction and failure. Through her new-found unity she was rising, like the walls of the cathedral, to a position of power and authority undreamt of before. Little wonder that the rejoicings held in honour of the final completion of the work in 1880, a date following closely on the Franco-Prussian War, assumed a national character and were invested with considerable pomp and circumstance.

No cathedral in the world has had so strange and chequered a history as that of Cologne. The hearts of many master builders were broken over it. The mediaeval difficulties of construction were enormous. The building even of the beautiful thirteenth-century choir suffered severely from the fierce civic and ecclesiastical feuds which raged at that time between the town and the archbishops. Many legends are connected with the name of Meister Gerhard, the architect whose main ideas are embodied in the Dom as it stands to-day. Germany is under debt to France for the greatest of her Gothic churches. To Amiens, where Gerhard lived and studied, Cologne Cathedral owes its inspiration. The thirteenth-century choir, an architectural gem of the first order, follows closely the lines of Amiens Cathedral. Few examples of early Gothic are more pure or more perfect. Meister Gerhard, in despair at the delays which beset his work, entered, so the story runs, into a very unsuccessful wager with the devil as regards the completion of the cathedral. When the bet was lost he flung himself, to save his soul, from the scaffolding. There is no evidence to show that Meister Gerhard came to a violent end, but the story is significant as a testimony to the difficulties from which the building of the Dom suffered. These difficulties became accentuated in the time of Meister Gerhard’s successors. The choir fortunately struggled to completion, and in 1322 the bones of the Three Kings, the most precious of all Cologne relics, were deposited with great pomp in their new shrine. But the noble design of the nave fell on evil days, and after the varying vicissitudes of several generations work was finally abandoned, leaving a great torso instead of the church as originally planned. For centuries the half-completed aisles mocked the vision of the early master builders. Little by little the nave, which was shut off by a wall from the choir, fell into complete decay. In 1796 it was used by the occupying French Army as a magazine and stable. Some progress had been made with the south tower before work was finally abandoned. But in modern times trees were growing in the ruins of the tower, and a derelict crane, stranded high aloft on a pile of stones and rubbish, was an object of interest to casual visitors.

Withal a vague hope persisted through the centuries that some day, somehow, Cologne Cathedral would stand on the banks of the Rhine in the majesty of the completed design of which Meister Gerhard had dreamt. For centuries the hope seemed vain indeed. When some years after the War of Liberation the architect Zwirner championed the idea of a completed Dom, the response of popular enthusiasm was immediate and complete. The building as finished follows faithfully the ideas of the mediaeval architect, a fact for which we have to thank an extraordinary chapter of accidents.

The story of the original plans, which were recovered in the loft of an inn, reads like a fairy tale. Before the Napoleonic wars the plans of the cathedral were kept in the chapter-house. During the French occupation, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, they were removed for greater safety to a Benedictine monastery. The monastery was broken up and the forgotten and neglected designs came eventually into the possession of a private family, who used the great sheets of parchment for drying beans. Subsequently the son of the house went to Darmstadt for educational purposes. His anxious mother thought the young man’s clothes would be kept clean and dry if his box were lined with the stout parchment sheets which had rendered useful service in the case of the beans. The youth took up his residence in Darmstadt at the Gasthaus zur Traube. Internal evidence shows that, once away from the vigilant maternal eye, the care of his clothes must have suffered. The coverings intended to protect his garments from dust and damp were cast aside with youthful recklessness. The scrolls, still carrying their hidden treasure of the great design of the west end of the cathedral, were thrown away and consigned as litter to the loft of the inn. There they were discovered by a carpenter sufficiently intelligent to appreciate their importance. From his hands they passed into those of a painter, and eventually after a journey via Paris were returned to Cologne. They hang to-day in a chapel of the choir.

The stone from which the cathedral is built is quarried in the Drachenfels. Unfortunately it is soft and perishable, and constant repairs are necessary. Nearly a million sterling was spent on completing the building, a modest sum for so considerable a work judged by the spacious standards of our own spendthrift time. The funds were raised from pious founders, from state help, and from lotteries. Whether or not you admire the exterior of the cathedral—personally the answer is in the negative—there can be nothing but praise for the enterprise which made a success of the failure of the centuries and the fine solid work to which the completed Dom bears witness. In 1880, six hundred years after the original founding of the cathedral by Archbishop Conrad, the final stone of the giant blossom crowning the south tower was swung into place in the presence of the Emperor William I.

Not only in Cologne, but throughout the whole of Germany, the completion of the cathedral was a signal for an outburst of pride and joy. National enthusiasm knew no bounds. There were festivals and feastings and pageants. Looking back on the rejoicings from our own standpoint of a stricken world, we can recognise of what tragic events they were the starting point. To keep a cool head when steering on a full tide of success is a test of character more severe in its searching than the patient bearing of adversity. Under that test the new-made German Empire broke down rapidly. By 1880 Germany was launched on the career which, soon transcending all that is legitimate in national virility and self-consciousness, was to bring her ultimately, through pride and aggression, to defeat and downfall.

From the cannon captured in the French war a bell known as the Kaiser-Glocke was cast, which became in a special sense the tutelary genius of the cathedral. Only on rare and solemn occasions was the Kaiser-Glocke heard. Then as its deep note boomed across the waters of the Rhine, the citizens of Cologne thrilled with proud memories of conquest and restored national life. The cannon of a conquered foe are symbols of death, destruction, and defeat. To convert them as trophies of victory into bells which call men and women to the service of God and the worship of the Prince of Peace, is an act of paganism removed as by the poles from rudimentary Christian ethic. But though the mills of God grind slowly they grind exceeding small, as the fate of the great bell was to prove.

In the spring of 1918, owing to the acute shortage of metal, the Kaiser-Glocke shared the doom of many other of the fine Cologne church bells. To-day its great chamber stands bare and empty. The people of the town were in despair. The passing of the bell was to them a symbol of the passing of victory. But the grim needs of the hour in the matter of munitions had to be met at any cost. Born of the things of death, to the things of death the bell returned. Reconverted into a gun, and lost on the Western Front—was ever warning more sombre as to the vanity of human desires and the perils which wait on human arrogance?

As to the architectural merits of the cathedral, opinion is and is likely to remain divided. To me at least the exterior is thoroughly unsatisfactory. Especially when viewed from a distance the proportions though massive are ungainly. It dominates the plain by its size, an unwieldy colossus too high for its length. The openwork spires sit heavily on the towers, and lack the great élan and heavenward spring of buildings such as Chartres or Salisbury. But the interior is a different matter. I cannot explain why proportions which externally fail to satisfy are harmonious and beautiful within. The choir, the apse, the long forest of columns carrying the nave, the spring of the vast western arch between the towers—all this is Gothic in its strength and beauty. The splendid glass of the north aisle has vanished temporarily. It was taken down during the air-raids period, and the hour of its restoration is likely to tarry. Much of the remaining glass is poor and modern, and the general effect of the nave suffers severely from this fact.