Once the official residence of the Federal Chancellor, the Palais Schaumburg in Bonn now stands empty. The Federal Republic has no use for the charming little castle. The sad consequence of a development that began at the latest with the Merkel era: those in power are indifferent to Bonn's legacy.
Attention real estate fans! Are you hungry for a historic castle in a prime location on the Rhine? Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brandt will be new tenants?
The Schaumburg Palace in Bonn, where the Federal Republic was once founded and ruled, is not yet on the market. But that may soon change. The Federal Chancellery has just taken the first step and is handing over the charming little castle to the Federal Real Estate Agency (Bima).
This authority must look for appropriate use. Although there is no thought of selling at the moment; But what the owner Germany wants to do with the Palais Schaumburg is anyone's guess. How could it come to this? Where does the sniffy indifference towards a historic building that means so much for recent German history come from? Why the Scholz government's lack of interest in the face of social democratic predecessors in Bonn, whose footsteps seem huge for today's rulers?
The little castle into which the aged and at the same time dewy Chancellor Konrad Adenauer moved to govern in December 1949 is currently being renovated with bureaucratic thoroughness. Asbestos had been found and all sorts of static defects. And because no one knew what to do with the construction in the former capital Bonn, which had been abandoned by power, people were taking their time.
Photos show completely exposed brick walls and torn floors. The impressive building at Adenauerallee 153 will not be usable again until 2025 at the earliest. Until then everything is cordoned off. Diagonally opposite on Bundeskanzlerplatz, the bistro “Alter Schwede” serves delicious snacks, then comes the “House of History”. In the Park facing the Rhine, the Chancellor's Bungalow, which Sep Ruf designed from 1963 onwards as an apartment for heads of government – and behind whose glass fronts no tenant ever felt at home – is twilight.
If you add Adenauer's cute teahouse right on the Rhine, which his employees christened “Konradsruh” because of the old man who meditated there, then the ensemble offers the view of a submerged metropolis that, like Egypt or Assyria, is now just a case for archaeologists.
If the black, red and gold flag were not still hanging on the Federal President's second residence in the Villa Hammerschmidt in Bonn, nothing representative would be a reminder that the essence of today's Berlin democracy was conceived and anchored here on the western bank of the Rhine: ties to the West and the rule of law, NATO and so on Eastern policy, federalization and social partnership…
But we are experiencing the paradox that the Federal Republic has grown into a rich and influential global player – with virtually no tangible capital and instead with this wasteland office in the direction of Bad Godesberg, which over the years has housed ministries, embassies and parliamentary buildings with the historical charm of regional health insurance companies had spread. Now, however, the united Germany once again has a veritable metropolis as the federal capital, has a symbolic center and magnificent buildings from the times of Frederick the Great and Otto von Bismarck.
But all of this, together with the global importance of the country, its industry and infrastructure, is increasingly in danger of deteriorating. The flourishing Bonn – unlike the ailing Berlin – did not need a penny from the state financial equalization. Is this perhaps the reason for the arrogant disinterest of those in power today for the unspectacular and brilliant Bonn Republic? Are the heirs ashamed?
At least since Angela Merkel and her ties to the East in the Brandenburg region, the Bonn legacy, which made the success of reunification possible, has become a thing of the past to those pulling the strings in the new, pompously cold Chancellery. The little Spree has long since flooded Father Rhine.
The mighty of the world in the cute palace
Somehow the Palais Schaumburg was suitable for a provincial operetta theater anyway. The ever-expanding villa of an Aachen textile manufacturer got its name from a Schaumburg-Lippe prince who resided in the Rhine meadows with a tennis court, riding arena, orangery and staff as the husband of one of Kaiser Wilhelm's sisters. This fun-loving Victoria of Prussia, now widowed and in debt, married a Russian conman 35 years her junior at the Schaumburg Palace in 1927, who then earned his living in Luxembourg as a waiter and brother-in-law of the emperor.
The Schaumburgers expropriated Viktoria and built office space into the castle before the Wehrmacht acquired it in 1939 as a command building for the French campaign. That and the rest of the World War passed without any damage to the edelweiss facades and the cozy salons on the park floor. When the commander-in-chief of the Belgian armed forces swapped tranquil Bonn for Cologne in 1949 and left the palace, Adenauer's hour came and he moved in.
The Palais Schaumburg offered sufficient office space for the government of the time, which made do with three telephone lines and two company cars. A neighboring villa was later acquired and added with a few connecting corridors. But essentially, when the world's most powerful people found their way to Bonn, they ended up in this timelessly cute palace. The Federal Republic didn't have anything more representative to offer than this little Duodez castle in the middle of nowhere.
Photos show the Kennedy brothers with Adenauer in the Chancellor's office, US President Gerald Ford with Helmut Schmidt in front of the door or Chancellor Kurt Georg Kiesinger, who, together with his deputy Willy Brandt, relocated a cabinet meeting to the park lawn in July 1967 in the heat. Green idyll avant la lettre? Or a sit-in by those in power as a response to the fermenting student protests out in the country? After all, since Kiesinger there was also a helipad in the park, which the palace's inmates could use to get away quickly if necessary.
It was no coincidence that in 1976 it was the unsentimental technocrat Helmut Schmidt who moved into a befitting and functional chancellery made of concrete and glass with a bunker and telecommunications. After moving to Berlin in 1999, Schmidt, Helmut Kohl and Gerhard Schröder's bright chancellor's office with a wall of books and a chess set is now a museum every now and then. But visitors will not come back into this Sleeping Beauty den until 2025 at the earliest.
Harald Biermann, President of the “House of History” foundation, complains about the neglect of all of Bonn’s political properties; The city relied too heavily on Beethoven's marketing anyway. So will there ever again be an asbestos-free but meticulously restored chancellor's office from the Adenauer era? The old cabinet room with tinkling chandeliers and ashtrays for Ludwig Erhard's cigar consumption? The ballroom with mediocre rococo paintings on the wall?
One or two references to Hitler's terrible lawyer Hans Globke, who was in charge in the Chancellery from 1949 until his retirement in 1963 and orchestrated the smooth integration of Nazi criminals into the new Juste Milieu – an eternal blot on the history of the Federal Republic – should certainly not be missed.
But one should also remember the lavish Chancellor parties in the park, where first dignitaries between Heinz Schenk and Rudi Carrell learned more democracy and later selected citizens were catered and fed in the finest way by Helmut Kohl's culinary business partners.
Harald Biermann rightly compares the importance of the Palais Schaumburg with London's Downing Street and the Paris Élysée Palace, although the political wasteland on the Rhine can in no way be compared with the size and splendor of the world metropolises on the Seine and Thames. But that is precisely why the memory of the Palais Schaumburg was and is so precious. Because unlike Berlin, there was no stain of crime and guilt attached to it.
Today, the civil servants of the Federal Real Estate Agency manage Adenauer's small palace on the Rhine. And the “Citizen Communication Department” of the Berlin Chancellery sits lost on Bonn’s Welckerstrasse with 19 officials in the last paradisiacal outpost of the Bonn Republic.
What they are doing there seems like a secret, but at least they know: Only the sleepy bishop's residence in Bonn could give the Federal Republic a zero hour on the left bank of the Rhine and anti-Prussian in the ruins – in the Palais Schaumburg, the German fairytale castle.
