Town Hall of Bremen

Bremen's Town Hall is a Gothic hall in a Renaissance costume. Its long brick body, raised between 1405 and 1410 when the Hanseatic city was at the height of its wealth, received two centuries later one of the most extravagant facades in northern Germany: a towering central bay of slender columns, tall windows and a richly carved gable in the Flemish manner, flanked by smaller gables and balustrades heavy with reliefs. It is one of the great monuments of both Brick Gothic and the Weser Renaissance, and in 2004 it was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List together with the Roland statue in front of it, as a testimony to the civic self-government of the cities of the Holy Roman Empire.

The building was a political statement from the start. The city council placed it on the market square so that the square, until then dominated by the cathedral and the archbishop's palace, would now be dominated by the burghers; its two great halls were even made slightly longer and wider than the hall of the archbishop's palace. Sixteen large statues of emperors and prince-electors on the walls proclaimed Bremen's claim to be an imperial city. The stone Roland, a 5.5-metre figure of Charlemagne's paladin with drawn sword and the imperial eagle on his shield, was raised in 1404 in place of a wooden one burned by the archbishop. Local legend holds that Bremen will remain free as long as Roland stands, and that a spare is kept hidden in the town hall's cellars just in case. Between 1608 and 1612 the master builder Lüder von Bentheim transformed the market front, drawing on Dutch Renaissance pattern books, and in 1909 to 1913 the Munich architect Gabriel von Seidl added the New Town Hall behind it, twice as large but deliberately kept from overpowering the old one.

Inside, the Upper Hall is still used for the city's ceremonies, and the small Golden Chamber off it was redecorated in 1905 by Heinrich Vogeler as a complete Art Nouveau interior, down to the door handles and gilded leather walls. The plain Lower Hall, with oak pillars and whitewashed walls, once served as a market for cloth and spices. Beneath it all lies the Ratskeller, where wine has been stored since 1405 and where a cask from 1653 is said to be the oldest in Germany. The building came through the bombing of the Second World War with little damage, though more than half of the city around it was destroyed. On the square outside stand the Schütting guildhall, the cathedral and, by the town hall's northern corner, Gerhard Marcks's bronze of the Town Musicians of Bremen.

Getting there

The Town Hall stands on the market square in the historic centre of Bremen, Germany. Bremen Airport (BRE) is about 3.5 km away in a straight line, and the main railway station, Bremen Hauptbahnhof, lies on the northern edge of the old town, a short walk away.