Brauweiler Abbey

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St. Nikolaus, church of the former Brauweiler Abbey

Brauweiler Abbey

Brauweiler Abbey (German: Abtei Brauweiler) is a former Benedictine monastery located at Brauweiler, now in Pulheim near Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, in Germany.

It was founded and endowed in 1024 by Pfalzgraf Ezzo, count palatine of Lotharingia of the Ezzonian dynasty and his wife Mathilde, a daughter of Emperor Otto II and Theophano.

The present abbey church, now the parish church of Saint Nicholas and Saint Medardus, is the third building on the site, built between 1136 and 1220 or later. The abbey was dissolved in the secularisation of 1803. The premises were subsequently used, under a Napoleonic law, as a hostel for beggars, and from 1815 under the Prussian regime as a workhouse.

From 1933 to 1945 the buildings were used for the internment, torture and murder of political and social 'undesirables' by the Gestapo and the civil authorities of the Nazi government. Prisoners included Konrad Adenauer, the former mayor of Cologne and first Chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany. From 1945 to 1949 it was an open camp for Displaced Persons administered first by the British Army and then by UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration).

The abbey buildings are now used by the Rheinisches Amt für Denkmalpflege (Rhenish Department for the Care of Historic Monuments).

[edit] References

Bathe, Peter, 2003. Der romanische Kapitelsaal in Brauweiler. Eine kritische Bestandsaufnahme seiner Architektur, Bauskulptur und Malerei. Cologne. ISBN 3-89498-100-8.
Euskirchen, Claudia, 1993: Die barocken Klostergebäude der ehemaligen Benediktinerabtei Brauweiler. Cologne. ISBN 3-7927-1383-7.
Schreiner, Peter, and Tontsch, Monika, 1994. Die Abteikirche St. Nikolaus und St. Medardus in Brauweiler. Baugeschichte und Ausstattung (2nd edn. 1999). Pulheim. ISBN 3-927765-12-0.
Handbuch der Historischen Stätten Deutschlands, 1970. Nordrhein-Westfalen. Stuttgart: Kröner-Verlag.