Qualla: Aachen Town Hall

Aachen Town Hall: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sascha Gebhardt, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. On the night of 14 July 1943, the towers of Aachen Town Hall caught fire from Allied bombing, and by morning the steel skeletons inside the tower caps had twisted from the heat. The north wall of the Coronation Hall had shifted as much as thirty centimeters from vertical. Engineers braced the building with emergency beams to keep it from collapsing on what remained of the medieval frescoes inside. The Rathaus, like the city it served, would spend decades reassembling itself. But it had done this kind of work before. The Aachen Town Hall is essentially a 14th-century Gothic building that ate a Carolingian palace, survived a Great Fire, was remade in Baroque, then Neo-Gothic, then ruined, then rebuilt - and is still where the mayor of Aachen reports to work.

Read more: Aachen Town Hall on Qualla

Image: Sascha Gebhardt | CC BY-SA 3.0 de

Aachen Town Hall: Built on Charlemagne's Foundations

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CEphoto, Uwe Aranas, CC BY-SA 3.0. When construction began in 1330, the masons did not start with empty ground. They started with the rubble of Charlemagne's palace - specifically the Aula Regia, the great hall of the Palatine residence that had stood there since the eighth century. The Granus Tower, which had ris...

Read more: Aachen Town Hall on Qualla

Image: CEphoto, Uwe Aranas | CC BY-SA 3.0

Aachen Town Hall: The Fire and Its Many Sequels

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Túrelio, CC BY-SA 2.5. Aachen burned in 1656. The Great Fire took the Rathaus roof and towers and forced the city to rebuild in the new Baroque manner. Between 1727 and 1732 the chief architect Johann Joseph Couven stripped out the Gothic muntins, replaced the gothic figures, and remade the front facad...

Read more: Aachen Town Hall on Qualla

Image: Túrelio | CC BY-SA 2.5

Aachen Town Hall: Rethel's Charlemagne

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Amel, CC BY-SA 3.0. When the 19th-century rebuilders restored the Coronation Hall, they hired the Romantic painter Alfred Rethel to fill its walls with frescoes from the life of Charlemagne. He began in 1847; his student finished the cycle in 1861. The work survived the 1883 fire by sheer luck - the...

Read more: Aachen Town Hall on Qualla

Image: Amel | CC BY-SA 3.0

Aachen Town Hall: Replicas of an Empire

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arnoldius, CC BY-SA 3.0. Walk through the Rathaus today and you find replicas of the Imperial Regalia of the Holy Roman Empire - the Imperial Crown of Otto I, the Sabre of Charlemagne, the Imperial Orb, the Vienna Coronation Gospels. The originals are in Vienna, locked in the Imperial Treasury. These cop...

Read more: Aachen Town Hall on Qualla

Image: Arnoldius | CC BY-SA 3.0

Aachen Town Hall: The Charlemagne Prize

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit kaʁstn Disk/Cat, CC BY-SA 3.0 de. Every spring since 1950, the Aachen city council has gathered in the Coronation Hall to award the Karlspreis - the Charlemagne Prize - to a person or institution judged to have served the cause of European unity. Winston Churchill received it. Konrad Adenauer received it. Pope Fr...

Read more: Aachen Town Hall on Qualla

Image: kaʁstn Disk/Cat | CC BY-SA 3.0 de