Municipal graves of honour for the mayors of Pfingsten and Schnorrenberg and the painter Leo Breuer

At the suggestion of the Monument Association (citizens' motion), the Beuel District Council has decided that the historic graves of the two early Vilich/Beuel mayors Gabriel von Pfingsten (+1855) and Ignaz Schnorrenberg (+1895) in the Vilich churchyard and the painter Leo Breuer (+1975) in the mountain cemetery in Küdinghoven be raised to the status of municipal honorary graves.

This was the first step in preventing the currently planned removal of the Breuer grave. The prestigious Schnorrenberg tomb is in such a miserable state that the monument association has been offering the city for three years to arrange its restoration in line with its listed status - and to finance this itself.

In detail:

Gabriel von Pfingsten (1825-1855) and Ignaz Schnorrenberg (1855-1891) were the mayors following Leonhard Stroof in the municipality of Vilich, which was established by Napoleon in 1808 (in succession to the Vilich Abbey) and was the beginning of the city district of Beuel. The fourth mayor, Friedrich Breuer (1891-1921), moved the administration to Beuel in 1896 to the new town hall he had built there. In Vilich, the mayor's office had been in private houses.

With the elevation to graves of honour, the monument association hopes not least that these gravesites a) will not be cleared and b) will be maintained and thus preserved in the long term. However, the administration had recommended that the district council pass a negative resolution (which unfortunately seems like a subordinate position of Beuel matters on the part of the Bonn administration).

This would have meant that while on the other side of the Rhine the city would have maintained about 90 honorary graves, in Beuel there would still be only two (Steger in Schwarzrheindorf and Rhein in Oberkassel). Leo Breuer was an internationally renowned painter who was born in Endenich in 1893 and died in Küdinghoven in 1975. Initially active in Bonn, he then spent many years in Paris, where from 1946 he enjoyed great success in the "Salon-des-Réalités-Nouvelles", which he chaired from 1953.

Breuer's love of his homeland was nevertheless so strong that he set up another studio in Bonn in 1951 and then spent decades commuting between Bonn and Paris. He had never forgotten his roots. At last, however, he had his studio in Küdinghoven (Erlenweg 15), where he also died. "Today he is counted among the most important representatives of the geometric-constructivist style of art after 1945" (J. Niesen).

Winner of the Federal Cross of Merit 1st Class, he was celebrated at exhibitions in Germany and Paris. In Bonn, his works include frescoes in the Gottfried-Kinkel-Realschule and a wall design in the university polyclinic. In 1973, the LVR-Landesmuseum dedicated a retrospective to him and the city made an entry in the Golden Book; a street in Endenich is named after him.

With this endeavour to save the gravesite, the Beueler Denkmalverein would like to support the Bonn city administration in its obligation to the important artists - so that the grave, whose term had ended, would not have been "cleared away overnight out of ignorance". (It is on the path that leads up to the right/south of the church, stairs on the right, then left above). The gravesite must now be maintained by the town. The memorial association wants to put up an information board on the house where he lived and died.

Illustration: Grave Ignaz Schnorrenberg

Figure: Tomb Gabriel of Pentecost