Test in English & German. The town hall in Bremen with its associated Roland statue in the market square in front of the building make up a UNESCO World Heritage site and thus count as outstanding examples of architectural and cultural history. The Bremen town hall is an ideal image of this building type that is so important for European and Western history. It is almost a textbook example of the medieval and early modern town hall. The building dates from 1405 to 1410 and has not been fundamentally altered since. The only exception is that it was carefully continued between 1595 and 1614, when it acquired an extended figurative façade decoration based on the forms of the Weser Renaissance that were current at the time. This underlined the Hanseatic city's claims to immediacy as a free imperial city. The figurative decoration is almost encyclopaedic in its scope, showing the period's striving for humanistic education in the form of iconography with a wide-ranging political and religious spectrum of allegorical themes. The old town hall has remained almost untouched to the present day. In the late 19th century, when the city administration had acquired greater responsibilities, and thus needed more space, an extension was finally added at the back of the building, which Munich architect Gabriel von Seidl sensitively subordinated to the existing structure. The particular importance of the town hall in Bremen is based on the fact that it is extremely ambitious in architectural terms, and at the same time symbolises the republican and municipal structures of European cities. The Free Hanseatic City of Bremen is the oldest European city republic, and has retained its independence until today as a Land in its own right in the German Federal Republic. This self-confidence is expressed through the resources of architecture and the pictorial programme. As the best-preserved example for this particular building type in Germany the town hall in Bremen has also a unique significance as a historical monument.

Introduction by: Georg Skalecki