Cologne Cathedral as an International Monument

What would Cologne be without its cathedral? Visible for miles across the flatlands, its twin towers direct the visitor’s gaze skywards on arriving in the city. Designated a UNESCO world heritage site in 1996 as ‘an exceptional work of human creative genius’ and ‘a powerful testimony to the strength and persistence’ of Christian belief in Europe,2 the cathedral is Germany’s most popular building, with over six million visitors per year.3 It also holds an exceptional place in local sentiment. The city’s unofficial hymn Mer losse d’r Dom en Kolle (‘We will leave the cathedral in Cologne’) imagines the inhabitants standing ready to defend their cathedral from being taken away. It was composed against the city council’s plans to modernize historic quarters and relocate inhabitants in the 1970s. A play on the German saying ‘Die Kirche im Dorf lassen’, literally to ‘leave the church in the village’, and figuratively ‘not to be excessive’, the song satirized the council’s hubris by juxtaposing the idea of removing the cathedral to the suggestion of transplanting world famous sites from the Kremlin to the Louvre to Cologne, concluding: ‘it is better if things stay as they are, and we keep our beautiful cathedral’.4