1.10.2014 to 25.1.2015 in the Ernst Moritz Arndt House

An exhibition by the Bonn City Museum to mark the 200th anniversary of the Congress of Vienna and the associated incorporation of the Rhineland into the Kingdom of Prussia.

Within just a few decades, Bonn changed its nationality three times in 20 years through no fault of its own. For centuries, the city belonged to the Electorate of Cologne, whose residence Bonn had officially been since 1597, and thus to the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. Two years after the young Bonn court musician Ludwig van Beethoven left for further training in Vienna, his employer and sovereign Elector Maximilian Franz of Austria also left Bonn for good on October 3, 1794. He fled from the approaching French revolutionary troops, who took Bonn five days later without a fight.

Although Electoral Cologne formally continued to exist until the death of Maximilian Franz on 27 July 1801, in reality the French remained the new masters in Bonn and the Rhineland, whose territories on the left bank of the Rhine had belonged to the French Republic until 1814 and to the French Empire from 1804, following the Peace of Campo Formio in 1797 and Lunéville in 1801, which also saw the abolition of all former ecclesiastical dominions and the secularization of all ecclesiastical estates.

After the fall of Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna from September 18, 1814 to June 9, 1815, which became the ideal platform for Beethoven's own performance opportunities, led to the political and territorial reorganization of Europe. Bonn and the Rhineland themselves had no influence or decision-making power in the negotiations. They were almost forced upon King Frederick William III of Prussia as compensation by the other powers sitting at the Vienna negotiating table. The reason for this was that Austria and England in particular refused Prussia's wish to incorporate the Kingdom of Saxony and preferred to see Prussia as a strong buffer on the border with France, which had been restored to its 1789 borders.

On May 15, 1815, the Rhineland paid homage to Prussian rule in Aachen in the absence of the king. On June 8, 1815, the Congress Act was signed in Vienna. From this point on, Bonn belonged to the Kingdom of Prussia.