Rheinbrücken / Rhine Bridges

Manfred Sack, in an essay about bridges: 'The Latin word ›relegere‹ means to connect. The assumption is that this is the basis of the word religion. The chief priest in Rome was the pontifex maximus, the highest builder of bridges between man and god, between this world and the ›other world‹. The Germanic tribes saw the bridge in the rainbow physically before them, it was their road of light to Valhalla. For those who are disheartened, drugs are the bridge of escape into other, very illusory, worlds of experience. Tradition builds bridges from yesterday to tomorrow. There are so many bridges: music, a letter, the sounds of a radio, phone conversations, light signals, Morse signals, calls. The building of bridges is thus not only a physical process, but a spiritual and emotional event, a longing felt by the soul. No wonder that those who design and calculate bridges, who build them and therefore take risks, at least subconsciously sense some of the extrasensory significance of their sensory activity.' And this is all the more true when we are talking about the bridges across the Rhine, the most important European river, which is wreathed in myths and legends and has inspired poetry and music like no other. Until the 19th century it was crossed almost exclusively by means of ferries. With the onset of industrialization, more and more goods had to be transported increasingly rapidly. Today, over 250 bridges cross the river. They too now shape the unsurpassed diversity of the Rhine landscape. Since 1987, Riehle has photographed some 150 Rhine bridges from the river’s headwaters in Switzerland to the Rhine’s delta in the Netherlands. The most interesting 100 bridges are published in this book. The son of an architect, Riehle was born in 1949 in Triberg in the Black Forest, studied industrial design at the Folkwangschule für Gestaltung in Essen from 1971 until 1975 and fine arts at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1975 until 1980. In Düsseldorf he was the protégé of the sculptor Erwin Heerich, who created highly noted buildings on the Museum Insel Hombroich that also shaped the artistic thinking of Riehle. Gottfried Knapp worked as a film critic for ten years before starting as art, architecture, and film editor for the arts page of the Süddeutsche Zeitung. His numerous publications on art-historical and architectural themes include monographs on individual buildings and catalogues about painters, sculptors, draughtsmen, and photographic artists. Knapp has won several journalism prizes in the fields of architecture and monument preservation.