New Town Hall (Leipzig)

[1] At the end of the 19th century, the Old Town Hall located at the Markt square finally proved too small for the booming city.

[3] The building complex, designed in the style of historicism[4] and made of light-grey, Main-Franconian shelly limestone, forms an irregular pentagon over an area of more than 10,000 m2 (107,600 sq.ft.).

On the southwest facade are the five statues "Crafts", "Justice", "Book Art", "Science" and "Music" by the artists Arthur Trebst, Johannes Hartmann, Adolf Lehnert, Josef Mágr and Hans Zeissig.

At the southwestern tip of the New Town Hall, in the green belt of the so called Promenadenring, there is a memorial to Carl Friedrich Goerdeler, one of the leading forces in the bourgeois resistance against Nazism and Leipzig's Mayor (Oberbürgermeister) from 1930 until 1937.

The Israeli author Yosef Agnon (Nobel Prize in Literature, 1966) describes in the second chapter of his novel "In Mr. Lublin's Store", how the nameless first-person narrator, a young Jewish man from Galicia, haunted in 1915 the authoritative new town hall for obtaining a residence permit in Leipzig.