The Binsfeld Werkstätten für Glasgestaltung, Trier (1882-2025)
Anja Ostrowitzki, Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz
In June 2025, the stained glass company Binsfeld in Trier, founded in 1882, closed its doors. It was one of the most important stained glass workshops in Germany. While specialising in church windows, it also supplied secular buildings, such as residential buildings, hotels, banks and town halls. Founded during a boom period for sacred architecture in Germany, the enterprise dominated the market in the Diocese of Trier in the 20th century. Accordingly, it participated in the heyday of church construction in the Federal Republic of Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. Church windows by Binsfeld can be found almost everywhere in the Rhineland-Palatinate and Saarland. At the same time, it supplied customers beyond the region, mainly in Luxembourg, Lorraine, today‘s North Rhine-Westphalia in the West, and to former German territories in present-day Poland and even worldwide. From the 1920s onwards, orders came from the USA and missions in Africa and South America and in the second half of the 20th century also from Japan and Korea. Particularly impressive is the huge glass dome with a representation of the cosmos in the Erawan Museum south of Bangkok, Thailand, designed by artist Jakob Schwarzkopf (1926-2001), which was executed by Binsfeld Werkstätten. The restoration of medieval and 19th-century stained glass windows has been a second focus of the company’s work in recent decades.
The company had an archive of unique completeness, because unlike many comparable companies in Germany, it had not suffered any war losses. Through the efforts of Dr Ivo Rauch, in October 2025 the archive material was secured by the Rhineland-Palatinat State Archives (Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz) as a donation from the last owner (Fig. 1). Given the quantity and the expected high follow-up costs, especially for preserving the fragile documents, it took some courage to take them on, but ultimately, the decision was not difficult as it was a matter of saving valuable cultural assets from destruction. Even retrieving the documents from the attic of the workshop building required considerable effort and was only possible with the support of a service provider. Now in provisional storage, the archive material must first be cleaned, inspected for damage and professionally packed before a more in-depth cataloguing process can begin. Some restoration work may be necessary. The long-term goal is to present the materials not only on the archive’s platform https://apertus.rlp.de/ but in an online stained glass portal.
Once it has been made accessible, the collection will offer the potential for a wide range of research into art, church, social and economic history, as it contains both operational documents such as records about business trips, order-books, cartoon inventories, glaziers‘ books, business files and restoration reports, as well as material on the artistic designs and their manual execution. For stained glass historians and stained glass conservation specialists the 9700 full-sized drawing-patterns of the windows are of particular value. These cartoons exemplify the development of stained glass from the late 19th century to the present day. They are the critical working basis for the restoration of 19th and 20th century windows in the context of preservation of historical monuments. Many of the church windows made by Binsfeld have been lost as a result of war damage or church modernisation and the ongoing closure of churches, which often affects post-war buildings, threatens further loss of glass artworks on a large scale. The preserved and archived drawing patterns will remain to document the artistic decoration.
The Landeshauptarchiv Koblenz is currently seeking collaborative partners and sponsors who could support the costly Binsfeld stained glass project over the next few years.