Gerling : Cologne's most stunning quarter - on sale now

The Gerling-Quartier is named after company founder Robert Gerling. In 1945, at the end of the war, Hans Gerling, son of a business entrepreneur, was granted permission by the American military government to establish the first German insurance company.

Publisher Günter Wallraff managed to help the group gain unwanted literary fame in 1973. He worked undercover as a janitor and interoffice messenger and reported on ‘anachronistic working conditions, an arbitrary approach to staff lay offs and the mood swings of supervisors, who controlled the staff underneath their positions and kept them dependent through a patriarchal insurance business model.’

In May 2006, Rolf Gerling, grandson of the company’s founder, sold the international Gerling Insurance Group to Talanx-Konzern, Germany’s third largest insurance group. The asking price was 1.4 billion Euros.

The Gerling building in Cologne’s Gereonsviertel was then sold to Frankonia Eurobau AG. In 2010, work began on transforming the buildings (now renamed ‘Gerling Quartier’) into exclusive luxury apartments.

The project’s progress and metamorphosis is recorded in photographs at http://www.gerling-quartier.de/.