In a mixture of lending library, newspaper hall, event venue and Adult Education Center, they were officially intended to give German citizens access to European and Western politics and culture again after the end of the war. Unofficially, the centers also served the British government to influence public opinion in favor of British interests.

The Bonn "Brücke" was one of the most successful centers. According to reports, up to 20,000 visitors per month frequented its premises at times. It was mainly students and academically educated people who became the audience of the "Brücke".

A look at the program reveals something quite remarkable. The range of lecturers invited was wide. Not only did they cover a broad spectrum of art, politics and business. Their reputations also varied considerably. For example, the appearance of a Nobel Prize winner in literature contrasted with lectures by interested laypeople. The political views of the speakers also varied widely in some cases. A relatively large number of lecturers spoke who had themselves been persecuted or disadvantaged by the National Socialists. Some of them had even survived concentration camps or Gestapo imprisonment. On the other hand, however, the program also repeatedly featured people who were closely and in some cases not insignificantly involved in the Nazi system and who had presented themselves as convinced National Socialists before 1945.

The Nazi era was hardly ever discussed in the "Brücke", at least in the official program. All the more remarkable is the broadcast of a documentary about the Nuremberg trials, which was even repeated several times due to high demand. Developments in the political climate in Great Britain, such as a growing concern about communism, were partly reflected in the program.

For the British, the centers were associated with high costs right from the start. In particular, the purchase of various daily newspapers put a strain on the budget. As the state became increasingly unwilling to provide the necessary funds in the 1950s, the history of the "bridges" in West German cities gradually came to an end.

The memorial and the Bonn Documentation Centre for the History of National Socialism were able to reconstruct large parts of the Bonn "Brücke" program from archive holdings and their own research. The publication of these results is intended to provide an impetus for further academic study of the institution and to draw attention to a chapter of Bonn's post-war history that has received little attention to date.

(Jonas Blum and Flora Hohoff played a leading role in this project as part of their internship at the memorial).