Hirschberg Castle on the Haarsee
The Hirschberg Castle is located above the Haarsee in the municipality of Weilheim in Upper Bavaria . The "Art Nouveau Baroque" palace was built for the von Hirschberg family from 1907 to 1909 according to plans by Carl Hocheder .
description
The building with two and a half storeys on a rectangular floor plan is designed in the neo-baroque style with elements of art nouveau . This is particularly evident in the hood of the tower attached to a building corner and the facade designs. The building is basically laid out in seven axes on the long side and five on the narrow side, at the three corners without a tower there are inclined corner risers , which shorten the five-axis narrow side. The corner design is typical of the late phase of the architect, the risalits are drawn up "in lively movement" and curved in two directions. At the time of construction, the bright plastered facade contrasted with dark green shutters. The entrance side, which is oriented approximately to the west, has a protruding portico made of tuff stone with Ionic columns and the von Hirschbergs family coat of arms. A narrow balcony with an elaborate wrought iron grille stretches across the full width of the facade. On the south side, the ground floor has a bay window that is closed off by a small arbor . There are a total of seven small and large terraces and balconies on all facades. The eaves height of the hipped roof is continued on the tower as a cornice . There are two small lanterns closed with lamellas on the ridges . The roof areas are structured by dormers, some of which are designed as bat dormers . Two sides of the tower show clock faces of a tower clock. From the lantern of the tower you can see the nearby mountains.
To the north to the lake there was originally an elaborate garden, which consisted of several stepped terraces and an elliptical plantation with a fountain. The property was otherwise designed like a park.
The usable area of the building is given as 2,670 m². The ground floor has a living space of 750 m², it is divided into 14 rooms, including the entrance hall, a library with gallery and the great hall. The first floor has 11 rooms on 560 m²; these are bedrooms and guest rooms, as well as sanitary areas. On the second floor there are 13 rooms on 590 m². In the basement there are utility and storage rooms as well as a granny apartment and a wellness oasis .
The Haarsee and its fishing rights belonged to the castle until 2012 . It is open to the public for swimming, with a section of the bank in the southeast being fenced in as a private bathing area. Furthermore, a park and agricultural areas are part of the property. The stable and coach house with a head building that used to be part of the castle is now an independent property. It is located north at the foot of the Schlossberg near the lake shore.
history
The Haarsee is a dead ice hole in the Eberfinger drumlin field . The name comes from Hardt and means forest lake . In the late Middle Ages a Schwaighof was built on it , which becomes tangible in 1349 when Duke Ludwig V placed it under the control of Polling Monastery . In addition to agriculture, fish farming at the Haarsee and several ponds in the vicinity were of particular importance to supply the monastery. The courtyard also served as a tithe barn , where dependent farms in the neighborhood had to pay their taxes in kind, the tithe . After a fire in 1526 it had to be rebuilt. The Thirty Years' War caused further damage , and the farm was rebuilt by 1680 at the latest. In 1691 a chapel with an All Saints altar was built, which was demolished in 1866. In the second half of the 18th century, the Schwaige Haarsee was seen as a model for the wider area. After secularization in Bavaria in 1803, the farm was initially leased together with Gossenhofen and Rothsee and then sold for 120,000 guilders. At that time, Haarsee included 2½ days of work in fields, 307 days of work in meadows, 13 days of work ponds and twelve individual forest plots with a total of 137½ days of work.
The buyers were a pair of brothers from the Swiss Aargau named von Mayer. They brought compatriots to Upper Bavaria for cultivation, which caused a sensation because they were Reformed religion . The von Mayers sold the farms back to a von Grunner family in 1808, who leased Haarsee to Josef and Franziska Braun. The Brauns bought the previously leased farm in 1830 for 30,000 guilders. The family lived in Gossenhofen, Haarsee was uninhabited most of the time. In 1860, after the death of her husband and son, Franziska Braun sold the goods to Karl Matthäus von Vieregg from the Vieregg family who owned large estates around Lake Starnberg. Haarsee was leased from 1865 to 1880, otherwise the property was managed by an administrator.
Hirschberg family
In 1906 Karl Rudolf von Hirschberg , royal chamberlain and major general, commander of the 4th Royal Bavarian Cavalry Brigade , bought the three estates in Haarsee, Gossenhofen and Rothsee. The money for this came from his wife's dowry, who came from the Faber family. On August 18, 1907, the foundation stone was laid for a castle on the hill on the Haarsee, which was intended as the family seat of the newly married general and cost around one million gold marks . Construction lasted two years until December 1909, and the building was equipped with the latest technology at the time. This included central heating with radiators hidden behind paneling, a passenger elevator and a swimming pool in the basement. In 1908, at the request of Karl Rudolf von Hirschberg, the place name Hirschberg am Haarsee was officially registered for the property and its land. In 1913 the castle and property were brought into a family entailment. From 1915 an inn was set up in the former Schwaige, which became the meeting place for many local associations.
In 1923 the von Hirschberg family got into economic difficulties due to hyperinflation and war bonds that had become worthless and could no longer live in the castle themselves because of high maintenance costs. It was rented to the von Bleichröder banking family from Berlin . Above all, Alwine Maria Emma von Bleichröder, wife of James von Bleichröder , lived there. In 1933 she had to move to the second floor; Karl Rudolf von Hirschberg died in 1927, his widow had to sell Gossenhofen in 1929 for financial reasons and moved to the ground floor and the first floor. James von Bleichröder died in 1937, the following year the bank was Aryanized because its ancestors were Jews, even if the generation around James von Bleichröder had converted to Christianity. His widow Alwine lived on payments from the New York branch of the bank.
State property
During the Second World War , the remote castle was confiscated in 1943 and used as the “guest house of the Reich Foreign Ministry”. It was given the code name Waldbichl . Later on, a sale to the "Greater German Reich" for 1.5 million Reichsmarks was agreed with the von Hirschberg family , with 1.3 million marks being for real estate exchanged. The sale only became legally effective after the war in 1953.
Guest house of the Reich Foreign Ministry
On September 19, 1943, Benito Mussolini , his wife Rachele, Romano Mussolini , Anna Maria Mussolini and Filippo Anfuso moved into the Hirschberg Castle. Mussolini had been freed from captivity by subversives in the Oak Company . At first he was quartered in the Prinz-Carl-Palais in Munich, because of the danger of bombs a remote, more peaceful area of the German Reich was sought until he could return to Italy. Mussolini's daughter Edda Ciano , her husband Galeazzo Ciano and children were housed in a villa in Allmannshausen on Lake Starnberg and intended to emigrate to Argentina . Mussolini flew back on September 23, 1943, his family stayed in Hirschberg Castle until November 2, 1943.
From October 18, 1944 to May 1, 1945, the Hungarian ruler Miklós Horthy was imprisoned with his wife and daughter-in-law under the care of Walter Hellenthal in Hirschberg Castle. On October 16, he was deposed and taken into protective custody and removed from Hungary. A hundred SS and 12 Gestapo men were deployed to guard it. Horthy stayed until the end of the war, and from January 1945 his brother was also interned in the castle.
After Weilheim and Marnbach were taken by the US Army on April 29, the Americans did not discover the well-camouflaged Hirschberg Castle until May 1, 1945. Horthy was interned, his family moved to Weilheim, where he was released in December.
Ukrainian seminary and late vocational school
From May 1, 1946 to 1961, the US government was responsible for the use of the building. Initially, a facility of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration for Displaced Persons used the castle. When some of them were able to return to their homeland in the course of 1946 or emigrated to other countries, including the USA, a seminary of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church was established in the castle.
The priests and candidates had fled the Red Army. From October 1946 to 1948, 72 Ukrainian students studied Catholic theology here . For financial reasons and because the Ukrainians were beginning to emigrate, it was moved to the Netherlands .
On April 26, 1948, the newly founded late vocational school St. Josef der Oblaten des St. Franz von Sales moved into the building, which stayed there until the spring of 1960. The school moved to Fockenfeld Monastery because Hirschberg Castle was too small to accommodate the increased number of students due to increasing registrations and extended training periods. One priest stayed behind as pastor of the parish of Marnbach.
Federal Intelligence Service
From 1961 to June 2000 the Federal Intelligence Service used the building to train candidates for the higher service . The training and common rooms were on the ground floor, the administration and the school director used the first floor, while the participants lived on the second floor. A shooting range was set up in the attic. The castle was run under the cover name Wildpark , which was of limited use, at the latest by the mid-1970s the Ministry of State Security had cleared up the castle and was able to tap the phone calls. In the 1970s, the castle was also thoroughly restored. In 1984 a meeting of the heads of friends from the Western intelligence services took place in Schloss Hirschberg, for this purpose the hall of mirrors was renovated and a copy of a large chandelier with golden deer antlers was made for the great hall. At the end of the 1990s, maintenance became too expensive and the accommodation of the participants in rooms without their own bathrooms no longer met the required standard. The BND school moved out of the castle in 2000, and the Federal Property Office then offered it for sale for 3.9 million euros. Various uses were under discussion. A buyer was only found in 2004.
In the meantime the farm was leased and the lake was open to the public and a popular bathing place.
Privately owned
The buyer was an entrepreneur from Berg , who was planning to use it as a high-quality riding stables and to set up ten apartments for riding guests. To do this, he bought neighboring agricultural land. In addition, an underground car park was built and the former kitchen house was renovated and converted into an independent apartment. However, the district office refused to erect the additional buildings required for the riding facility for legal reasons. An opposing action by the entrepreneur was dismissed in 2011. He then acquired the nearby Waitzacker estate , which was already in agricultural use , set up his riding stable there and offered Hirschberg Castle for sale.
In 2016 plans were presented to turn the castle into the core of a hotel & resort. For this purpose, terraced buildings with the hotel rooms are to be erected against the slope. The city of Weilheim supports the project. However, conflicts arise from the state development plan of the Free State of Bavaria, so that implementation at the end of 2017 was uncertain.
In the course of the debate, the city of Weilheim bought the Haarsee with 6.4 hectares of land in order to secure it for the public.
Web links
- N / A : Hirschberg Castle on Lake Haar near Weilheim in Bavaria (PDF; 64.2 MB) . In: Deutsche Bauzeitung , Volume 47, No. 18 (March 1, 1913), pp. 161-162
- Carl Hocheder: Plan drawings of the new castle building on the Haarsee (1907)
literature
- Georg Paula , Stefanie Berg-Hobohm : District Weilheim-Schongau (= Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation [Hrsg.]: Monuments in Bavaria . Volume I.23 ). Lipp, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-87490-585-3 .
- Klaus Gast: The history of the “Schwaige Haarsee” - from 1908 “Hirschberg am Haarsee”. In: Lech-Isar-Land 2011 . Local history yearbook, published by the Heimatverband Lech-Isar-Land eV, Weilheim i.Obb. 2011.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Deutsche Bauzeitung 1913, page 162
- ^ A b Georg Paula , Stefanie Berg-Hobohm : District Weilheim-Schongau (= Bavarian State Office for Monument Preservation [Ed.]: Monuments in Bavaria . Volume I.23 ). Lipp, Munich 2003, ISBN 3-87490-585-3 , pp. 601 f .
- ↑ Deutsche Bauzeitung 1913, page 161
- ↑ Real estate offer ( Memento from December 31, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), as of 10/2012
- ↑ Gast 2001, page 8
- ↑ Guest 2011, page 10
- ↑ Guest 2011, page 11
- ↑ Guest 2011, page 12
- ↑ Guest 2011, page 16 f.
- ^ Gast 2011, pages 20–22
- ↑ Volker Koop : In Hitler's hand: the special prisoners and honorary prisoners of the SS . Böhlau, Cologne / Weimar / Vienna 2010, ISBN 978-3-412-20580-5 , p. 202.
- ↑ Heiko Pleines, Business Elites and Politics in Russia in the Yeltsin Era (1994–99)
- ^ Gast 2011, pages 27–30
- ↑ Klaus Gast 2011, page 30 f.
- ↑ a b The son of a politician buys Hirschberg Castle. In: Münchner Merkur. February 21, 2004.
- ↑ The Augsburg Federal Property Office is looking for a buyer, castles and palaces for Hirschberg Castle (Weilheim-Schongau district) . Volume 42, German Castle Association, 2001, p. 10.
- ↑ Gröber wants compensation. In: Münchner Merkur. May 3, 2009.
- ↑ Court rejects horse boarding. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung. March 18, 2011.
- ↑ Münchner Merkur: A luxury hotel above the Haarsee? , September 25, 2016
- ↑ Münchner Merkur: Headwind from above for hotel plans at Haarsee , November 15, 2017
- ↑ Münchner Merkur: The Haarsee now belongs to the people of Weilheim , December 7, 2012
Coordinates: 47 ° 48 ′ 31 ″ N , 11 ° 13 ′ 0 ″ E