Schwanenburg

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East view of the Schwanenburg at dusk
East view of the Schwanenburg

The Schwanenburg is the landmark of the city of Kleve in North Rhine-Westphalia near the Dutch border. It was probably built in the 11th century by the counts and later dukes of Kleve on a spur-like foothill of the Lower Rhine ridge and is therefore one of the few hilltop castles on the Lower Rhine . Their castle hill gave their name to the settlement that was created later: Cleef (for cliff, cliff) became Kleve.

It got its name because of its weather vane in the shape of a large swan , whose wings were the crest of the ducal coat of arms. The plant was also het slot of Cleef called, and even though it suggests the name, it is not in the Schwanenburg a castle , but a arisings by modifications of a castle in the 17th century castle in the style of the Baroque .

history

Residents and owners

In 1092 a Count Dietrich I von Kleve was first mentioned in a document, who probably named himself after his ancestral castle located there. In the decades before this time, there was also increased building of hilltop castles by the nobility and the settlement of higher areas. These included up to around 1000 Hochelten ( Count of Hamaland ), Mergelp Castle on the Wylerberg near Nijmegen, Montferland Castle in Zeddam and Monterberg Castle near Kalkar. Other residents settled around the residential tower of the castle. Around 1233 the Klever counts included the carbuncle in their coat of arms and thus referred to the legendary swan knight Helias as the progenitor. It was this legend of the swan knight who gave the so-called swan tower in the Middle Ages and the entire castle complex its current name in the 19th century.

To the west of the complex, Count Dietrich IV. Founded the Kleve settlement and granted it city ​​rights on April 25, 1242 . Under Count Dietrich VII and Johann , Klever Castle finally replaced Monterberg Castle near Kalkar as the county’s permanent seat of government.

When the male line of the Count's family died out in 1368, the Count of Kleve and the Schwanenburg were inherited by the Counts of the Mark . Adolf II of Kleve-Mark was raised to Duke of Cleves by Emperor Sigismund in 1417 .

The dukes experienced the height of their power in the 16th century as rulers of the United Duchies of Jülich-Kleve-Berg , which were also owned by the Counties of Mark and Ravensberg and, for a short time - from 1538 to 1543 - by the Duchy of Geldern . This also had an effect on the Schwanenburg, because the ducal court rarely stayed in the Klever Residenz, mostly in Düsseldorf , Jülich or Hambach .

With the death of the childless Duke Johann Wilhelm , the Schwanenburg came to the Margraviate of Brandenburg , namely Johann Sigismund, by dividing the inheritance . In addition to Berlin and Königsberg , Kleve became the third residential city in Brandenburg . Under the Brandenburg governor Johann Moritz von Nassau-Siegen , the Schwanenburg experienced its last great heyday from 1649. On behalf of Elector Friedrich Wilhelm , he had Kleve expanded into a garden and park city of European standing, which in turn served the Elector from 1660 as a model for the gardens of his Potsdam City Palace.

In the first half of the 18th century, the city and thus the palace lost its importance because the focus of the residence function and government and administrative activities shifted to Berlin and Potsdam. The Schwanenburg was only used for administrative and judicial purposes.

During the French time of Kleve, French "occupiers" established themselves there, who were followed by German officials in 1821 after Kleve had been added to the Düsseldorf administrative district. The castle complex served as a prison until 1917. Today the district court of Kleve and the district court of Kleve are housed in the Schwanenburg . In the swan tower there is a geological collection of the Klever Heimatmuseum on several floors.

Building history

Floor plan of the Schwanenburg from 1785
Door surround with Romanesque elements from the abandoned hall
The swan castle in the 18th century. From left to right: Zwingertor, mirror tower, the top of the swan tower, Herzog-Wilhelm-Tor and chancellery, above that Johannisturm. Engraving after a drawing by Jan de Beijer.

Excavations in 1999/2000 have shown that there was already a castle complex at the end of the 11th century, the origins of which are suspected by historians in a fortification from the late Carolingian period. However, the work showed that assumptions that the complex could possibly have Roman roots are incorrect.

Klever Castle was first mentioned indirectly in 1145 when a Heinricus castellanus de Clevia (Heinrich, Burgrave of Kleve) appeared. On the other hand, the Schwanenburg was first mentioned directly in 1184 in a Siegburg book of miracles. At that time it already consisted of a quadrangular residential tower built from tuff stone around 1100 with 2.5 meters thick walls, which had been surrounded by a polygonal circular wall since around 1150 . On the east side of the area was an approximately 12 x 30 meters measuring Palas whose floor with barrel vaults the Ritter room housed. The castle gate in the east was secured by the so-called Johannisturm . In the south, an artificially created neck ditch separated the complex from the rest of the mountain ridge. In the southwest, the so-called mirror tower with a comfortable lavatory system, including flushing water and ventilation system , rose even then . In the 12th and 13th centuries, this crescent-shaped complex was one of the largest and most magnificent secular buildings of the Romanesque style on the Lower Rhine.

At the beginning of the 13th century there was still an independent hamlet with accommodation for servants and ministerials below the complex , which gradually grew together with the nearby town of Kleve.

In the 14th and 15th centuries, numerous extensions and alterations were made using brick in order to take into account the growing political and cultural position of the Klever ruling house. Duke Adolf I had the mirror tower converted into an archive in 1429, with vaulted ceilings on the two lower floors .

When the old residential tower collapsed on October 7, 1439, Adolf I had the slimmer swan tower built by the ducal Klevian master builder Johan Wyrenberg in place of the donjon . Construction began in 1440 and was completed 13 years later. A gilded swan was placed on the spire in 1455, which gave the building its name.

In the 16th century, Duke Wilhelm the Rich had the Swan Castle modernized and expanded by the Pasqualini family of builders . To those extensions, which are now all no longer receive, included the built among others in 1560, south of the castle upstream Duke Wilhelm gate and a 1558-built office buildings that 1569/70 by a lower gallery wing in the style of the Renaissance with the Johannis tower connected has been.

Under the Brandenburgers, the Schwanenburg was then rebuilt into a simple baroque palace by the Dutch architect Pieter Post in the years 1663 to 1666, in line with contemporary tastes. In the course of this work, all existing Gothic building elements were removed with the exception of the towers . At that time, among other things, an intermediate wing with a monumental gate passage with the Brandenburg coat of arms mounted above it, which is now used as the main entrance, as well as arcades in the two inner courtyards. The construction work gave the facility its current appearance.

In the second half of the 18th century and at the beginning of the 19th century, insufficient building maintenance meant that many parts of the large complex had to be demolished; so z. B. the chancellery buildings, the Staufer hall with knight's hall (1771) and the Johannisturm (1784) as well as the Herzog-Wilhelm-Tor . The remains of a portal from the hall were then used as a door frame in the northern inner courtyard.

In 1828, the justice administration located in Schwanenburg carried out a renovation in order to adapt the building to the needs of the time. As a result, some historical structural features were completely destroyed. The first restoration work on the existing structure was carried out from 1893 to 1897 and - as a result of the first archaeological investigations on the complex - in the period from 1909 to 1914.

During the Second World War , the Schwanenburg was badly damaged in an Allied air raid on October 7, 1944 : an airplane crashed into the swan tower and exploded. The "Bauhütte Schwanenburg" association, which was then supported by the citizens of Kleve, took care of the partial reconstruction of the facility between 1948 and 1953. The "Friends of the Schwanenburg" association, founded in 1986, succeeded him and since then has continuously taken care of the restoration and restoration of the existing building structure, such as the Gothic vaults in the mirror tower in 1988.

description

Today's layout of the facility

The Schwanenburg is a polygonal building complex, the ground plan of which was given by the shape of the location, a plateau on the mountain range known as Hartenberg. The approximately 6300 m² area drops off 40 meters steeply on three sides. On the west side, the buildings have a sickle-shaped floor plan, while the east side along the edge of the plateau is only built up to half the length and is almost straight. A transverse wing divides the Schwanenburg into a northern and a southern area, each with its own approximately triangular inner courtyard.

The southern part of the complex is dominated by the 28 meter high mirror tower with a square floor plan, the slate roof of which is crowned by two weather vanes . Its top floor is closed off by a simple arch frieze and a crenellated parapet . The ceiling of its ground floor is closed by a barrel vault , while the first floor has a cross vault supported by a central pillar on a low base. The Tower of Mirrors is a stair tower attached to the 19th century. On the south side it is clad with basalt blocks up to a height of five meters . On the eastern side of the tower is a four-storey building wing from 1463 with a hipped roof , which was previously used as a prison and is known as the Old Chancellery . Its southern, four-meter-thick outer wall is the former ring wall of the medieval castle complex made of tuff and basalt. On the west side of the mirror tower is a three-storey building wing with an arcade from the Renaissance period on the ground floor facing the courtyard .

Arcades in the inner courtyard with the swan fountain by Alfred Sabisch

Access to the northern inner courtyard is provided by a gateway with four cross vaults in the three-story transverse wing, on whose unplastered archway made of brick a bearded male head is attached in the middle. Above it is a coat of arms stone with a carbuncle shield, which has replaced the destroyed alliance coat of arms of Duke Wilhelm the Rich and his wife Maria of Austria since 1953 . The date 1664 can be found on the arches of the gate. The courtyard is surrounded on two sides by arches in the Renaissance style with flat cross vaults on the ceiling, which date from the same time as the arcade of the south courtyard. They were placed in front of the medieval building stock together with a closed upper floor. The east arcade has five arches, while the west has six arches. Both have in common that their square pillars made of bricks on a low base of light Haustein are crafted and easy fighters possess. As material for the Doric capitals was limestone used. The door frames of two entrances to the wing surrounding the courtyard were made from spoils from the abandoned hall . One of the entrances is flanked by monolithic columns made of black stone and has a pointed arch with rich, ornamental tendrils at the top. In the northern corner of the courtyard is the former residential building of the castle. Its outer wall consists partly of the medieval curtain wall and is three meters thick there. A fountain in the inner courtyard shows the heraldic animal of the Kleve dukes: a swan. The sculpture was created by the sculptor Alfred Sabisch , whose work is also the coat of arms stone above the gateway.

The dominant building of the northern part of the castle is the 54 meter high swan tower in the northern area of ​​the east side. The tower with tufa masonry and corner blocks made of trachyte rises on a square, 180 m² floor plan. The wall thickness on the ground floor is 3.25 meters. The first seven floors together have a height of 25 meters. In rises on a pointed arch fries a projectile with slightly cantilevered walkway above the two other floors rise with reduced floor plan that by another walkway with Eckwarten on Pendentifs have been completed. The tower has a pointed roof with a lantern . Above its entrance on the ground floor is an inscription plaque that announces the construction of the tower:

"IN THE JAIR NA GAIDS BOIRTE MCCCCXXXIX, OP DEN VII. ROOF VAN OCTOBER, VYEL HERE OP DESER PLAETSE EEN GROIT TOIRN VAN GRAVEN STAND, THE DAAR SEA DAN III C JAIR VAIR GAIDS GESTAEN HAD. INDPH THE HOGEN YBORN PRINCE, MR ADSTOL HARTOG VAN CLEVE IND GREVE VAN DER BRAND, DEDE THE PLAETZE RÜMEN IND DESEN NYEN TOIRN UYTTER EERDEN UNTIL DESEN STAND TOE BYNNEN DENSELVEN JAIR NEVER OPMUEREN. ITEM ENDE MEN SEGHT, DAT JULIUS CESAR DOIN MAKE MAKE STIRN.

literature

Web links

Commons : Schwanenburg  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cleve. In: Johann Heinrich Zedler : Large complete universal lexicon of all sciences and arts . Volume 6, Leipzig 1733, columns 402-407.
  2. ↑ a b J. Wroblewski, A. Wemmers: Theiss-Burgenführer Niederrhein , p. 126.
  3. ↑ Bert Thissen: The beginnings of the Klever history. In: NRZ. January 8, 2017, accessed December 21, 2019 .
  4. ↑ a b c d J. Wroblewski, A. Wemmers: Theiss-Burgenführer Niederrhein , p. 128.
  5. ^ Wolfgang Krebs: History of the city of Kleve . 2nd Edition. Verlag für Kultur und Technik, Kleve 1999, ISBN 3-924637-16-4 , p. 19.
  6. ^ MGH DD K III 136. Accessed September 2, 2013 .
  7. ↑ a b c J. Wroblewski, A. Wemmers: Theiss-Burgenführer Niederrhein , p. 129.
  8. ↑ G. Spor: How nice to dream here. Castles on the Lower Rhine , p. 87.
  9. ↑ a b c B. Ebhardt: Die Schwanenburg zu Kleve , p. 7.
  10. ↑ P. Clemen: Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kreises Kleve , p. 112.
  11. ↑ a b c L. Fischer: The most beautiful palaces and castles on the Lower Rhine , p. 72.
  12. ↑ B. Ebhardt: Die Schwanenburg zu Kleve , p. 11.
  13. ↑ a b Information on Schwanenburg  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on heimat-kleve.de; Retrieved May 30, 2012.@1@ 2Template: Toter Link / www.heimat-kleve.de  
  14. ^ Willehad Paul Eckert: The Lower Rhine. The country and its cities, castles and churches . 4th edition. DuMont, Cologne 1982, ISBN 3-7701-1085-4 , p. 225.
  15. ↑ a b B. Ebhardt: Die Schwanenburg zu Kleve , p. 8.
  16. ↑ P. Clemen: Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kreises Kleve , p. 110.
  17. ^ P. Clemen: Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kreises Kleve , p. 111.

Coordinates: 51 ° 47 '12.4 "  N , 6 ° 8' 20.7"  E