Berkheimer Schlössle
The Berkheimer Schlössle or Berkheimer Schlössle was a castle owned by Karl Ludwig von Zanth in Bergheim in the Weilimdorf district in the northwest of Stuttgart in Baden-Württemberg . It was destroyed in World War II.
history
The Berkheimer Schlössle was built below the Solitude near the Bergheimer Hof . The builder was Friedrich Notter . After his return from Paris, the architect Zanth had taken up residence in Stuttgart and wrote his treatise On the Apartment Houses in Pompeii . In the following years he designed several houses in the so-called Pompeian style: in 1833 a manor house in Hungary with an attached church, in 1835/36 a house for Adolf Goppel in Heilbronn , 1836/37 the Berkheimer Schlössle for Friedrich Notter, in 1837 a country house for Count Wilhelm von Taubenheim in Degerloch and in 1838 the Villa Rebenberg for Elise von König. Most of these buildings have not been preserved, and Villa Taubenheim has been greatly changed.
The Berkheimer Schlössle had an H-shaped floor plan, which was formed by a longer, two-story central wing and two single-story transverse wings. The saying “Parva domus magna quies” could be read above the entrance. A pergola followed on the garden side, and the gently sloping pitched roofs were reminiscent of Italian villas. In the middle wing there was a kind of atrium , which, however, was not open at the top, but was provided with a glazed skylight . The walls of this atrium, which served as a connecting corridor, were painted with tendrils, each framing a monochrome area on which there was a smaller individual picture. The living rooms were also decorated with wall paintings. Here Zanth used the classic idea of three-way division. A single-colored field was located above each dark base zone, and above it a zone with a lighter background and often perspective paintings. The pictorial representations were limited to the upper part of the walls and also to the ceilings, because the design of the lower areas should not hinder the placement of furniture or the hanging of mirrors and pictures. Therefore, the large fields in the lower two thirds of the wall were structured by pilasters or horizontal ornamental bands. The dining room had a dark ceiling and was furnished with several candelabra based on Vitruvius .
After the death of the first landlord in 1884, the building passed into the hands of his son-in-law Märklin. A few years later, around 1890, the publisher Adolf Kröner bought the Berkheimer Schlössle. He made sure that the property was restored and that the whitewashed murals came back to light. Kröner provided furniture in the style of Empire and Biedermeier and equipped the pergola with antique statues. Kröner died in 1911; his urn was buried in the garden of the castle and the tomb was adorned with one of the statues he had placed on the pergola. However, Kröner's remains were later reburied in the forest cemetery.
According to the inheritance contract, the families from Kröner's descendants alternately had the right to live in the Berkheimer Schlössle for one year. During the Second World War, the house was looked after by the tenant family Bihr, who also lived on the upper floor of the building, while the Kröner descendants used the ground floor. Allegedly, both the tenant daughter Anneliese Bihr and the Kröner granddaughter Erna Klemm observed a ghostly apparition of the publisher Kröner in the house.
On January 28, 1945, an attempt was made to distract the approaching bombers from downtown Stuttgart by lighting tree trunks in the Rappach Valley that were covered with cloths soaked in phosphorus. This fire should simulate the burning Stuttgart and get the bomber pilots to drop their bombs outside of the densely built-up inner city area. The result was that Weilimdorf and the Bergheimer Hof became the target of the bombing. The Bergheimer Hof was devastated by more than 150 bombs, and eleven Belarusian slave laborers were killed in the attack. The Berkheimer Schlössle was hit by two high explosive bombs and one incendiary bomb. Anna and Anneliese Bihl were not in the building during this attack, but survived it in a tunnel. When they left this, the Berkheimer Schlössle was on fire. Attempts to extinguish the fire failed, among other things, because of the winter temperatures: the extinguishing water froze to ice.
The property on which Zanth's building had stood was sold to the Ellner family after the Second World War, who had a new house built on it. The garden side adorned with columns was reminiscent of the pergola of the castle. In the 1990s, the Ellner House became the property of Diakonie Stetten , which set up a home there for people with intellectual disabilities.
literature
- Erika Porten: The Berkheimer Schlössle (= Weilimdorfer Heimatblatt 34). September 2012 ( digitized version )
