Beech hall
The beech hall near Bad Kösen was an open space in the high beech forest on the right of the path from Bad Kösen to Rudelsburg , which gained special importance for the up-and-coming brine bath on the Saale in the course of the open-air movement in the second half of the 19th century .
term
The German dictionary of the Brothers Grimm refers to the first written record of the Buchenhalle as a term to the philosopher and writer Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi and the second part of his Woldemar. There Woldemar wrote in one of his romantic letters from the country to Biederthal:
"I went, and walked up and down my avenues of orange trees under the linden trees, and in the long beech hall all glinted through by the moon."
In the second half of the 18th century, around the end of the Seven Years' War , the enlightened, educated bourgeoisie discovered the function of the recreational forest for their romantic nature interests in addition to the existing commercial forest function . The concept of the beech hall was then adopted by the Romantics in the first half of the 19th century, for example by Joseph von Eichendorff in his poem Durch Feld und Buchenhallen from 1836. The composer Justus Wilhelm Lyra set Eichendorff's poem to music in 1843 to a well-known student song and thus contributed to the establishment of the term.
In this way, stimulated in many places in Germany, special forest areas were created in the vicinity, the conception of which was geared to the leisure needs of the population at the time.
Use of the Kösener beech hall
The Kösener Buchenhalle was first mentioned in writing in the revolutionary year of 1848 as a meeting place. The Privileged Jenaische Wochenblätter report on a meeting of constitutional associations with 5000 participants, the people's meeting in Kösen on July 9, 1848, under the leadership of Professor Karl August Koberstein from Portens . The Buchenhalle was already a popular meeting place and excursion location for the spa guests and for the students of the nearby Pforta state school . For the year 1849, the then 13-year-old Alfred Boretius reported in a letter to his father about a school trip to the Buchenhalle, where you can "amuse yourself to your heart's content" with cake, singing and drinks: "with singing and sound" on the way home were "most of them a little drunk". The area was used for open-air worship services and secular celebrations and festivals alike. Friedrich Nietzsche , at the age of 15, described in a letter and in his notes in 1859 a service of the Gustav-Adolf-Verein in the Buchenhalle, which he witnessed as a pupil and chorister of Schulpforta:
“We got to the Buchenhalle at around three. It is a wonderful place in the forest, furnished with benches like an amphitheater. The choir and other music took the highest place. An altar and a pulpit were erected below and very solemnly decorated with flowers. First, ' Oh, stay with your grace ' was sung, then Prof. Buddensieg read the liturgy; but we sang a few more motets; then Deaconus Link from Ekartberga climbed into the pulpit and delivered a beautiful, spiritual sermon. Then the celebration ended with several songs. - It was very busy. Almost all bathers were there. "
The Kösener Buchenhalle as an art motif
As an up-and-coming brine bath on the Thuringian Railway, Kösen attracted numerous celebrities. The Gasthof Mutiger Ritter developed into a spa hotel with the increasing demands of its guests and reached a level of comfort between the end of the 19th century and the First World War , which also appealed to the more spoiled city dwellers. These spa guests also included recognized artists. Both Adolph Menzel and Max Liebermann visited the courageous knight in Kösen and both painted the nearby beech hall, albeit with the appropriate time interval.
Adolph Menzel (1868)
A parish was set up for the spa guests, but until 1894 it only had a provisional church building and held forest services. During his stay in 1868, Adolph Menzel painted the mission service in the Buchenhalle near Kösen. The picture corresponds to the description that Nietzsche gave almost ten years earlier of the course of a service in the Buchenhalle. In the picture, as an artist, Menzel processed the impulses that he had received from his French painter friends the year before when he visited the world exhibition in Paris . Menzel used one of the drawings he made in Kösen as a starting point for the painting: a pencil drawing from 1864, which shows the Buchenhalle from the same perspective, but without people.
The painting of the Buchenhalle has been hanging in the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest since 1926 after it was bought by Bruno Cassirer . It clearly follows on from the afternoon in the Tuileries Garden , which was created during the World Exhibition in 1867 and is now in the Galerie Neue Meister in Dresden.
Max Liebermann (1888)
Max Liebermann first spent the summer in Barbizon near the forest of Fontainebleau in 1874 and took up ideas from the Barbizon School. Inspired by the book Hall Adolph Menzel he painted 20 years later in the Year of Three Emperors in 1888 after numerous studies and own under the fresh impact of the death of Emperor Frederick III. a fictional memorial service for Emperor Friedrich III. in Bad Kosen. While Menzel's depiction shows people in motion, distracted from the service and on the move, Liebermann's composition gives the scene an expression of concentration and calm through an empty zone in the foreground and the even verticals of trees and figures.
The first version of the painting has been hanging in the National Gallery in London since 1997 on loan from the Tate Gallery . A second version of Liebermann's painting, like Menzel's painting, was in the Szépművészeti Múzeum in Budapest and was destroyed there in 1945.
Further use
The use of the Buchenhalle for open-air church services, as documented by Menzel and Liebermann, became superfluous with the completion of the neo-Gothic Luther Church in 1894. In addition, an - albeit significantly smaller - open-air church square was set up in a small wooded area just a few steps away from the Luther Church. The beech hall was still used for celebrations and festivities by the citizens of Bad Kösen, and an open-air service by the Gustav-Adolf-Werk to celebrate its 100th anniversary is documented for 1932. After the Second World War , the beech hall was no longer used, overgrown and gradually fell into oblivion.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Woldemar: a rarity from natural history . Flensburg 1779
- ↑ Woldemar. The first volume of the second part [125]
- ↑ Joseph von Eichendorff: Through field and beech halls . In: Allgemeines Deutsches Kommersbuch , No. 356
- ↑ Extra sheet to the Privileged Jenaische Wochenblatt No. 16 of July 15, 1848
- ↑ Agathe Boretius (ed.): Alfred Boretius: a life picture in letters 1849–1874 (apprenticeship and wandering years). F. Schneider, Berlin 1900, p. 3
- ↑ Friedrich Nietzsche: Works: Critical Complete Edition. Part I, Volume 2: Postponed records Autumn 1858 - Autumn 1862. Walter de Gruyter, Berlin / New York 2000, ISBN 3-11-014946-X , p. 120
- ^ Adolph Menzel: The beech hall near Kösen , 1864; Pencil. Berlin, Kupferstichkabinett; Sketchbook 27, p. 66
- ↑ Page no longer available , search in web archives: Image description of the Szépművészeti Múzeum (English)
- ↑ Afternoon in the Tuileries Gardens
- ↑ Example of a preliminary study ( Memento from December 24, 2004 in the Internet Archive )
- ↑ Adolph Menzel. 1815-1905. The labyrinth of reality . State Museums in Berlin - Prussian Cultural Heritage, Berlin 1997, p. 241
- ↑ Image description of the National Gallery (English)
- ↑ The square is still visible today at the intersection of Eckartsbergaer Straße and Ilskeweg at the beginning of the hiking trail to the Berghotel Wilhelmsburg .
- ↑ Picture of a fire brigade anniversary in 1895
- ↑ Photo from 1932
Coordinates: 51 ° 7 ′ 39 ″ N , 11 ° 43 ′ 27 ″ E