Callenberg Castle

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Callenberg Castle in autumn 2019
Callenberg Castle

The Callenberg Castle - hunting lodge and summer residence, last years of Coburg primary residence of the Dukes of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha - is due to its history and its neo-Gothic a significant monument architectural style. It stands on a wooded hill in the Beiersdorf district of Coburg , in the northwest, six kilometers from the city center. The castle has housed the ducal art collections of Saxony-Coburg and Gotha since 1998 and the German Rifle Museum since 2004 and is one of the city's sights.

history

Callenberg Castle - valley side
Lower castle in the glow of the evening illumination
Lower lock with exhibition entrance
Inner courtyard with stairs to the rose garden

In 1122 the name was first mentioned as "Chalwinberch". At that time there was probably already an ancestral castle of the knights of Callenberg, who were directly imperial, with Thiemo von Chalwinberch as lord of the castle. In the following two centuries the owner changed several times. First Ulrich von Callenberg sold the castle and the manor to the diocese of Würzburg in 1231 , then the Counts of Henneberg bought the property, who gave it to the Lords of Sternberg as a fief in 1317 . The von Sternberg family retained the fief even after the Henneberg possessions were inherited by the Wettins in 1353. The buildings and the surrounding area have remained in the property of the Wettins to this day, but within the widespread House of Wettin, ownership changed between different ducal lines. After the death of the last Sternberger vassal in 1588, the property was as open fief of Duke Johann Casimir of Saxe-Coburg , the ruling in Coburg representatives of Ernestine Wettins . Johann Casimir did not pass on the fiefdom, but used it for himself and began - probably from 1592 - to convert the castle into a splendid Renaissance hunting lodge. The castle chapel (inaugurated in 1618) comes from this period. After Johann Casimir's death in 1633 and another change of ownership within the Ernestines, the castle came back to the Coburg line in 1826 - due to the reorganization of the Ernestine duchies - which has been called Saxe-Coburg and Gotha since 1826. Today, their descendants are responsible for the preservation and public viewing of the listed building.

During the reign of Duke Ernst I of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (r. 1806–1844), the upper castle was rebuilt with the addition of the so-called Beletage. His son Ernst II (r. 1844-1893) had the area of ​​the lower castle rebuilt in the neo-Gothic style by Georg Konrad Rothbart from 1856-1857 . The property was the summer residence of the Coburg regents, who often went hunting in the neighboring Callenberger Forest. The palace became the main residence of the ducal family in Coburg under the reign of Duke Ernst II .; after his death in 1893, Duchess-widow Alexandrine used the castle as a retirement home, where she died in 1904 without children. In 1905 her great-nephew and the last reigning Duke Carl Eduard moved into the palace and lived there with his family until 1945. Even during this late phase, the building underwent several architectural changes and modernization measures. In 1934 Carl Eduard had the castle tower again provided with a Welschen hood , which was crowned with a swastika.

US forces occupied the castle at the end of World War II ; subsequently it was rented and used by a theater company and as a retirement home. In 1957, the Mathilde Zimmer Foundation 's women's college moved into the building. In 1972 the ducal family sold the property. In 1982 Prince Andreas managed to buy back the castle through the Ducal Family Foundation. During the following fifteen years the family restored and refurbished the entire palace building with the help of the public sector.

Callenberg Castle opened its doors to the public for the first time in 1997 with part of the Bavarian State Exhibition , which took place in Coburg under the title A Duchy and Many Crowns . It has been permanently open to the public since 1998 and houses the ducal art holdings of Saxony-Coburg and Gotha as valuable furnishings in the historic living quarters . It includes furniture, paintings, porcelain and handicrafts from five centuries. As part of a moderate restructuring of the presentation, further parts of the ducal private collection are to be made accessible, such as an extraordinary watch cabinet and important paintings by Lukas Cranach.

Since 2006, Schloss Callenberg has had a special exhibition area devoted to historical and current topics from family history and European noble houses. The importance of the marriage policy of the Coburg Princely House was shown by the opening exhibition Leopold & Europe . In 2008 the first floor was completely renovated and since then it has been used for changing exhibitions of contemporary art.

In 2004, the German Shooting Federation addressed the Northwest wing of the castle, the German Rifle Museum one. Historical reference is the establishment of the German Rifle Federation in the Duchy of Gotha in 1861 under the then ruling Duke Ernst II.

investment

The three-wing castle complex consists of an upper and a lower castle, a towering octagonal stair tower with a bell storey, which still has medieval foundation walls. In the heart of the building ensemble there is a lower courtyard and a higher rose garden, which are connected by a spacious, neo-Gothic style staircase.

The castle is surrounded by an English landscape park , which merges into the Callenberger Forest, the former hunting ground of the dukes. The castle's former pheasantry was also located there . The burial place of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha has been located south of the castle on the 404-meter-high elevation of the Buchleite since 1954. 1827-1830 Duke Ernst I. a highly regarded model farm (now Waldorf School ) built and the former Fasanerie mulberry plants that the sericulture served. Today the Callenberger Forest is often used for sport and leisure because of its picturesque walking paths.

Castle Church

Also worth seeing is the castle chapel, a three-aisled hall with pointed-arched tracery windows , whose construction in the so-called post-Gothic style is attributed to the builder Giovanni Bonalino . The builder was Duke Johann Casimir von Sachsen-Coburg, who with the new building under the direction of Peter Sengelaub created a sacred space (circumferential gallery, pulpit altar ) which was the earliest for the region according to Protestant standards . The consecration was in 1618. The early baroque pulpit and the font are sculptural works of art that are attributed to Veit Dümpel from Nuremberg . In the church there are Doric column capitals and Gothic partition arches as well as gallery parapets in the Italian Renaissance style with medieval facings.

Since the middle of the 19th century, 224 colored glass panels from the 16th to 18th centuries had been used in the church windows, which Duke Ernst II had collected; these were expanded in the 1980s for conservation reasons and replaced by white glass. A selection of the panes is permanently on display in the Ducal Art Collection of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha at Callenberg Castle.

  • Castle Church

  • Upper castle and castle church

graveyards

The ducal cemetery for the members of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha is located southwest of the castle on Buchleite. Before that, the members of the family were buried in the ducal mausoleum in Coburg .

A curved staircase leads to the cemetery, surrounded by a low stone wall, on which there are five burial sites covered by crypt slabs in front of a mighty stone cross . The first to be buried there in 1944 was Prince Hubertus, who died in a plane crash in 1943. This was followed by burials for Duke Carl Eduard († 1954), Duchess Victoria Adelheid († 1970), Princess Caroline Mathilde († 1983) and Prince Friedrich Josias († 1998).

On the edge of the former pheasantry of Callenberg Castle, in Weihersholz, the dog cemetery, which was created in 1846, is located in a forest clearing that has now been overgrown. Six favorite dogs of Duke Ernst II were buried there by 1896 and the grave sites were provided with inscription stones that testify to the Duke's affection for his hunting companions. The then prominent dog cemetery in Hyde Park in London served as a model .

  • Cemetery of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha

  • Dog cemetery in the Callenberger Forest

Economy yard

The farmyard called Ökonomiehof lies in a north-westerly direction a little below the castle. It consists of the farm building, known as the Kavaliershaus, which was occupied in 1844, the officials' house from the beginning of the 18th century and the chauffeur's house, which was built in 1939 by Reinhard Claaßen .

The Ökonomiehof, whose history goes back to the Middle Ages, was created in its current form under Duke Ernst I as the administrative and hostel center of the Callenberg estate . The three buildings of the ensemble , which is now used as a residential complex, are arranged at right angles to each other. The originally painterly overall picture of the combination of different construction techniques and styles and a horticulturally designed roundabout in the inner courtyard was disturbed by improper fixtures, especially when the roundabout was built over with a transformer station in 1967 .

The Kavaliershaus is an elongated, two-story building that housed an inn until 1873. The first floor made of ashlar masonry carries a half-timbered upper floor with a hipped roof . The front is characterized by a flat central projection with a dwelling . Towards the castle are two short wings, between which covered arbors are inserted. In 1920 a bakery was set up in the house.

Only the core structure of the official house on the west side of the Ökonomiehof is preserved. The half-timbered building with a hipped roof, slated to the weather side, with a single-storey wing structure attached to the north, stands on a rectangular base. The attic has dormers .

The chauffeur house, which was built in place of a previous building with a connecting passage to the stables, served three families of the ducal headquarters as an apartment. The single-storey building with an extended mansard has a hipped mansard roof and is provided with a three-axis central projection with a dwelling, which corresponds to a small porch with a terrace on the Nordseile.

  • Cavalier House

  • Official House

  • Chauffeur house

Model farm

On behalf of Duke Ernst II, Georg Rothbart built the Callenberger Farm not far west of Callenberg Castle in 1863–1864. It was one of the earliest model farms in Germany based on the English model . The model farm in Windsor served as a model , which the brother Ernst II, Prince Consort Albert , had set up there as an agricultural chemical test station for research in the chemical and physiological areas of agriculture and for the control of seeds , feed and artificial fertilizers .

As in Windsor, on the Callenberger Farm, too, the distances between the utility buildings, which dispensed with any superfluous luxury, were as short as possible. Particular attention was paid to compliance with hygiene , which was made possible not least by an optimal water supply . For this purpose, a new line was laid from the waterworks on the Gösslesleite to the model farm, which was able to cover the water requirement of 29–30 cubic meters per hour. The water was used to cool the milk and to operate steam engines.

The farm was enlarged four times by 1938. From the uranium plant, remnants of the old building structures in the single-storey stables, which cover a cap vault supported by iron columns , from which the two-storey house with a recessed entrance protrudes, as well as the coach house on the northern front side of the courtyard and the one opposite the house, have been preserved. Swiss house expanded with mansard dormers .

The Waldorf School has been housed in the Callenberger Farm since 1990, adding a few new buildings based on anthroposophical principles. Another model farm based on the English model was built by Ernst II in Coburg-Scheuerfeld in 1878 (see Ernstfarm ).

  • The model farm Ernst I.

  • Administrator apartment of the model farm

  • Stables of the model farm

menagerie

former cottage

At the fork in the driveway to Callenberg Castle is a cottage that was built by the ducal building officer Georg Scherzer from Gotha 1844–1845 as a staffage building to emphasize the picturesque impression of an English park . The building council achieved the “English” impression with two saddle roof buildings of different heights, standing perpendicular to each other, with cantilevered roofs with steep gable dormers. The half-timbered structure on the upper floor reinforced with bricks, as well as a three-sided ground floor bay window and the hexagonal chimney. A dog kennel was attached as a narrow, single-storey building in rectangular construction. As early as 1850, the dog kennel was exchanged for a publicly accessible menagerie by building new kennels for lions and bears, jackals and other animals and adding an aviary . This zoological garden was one of the attractions of the Callenberg Castle. Until 1918, the cottage and menagerie were the starting point of the stately hunts in the immediately adjacent wildlife park . The menagerie and wildlife park disappeared with the dissolution of the duchy, and the preserved cottage was then used as an apartment, now as a storage room.

Park

Giant sequoia ( Sequoiadendron giganteum ) in the palace gardens
Former castle restaurant

Between 1827 and 1863 left the Dukes Johann Casimir, Ernst I. and around Callenberg Castle Ernst II. A 50 hectare large English landscape garden with wildlife park and pheasant create, turning pond in the west, the Long ground in the south and the tap pond in the east. Numerous historical Coburg boundary stones prove that the area of ​​the later park only passed from urban to ducal ownership through land swaps and consolidations between 1828 and 1837 .

The hilly terrain proved to be an advantage for the English landscape garden's claim to constantly opening up new and surprising scenarios. Despite a wide system of paths, the castle formed the permanent point of view and reference, while the model farm and the economy in the north, a riding arena in the west, cottage, dog kennel and castle inn in the east as well as the ducal cemetery in the southwest and, as a counterpart , the dog cemetery on Weihersholz served as staffage and utility buildings. The park's facilities also included a foal kennel , the nursery , the pheasantry with a silkworm plantation and a small waterworks. Older land maps show that starting from the round hill of the castle, ring-shaped paths meandered through the park and a main driveway on the city side was laid out on the south side from the west through the Hahnwald, the slope of which was extensively wooded. While exotic solitary trees were set in the park around the castle, there were lines of sight over open spaces along the driveway, in which the aforementioned buildings played an important role as eye-catchers and the unobstructed view of the Coburg Fortress. Under Ernst II, the palace park was made accessible to the population for the first time, which corresponded to the Duke's idea of ​​a socially hygienic education of the subjects by staying in the countryside and informal encounters between the estates .

After the Second World War, the park was significantly restructured. Today it differs greatly from the original plans and its former state. The delightful alternation of wooded hills, unshaded meadows and quiet water, as historical illustrations still show, has been severely disrupted since 1974 by the conversion to agricultural and forestry use. Meadows were reforested, a number of park structures were destroyed and their number was greatly reduced as a result. Today, large parts of the original park area are used for forestry and fish farming. Agricultural land was leased.

literature

  • Astrid Arnold: Callenberg Castle. A contribution to the early neo-Gothic castle construction in the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. In: Yearbook of the Coburg State Foundation. 47, 2002, ISSN  0084-8808 , pp. 67-157.
  • Rainer Axmann: On the construction of the church at Callenberg Castle under Duke Johann Casimir. A contribution to the building history of the Casimirian era. In: Yearbook of the Coburg State Foundation. 43, 1998, pp. 93-148.
  • Ewald Jeutter, Birgit Cleef-Roth (ed.): Light and color. A glass painting collection from the 15th to 19th centuries owned by the dukes of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Collection of Herzoglicher Kunstbesitz Schloss Callenberg, Coburg 2003, ISBN 3-00-011079-8 (exhibition catalog).
  • Fritz Mahnke: Palaces and castles in the vicinity of the Franconian Crown. Druck- und Verlagsanstalt Neue Presse GmbH, Coburg 1974, pp. 55–57.
  • Peter Morsbach, Otto Titz: City of Coburg. Lipp, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-87490-590-X , pp. 425-435 ( Monuments in Bavaria 4/48).

Web links

Commons : Schloss Callenberg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Harald Sandner: Hitler's Duke. Shaker Media, Aachen 2011, ISBN 978-3-86858-598-8 , p. 259
  2. ↑ An inventory catalog of these historical glass paintings was published in 2003 on the occasion of their special exhibition at Callenberg Castle under the title Light and Color
  3. ↑ EA Bryaley Hodgetts: A Cemetery for Dogs in. The beach Magazine Vol VI [July-December 1893], pp 625-633
  4. ↑ Peter Morsbach and Otto Titz: Monuments in Bavaria - City of Coburg , Series Monument Topography Federal Republic of Germany Volume IV.48, Karl-M-Lipp-Verlag, Munich, 2006, page 432
  5. ^ Peter Morsbach and Otto Titz: Monuments in Bavaria - City of Coburg. Monument topography series Federal Republic of Germany Volume IV.48, Karl-M-Lipp-Verlag, Munich 2006, pages 434-435.
  6. ↑ Peter Morsbach and Otto Titz: Monuments in Bavaria - City of Coburg , Series Monument Topography Federal Republic of Germany Volume IV.48, Karl-M-Lipp-Verlag, Munich, 2006, page 433
  7. ↑ Peter Morsbach and Otto Titz: Monuments in Bavaria - City of Coburg , series monument topography Federal Republic of Germany, Volume IV.48, Karl-M-Lipp-Verlag, Munich, 2006, pages 425-426

Coordinates: 50 ° 16 ′ 40 ″  N , 10 ° 55 ′ 22 ″  E