Forum Fridericianum
The Forum Fridericianum ( Latin for Friedrichsforum ) in the Berlin district of Mitte is a square at the beginning of the boulevard Unter den Linden , which extends from the Schloßbrücke to the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great . Planned by Friedrich II from 1740 and executed by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff , it was destroyed in World War II and then rebuilt. The middle of the Lindenforum is today's Bebelplatz with the opera house , the Prinzessinnenpalais , St. Hedwig's Cathedral , the Old Library and the Old Palace . It is bordered by the Palais des Prinzen Heinrich , the Neue Wache and the armory in the north and the commandant's house and the Kronprinzenpalais in the south. According to Friedrich Nicolai , it is one of the “most beautiful places in the world”.
Friedrich II as the client
The name Forum Fridericianum refers to the Prussian King Friedrich II. (The Great), who was extremely interested in architecture and not only commissioned royal buildings, but also influenced their design with his own drawings. He gained his first major experience in architecture and urban planning as the Crown Prince during the renovation of the Rheinsberg Palace until 1736 and after 1740, when the winding residential town of Rheinsberg burned down almost completely and was rebuilt according to the contemporary, strictly grid-like floor plans, aligned with the palace.
Friedrich's most important advisor in questions of architecture - if not the only one - was the architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff . He also owned numerous architectural textbooks from which he took inspiration and ideas. He had famous buildings that he knew from engravings rebuilt. The market square in front of the Potsdam City Palace developed into a collection of samples, mainly of Italian architecture. The old Nikolaikirche, for example, disappeared behind the smaller copy of the recently completed baroque facade of the Roman church of Santa Maria Maggiore . With the Royal Library , a comparable architectural quote was also created at the Forum Fridericianum.
The big project
First planning
Right at the beginning of his reign, Friedrich II intended to set new urban development accents in Berlin. In place of the fortifications not far from the old city palace , which had been dismantled since 1735 , a large-scale building ensemble was to be built, with a vast new residential palace (Palais du Roy) as a reference.
A floor plan from the earliest planning phase shows how Knobelsdorff had designed the facility. After that, the new Royal Palace is located north of the east-west axis Unter den Linden - a building complex with two inner courtyards, a large courtyard and a semi- elliptical colonnade , the whole thing about 300 meters wide and 150 meters deep. A spacious square extends to the south with Markgrafenstrasse as the axis of symmetry. Immediately on the south side of Unter den Linden street, two free-standing buildings are planned, the opera house and a ballroom . (According to the parlance at the time, it was a building for a tennis-like ball game .) The extent of the course to the west is not specified. However, since the new royal buildings should stand completely free and at an unusually large distance from the town houses in the area, the result is an extremely monumental Residenzplatz.
This apparent principle of demarcation contradicts the planned and ultimately also implemented integration of the street Unter den Linden into the ensemble, with exactly the opposite effect. The public transport route, which was heavily used at the time, is the main access axis between the royal palace and the southern part of the square with the opera house and ballroom. The roadway should probably only lead across the square as a marker in the pavement. The Forum Fridericianum was therefore planned as a freely accessible Residenzplatz from the start, so that the overall concept does not give the impression of a desired distance to the population.
The reign of Frederick II began on May 31, 1740. In the same year he started the major building project. 54 houses were to be bought and demolished, and the affected owners were to be compensated with a total of 186,000 Reichstalers (an approximate comparison, based on income and purchasing power : one Reichstaler in 1775 corresponded to around 40 to 50 euros in 2005). At the beginning of August 1740, the first earthworks and the investigation of the subsoil began. Very soon after that, there were signs of a change in the plan. On September 6, 1740, the news was spread that the planned building site was "found to be too boggy and not suitable for such a building".
First difficulties
With the construction technology of that time, however, entire fortresses were built in swampy terrain and a few years later the palace of Prince Heinrich was built on the allegedly unusable building site . This statement was very likely to obscure the real problem - family differences in the Hohenzollern house . In the middle of the planned Residenzplatz was the Schwedt Palace of the Margraves of Brandenburg-Schwedt , a side line of the Hohenzollern family, the predecessor of today's Old Palace . Apparently the Brandenburg-Schwedter stubbornly refused to sell the building, so that Friedrich finally had to abandon his ideas. With his own sketches on the original plan, he tried to save the situation as best he could. The palace was to be relocated further north, the opera house rotated 90 degrees - the Palais Schwedt would then have been integrated into the south front of the reduced Residenzplatz. Instead of the ballroom, a new building was planned for the Academy of Sciences . The immature sketch of ideas marked the state of the art before the young king dealt intensively with the first Silesian War .
The smaller solution
Opera house
Even during the war - the concept of the Forum Fridericianum had not yet been finally decided - the foundation stone for the opera house, today's State Opera Unter den Linden , was laid on September 5, 1741 . According to Knobelsdorff's plans, it was built in a north-south orientation, as originally intended. It is not entirely clear what part Friedrich II had in the preparation. It was probably he who advocated using two well-known contemporary architectural designs as the basis for the design. Construction work was not yet complete when the first opera was performed in late 1742 . Another year later, the finished building was available for regular opera performances and masked balls, the usual winter entertainment of the time. The king had stopped in a hurry - certainly also with a view to his war opponents, to whom he wanted to demonstrate the cultural and material productivity of Prussia even in times of war. In a Berlin newspaper the architect described the technical features of the house, but also, with recognizable pride, its sheer size: "This theater is one of the longest and widest in the world". The finished opera house stood in an as yet unstructured urban space, in a sandy area on the former fortress grounds, which Knobelsdorff said had the main purpose “that 1000 carriages could leisurely stop there”.
Gradually it became clear that the residential complex planned at the beginning would not be built like this. Two decisions by the king at the beginning of 1745 reinforced this impression. At this point in time, he was probably finally convinced that he would no longer be able to acquire the annoying Palais Schwedt. It was already suspected - and feared by the Berlin citizens because of the economic consequences - that his main interest in the future could no longer be Berlin, but Potsdam. The reason for such speculations was Friedrich's order to start building the Sanssouci Palace immediately and to renovate the Potsdam City Palace . In the old Berlin Palace, he had an apartment expanded at great expense - a new residential palace was becoming increasingly unlikely.
Hedwig's Church
With the construction of the Hedwig Church , the king gave the development of the square a new turn - such a building had not previously been planned. This project, started in 1747 after the end of the Second Silesian War, had a political dimension. . Frederick II permitted the construction of a new Catholic Church, the patron saint was Silesian country Saint Hedwig determined - strong evidence that the King religious tolerance and thus prove easier in particular the integration of the predominantly Catholic nobility in Silesia wanted. Up until now there had only been a small Catholic chapel in a backyard in Berlin , now the new church was built on a prominent, if barely designed, square in the city.
Friedrich donated the building site and even finished designs for the architecture to the Catholic community. Presumably the king himself suggested the plans and had them carried out by Knobelsdorff. The extremely high construction costs, however, had to be paid almost entirely by the municipality. Thanks to appeals for donations across Europe, we were able to collect what we needed. Right from the start, the Vatican criticized the lavish-looking building plans, probably also with a view to the type of financing . The Berlin building commission defended itself by pointing out that the lavish design came from the king himself, that it would be politically unwise to change it; However, the planned marble pillars will be dispensed with and brick pillars will be built instead. Time and again, a lack of money caused long breaks in work. It was not until 1773, after a total of 27 years of construction, that the church could be consecrated .
Prince Heinrich Palace
In 1748 construction work began on the Prinz-Heinrich-Palais . In the meantime it was clear that the new Berlin residence would not exist. Instead, the king had a palace built for his younger brother Heinrich. The palace, which was remarkably spacious for a young prince who was still unmarried at the time, was built on the site that was once intended for the palace. Here, too, Friedrich II, as the client, provided the first sketches of ideas. The facade design was based on the shapes of the opera house and was obviously aimed at giving the square a uniform design. The construction was carried out by Johann Boumann the Elder. Ä. , who was given responsibility for the entire Berlin construction industry in 1755. By this time the costs had already risen to 200,000 thalers, in 1756 another 33,000 thalers were approved - at that time enormous sums for a project of this kind. Work here was slow and stopped altogether during the Seven Years' War .
The prince was only able to move in with his court at the beginning of 1766 . After viewing the unfinished building, a courtier noted: The palace “will be immensely large and not comfortable. You will freeze to death here and each time you need 4000 Taler lights to illuminate this building. ”Heinrich, whose homoerotic inclinations were obvious, was married to Wilhelmine von Hessen-Kassel as early as 1752 for reasons of state reasons . Contemporaries saw him go to the wedding ceremony “with a gloomy expression like at the sacrificial altar”, as the married couple usually lived separately. Prince Heinrich died in 1802, in October 1810 the first courses of the Berlin University (Alma mater berolinensis) began in the Palais , which was called "Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität" from 1828 to 1945 and is now called Humboldt University in Berlin .
Royal Library
In 1774 the opportunity arose to complete the square with a building on its west side. A daughter of the Margrave of Schwedt offered the Palais Schwedt for sale after all, but the Prussian court only acquired an outbuilding opposite the opera house from the large property - the old plans with the large space requirements had long been put aside. Friedrich II had the new Royal Library built here. In the years 1775–1786, a building was built according to the plans of Georg Christian Unger , which clearly differed in its formal language from all the others on the square.
The king wanted a copy of the Michaeler Front, which Joseph Emanuel Fischer von Erlach had designed for the Vienna Hofburg in 1726 . (There the draft was only realized in a modified form much later, the copy overtook the original, so to speak). Adjusting was difficult. The Viennese design was drawn for a completely different urban environment, the building looked like a foreign body in the Berlin situation. With its curved facade - the Berliners spoke with a bit of amusement about the “ dresser ” - it could not be accommodated on the newly acquired property after all. Therefore the alignment line had to be moved a few meters forward, so the free space had to be a little smaller; at the same time, the inward curvature of the facade was significantly flatter than in the Austrian model.
There was no urgent need for the new library. The royal book collection was housed in a wing of the Berlin Palace, grew only slowly and found reasonable space there. The new library building, which was initially much too large for its purpose, can therefore also be seen as a demonstration of the patriarchal provisions, as a thoroughly contemporary step towards maintaining bourgeois culture and education. The annual purchase budget was increased significantly to 8,000 Reichstaler, with additional funds being used to take over the holdings of entire libraries. The construction is also connected with a whole series of building measures that the king had carried out in Berlin after the Seven Years War in order to bring the city into line with European metropolises . Particular examples are the two towers on the redesigned Gendarmenmarkt and the so-called Immediatbauten , a large number of mostly four-story handsome residential buildings that were built entirely or partially at royal expense.
South side
The southern end of the Forum Fridericianum was initially not occupied with representative buildings. Up until the late 19th century, inconspicuous two- and three-story bourgeois houses stood here on Behrenstrasse. Then Dresdner Bank bought the property at Behrenstrasse 38/39 and in 1889 had a richly decorated building built in the style of the Italian high renaissance as the new business headquarters , the dimensions of which still blended easily into the historical surroundings. When, in 1923, despite fierce public protests, the house was given three additional floors and now clearly towered over the opera, library and university, it seriously disrupted the architectural uniformity of the square.
The square - more than its buildings
Given the inconsistent building history, it would not have been astonishing if the square had only been perceived as a collection of more or less attractive individual buildings. The opposite was the case. Even contemporaries were very impressed. The bookseller and writer Friedrich Nicolai sums up his impressions a little exuberantly : The square is “one of the most beautiful in the world. [...] The attraction of seeing so many palaces is enhanced by the fact that each of them is completely different from the others in its construction, and each is extremely beautiful in its own way. ”Commendations are also made by Karl Friedrich Schinkel , Heinrich Heine and others known.
In spite of the prevented ideal design and later difficulties, the complex achieved its overriding purpose - to impressively stage the reign of Frederick II and to increase the fame of the client. Various accompanying measures, some of which were deliberately promoted, supported this intention: detailed reports appeared in the Berlin newspapers, the construction plans of some buildings were published as copperplate engravings, travelers sent highly appreciative descriptions to their home countries, the opera house and St. Hedwig's Church soon found their way into architectural teaching and Manuals mention. As a downright populist measure, the king had the opera house open free of charge to citizens of all levels for opera performances and masked balls during Carnival .
Designations
The term Forum Fridericianum was rarely used in the 18th century. Only one Italian variant is known - when the writer and well-traveled aestheticist Francesco Algarotti spoke of the “foro di federigo” in a letter to his friend Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff on September 10, 1742 . It was not until the 19th century that this letter and the terms Forum Friedrichs and Friedrichsforum found their way into German art literature, and finally also in the Latin translation Forum Fridericianum. It is also called the Lindenforum .
The Forum Fridericianum originally consisted of three sections: the Opernplatz (today Bebelplatz ) to the west and east of the opera house , the square at the opera house (today Unter den Linden ) from the equestrian statue of Frederick the Great to the armory and the square at the armory (today Unter den Linden) from the armory to the castle bridge . The square at the opera house and the square at the armory were incorporated into the street Unter den Linden in 1937.
literature
- Martin Engel: The Forum Fridericianum and the monumental residence squares of the 18th century. Dissertation at the FU Berlin, 2004, online
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Wolfgang Ribbe, Wolfgang Schächen: Builders, Architects, Urban Planners: Biographies on the structural development of Berlin . Stapp, Berlin 1987, p. 569 .
Coordinates: 52 ° 30 '59 " N , 13 ° 23' 34" E