House Düsternstrasse 43–51

House Düsternstrasse 43–51, photo by Georg Koppmann , June 1906

Palm frond decoration, on the facade of the Museum of Hamburg History since 1922

The house at Düsternstrasse 43-51 was a brick building in Hamburg's Neustadt district , which people also called the Old Palace due to its impressive construction and its baroque facade . It was built between 1671 and 1677 and demolished in 1906 and stood on the southern part of Neustädter Fuhlentwiete, which was renamed Düsternstrasse from 1900. Parts of its architectural decoration were by Fritz Schumacher in the architecture of the Museum of Hamburg History involved and to decorate the Holstenwall Located south-east wall of the building.

Location and description

The house was built on two pieces of land at a time after the Millerntor was moved further west through the construction of the ramparts from 1615 to 1626 and the former gardens in front of it were included in the Hamburg city area. The property was on a former garden path parallel to the old city moat, today's Herrengrabenfleet , between the old streets from the Alten Steinweg and the Fuhlentwiete. The address was Neustädter Fuhlentwiete , at the end of the 19th century the street was extended into Düsternstraße .

The building was a three-story, five-axis symmetrical brick building with a 21-meter-wide baroque palace facade, which was evenly structured by six colossal pilasters . These were led from high plinths to the protruding cornice and crowned by Corinthian capitals . The facade towered over a triangular gable with a ribbon of windows and a semicircular gable window in front of a large hipped roof with two wide dormers and several sloping skylights.

A mezzanine floor was inserted between the ground floor and the first floor, in line with the construction method developed from the high hallway in northern Germany . In the middle axis of the ground floor there was a double portal with a curved sandstone gable , in which there were two entrances with short stairs, which was probably built in later in the middle of the 18th century. The four lateral axes were designed differently on the ground floor with additional entrances and shop windows for the shops located here. There were also shops in the basement.

Formerly there were entrances on both sides of the building that were vaulted with arches. The right doorway gave way to a four-story house in the 1790s. On the left side the passage led into a spacious courtyard until the house was demolished. The property, which was 80 meters deep at the end and extended to the school corridor and the long corridor, included other buildings, formerly sheds , stables and apartments for the servants, in the 19th century some houses and some factories.

Model Kornhaus am Wandrahm

Buildings by the Amsterdam master builder Philips Vingboons , in particular the Landhaus Westwijk from 1637 or the building yard at Deichtor built by Hans Hamelau from 1666 on, are assumed to be models for the architecture of the house . Wilhelm Melhop also pointed out parallels to the Kornhaus on the wall frame , also built by Hamelau in 1660/1661 , above all through the impression of the towering, large hipped roof and the oriel formation.

Building history

At the beginning of the 17th century, even before the ramparts were built, the garden property adjacent to the school corridor was owned by the mayor Vincent Moller from the Hanseatic Moller vom Hirsch family. The other property belonged to Johann Möller, the older brother of the mayor, Dr. jur. and Holstein advice. Johann Möller's property was inherited by his son, licentiate Vincent Möller, who also acquired the neighboring property in 1652 from the heirs of his uncle, the mayor Vincent Möller. After the death of licentiate Vincent Moller in 1665, the entire property passed to his daughter Cecila Schrötteringk and her husband, the mayor's son and princely Gothic councilor licentiate Joachim Schrötteringk, who was entered in the land register in 1670. Construction of the house began in 1671 at the earliest and was completed in 1677 at the latest.

The Schrötteringk family did not live in the house; in the 17th century this had its main residence in the Cranz'schen house in Hamburg's old town. Rather, the Palais in Düsternstrasse was a representative investment property with rental income. In the course of its history it has changed hands frequently.

After Joachim Schrötteringk's death in 1706, his son Hinrich Schrötteringk and daughter Anna Cecilia Schrötteringk inherited the house and the property, which was finally registered with their husband Johann Albert Lohrmann. Due to debts, however, it was transferred to the creditor Jobst von Overbeck in 1717. In 1732, six years after Overbeck's death, his heirs put the house up for sale. The newspaper advertisement read: “To know that on the morning Wednesday, as the 26th of the current month Martii, in the evening at the usual time in the Eimbeck house the guest house, garden and accessories, previously the Bremen key and by the city ditch bey der Fuhlentwiete prove, to be sold to the highest bidder and to be used at a tolerable price. ”Uwe Meyer-Brunswieck emphasizes in his description of the house that there was no restaurant at this address in 1721, as an inventory shows. The Bremen key of the Fuhlentwiete was repeatedly taken up by the author Petra Oelker as the setting in a detective novel cycle set in the second half of the 18th century .

In 1732 the house was bought by Johann Fahrenholtz and Elert Maack, who in 1753 divided it into two halves by a dividing wall inside. The double portal was probably used at this time. When Fahrenholtz died in 1758, his heirs sold his house to Johann Georg Tummel (1718–1777). He was a relative of Elert Maack (1701–1772); after his death in 1773 Tummel was also awarded the other side by resolution of the Senate, so that the house was again in the hands of a single owner. After Tummel's death in 1787, his daughter Dorothe Ester (1761–1796) and her husband Johann Otto Maack (1755–1802) inherited the building. In May 1803 Andreas Masson moved into the house that he had bought. He was a partner of the French architect Joseph Ramée . Here they sold wallpaper, porcelain and furniture from French production under the name “Masson et Ramée”. The partnership dissolved in August 1806. Ramée indicated the years 1808 and 1809 under house number 17 alone. From 1810, the owner was Peter Godeffroy (1749-1822), who had commissioned Ramée to renovate his house on Jungfernstieg in the previous years .

According to the address book from 1810, during the French era , the house was home to the Hôtel du Nord , which in 1813 was listed as one of the “most distinguished inns here”. In 1820, a tobacco and cigar factory and a tobacco broker are listed at the address .

After Peter Godeffroy's death in 1822, the building was offered for sale by his executor. After Georg Andreas Bornhorst, who owned the house for only three years, Constantin Philipp Staeven bought it. After his death in 1857 the house was up for sale again. According to the advertisement, there were now “two residential buildings in one association, ground floor two shops and an apartment on each floor, one, two and three flights of stairs up, a closed floor with several rooms, chambers, kitchen; under each of the houses a spacious cellar with living and storage areas, one of which was used as a wine store, the other as a fat store ”.

The new owner was Johann Georg Wittmann, who received permission in 1860 to erect a massive building in the courtyard to operate a brass foundry with the necessary melting furnaces . After Wittmann's death in 1872, his heirs were entered in the land register as Johann Georg Wittmann's will , the administrators were the Reader brothers. In 1905, in the year of the demolition, the last tenants listed in the address book were a tailor, a milk shop, a carpentry shop, an auctionator, a marine painter, a green goods dealer and a cap maker.

Düsternstrasse at the arch of the Herrengrabenfleet, 2013

The house, which was reconstructed on the property a short time later, was called "Schloßhof"; it was bombed during World War II in July 1943. During the reconstruction in the post-war period, the surrounding area was restructured and the plots were redistributed; only the bend in the street parallel to the course of the Herrengrabenfleet is still understandable. The location of the old castle can be found roughly on the eastern side of the office complex with the address Düsternstrasse 1–3 .

Architectural jewelry

The facade of the house was mentioned several times in the contemporary Hamburg topographies , and the built-in architectural decorations were widely praised. Wilhelm Melhop also describes that “the baroque facade has always attracted the attention of art lovers because of the more mature artistic feeling it expresses”.

The decorative elements were drawn in regular alternation over the window parapets of the first floor like a ribbon. Crossed palm fronds made of sandstone were embedded in the axes between the pilasters; these go back to the original time of the building: “Instead of lush festoons as symbols of wealth, one found the crossed palm fronds. They can be seen in a similar form in idealized depictions, possibly by Philip Vingboons, of the Temple of Solomon in a work by Johannes Coccejus that appeared in 1669. Then they may have been meant in allusion to King Solomon as a sign of wisdom, which the lawyer Schrötteringk probably thought more fitting than evidence of prosperity. "Crossed palm fronds can also be found in a similar form on other houses of the time, for example on the houses Neuer Wandrahm 7 and 10 .

At the same height, niches were subsequently carved out in the four inner pilasters and volute consoles were added on which four busts stood. They represent the ancient emperors Ninus, Cyrus, Alexander the Great and Caesar:

	Ninos (Ninus), the mythical and eponymous founder of the city of Nineveh in Assyria , shown here with a flowing beard and a lion's skin pulled over his head, whose paws are knotted over a scaly breastplate
	Cyrus II (Cyrus) around 590 to 530 BC BC, Persian king of the Achaemenid dynasty, also shown here as bearded, wears a turban with a clasp on which sits a medallion above the forehead, the cloak is knotted over the armor on the right shoulder
	Alexander the Great (Alexander III of Macedonia, 356 BC in Pella to 323 BC in Babylon ) was king of Macedonia and hegemon of the Corinthian League , depicted as a youth, beardless, helmet with brim and umbrella, long hair flowing out, war clothing, held on the right by a fibula, decorated breastplate
	Gaius Iulius Caesar (Caesar, 100 BC to 44 BC), Roman statesman , general and author , also depicted beardless, adorned with a laurel wreath, the cloak is held on the left shoulder, the armor is with a human mask occupied

On the outer pilasters there were coats of arms carved in sandstone . They both show an empty shield and a spangenhelm with attached wings, between which one sits a dove with a ring in its beak and in the other a small dog stands up.

The coats of arms, busts and palm fronds were included in the building of the Museum of Hamburg History by Fritz Schumacher and are attached to the south-east facade facing the street. Two of the pilaster capitals have also been preserved and are in the museum's magazine.

literature

• Hans Nirrnheim , Wilhelm Melhop : Das Haus Düsternstrasse No. 43 −51. In: Communications from the Association for Hamburg History . 1907, p. 329-352 (on- line ).
• Uwe Meyer-Brunswick: Palais-like Hamburg town houses of the 17th century and their history . Ed .: Jörgen Bracker , Museum for Hamburg History. Sautter et al. Lackmann, Hamburg 1990, ISBN 978-3-88920-012-9 (also as a dissertation at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts .).
• Wilhelm Melhop: Old Hamburg construction . Brief historical development of the architectural styles in Hamburg (shown on the secular building up to the resurrection of the city after the great fire of 1842, along with information about the area and life history). Boysen & Maasch, Hamburg 1908 ( online ).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Nirrnheim, Melhop, p. 329 ( online )
2. ↑ Uwe Meyer-Brunswieck, p. 102
3. ↑ Nirrnheim, Melhop, p. 331 ( online )
4. ↑ Nirrnheim, Melhop, pp. 334–335 ( online )
5. ↑ Hamburger Relations Courier of March 25, 1732, quoted from Uwe Meyer-Brunswieck, p. 118
6. ^ An obituary notice from Dorothea Esther Maack, b. Tummel in the Hamburger Nachrichten of January 7, 1797 contained the following data: born. November 22, 1761, m. July 30, 1782, d. December 25, 1796
7. ↑ The author Melhop took from the documents available to him from the French-born Masson the German first name Andreas instead of his French André. At that time it was common to "translate" foreign-language first names into German. Biographical data on André Masson (1759–1820) (Carl Niekerk (ed.): The Radical Enlightenment in Germany: A Cultural Perspective , Brill – Radopi, Leiden 2018, ISBN 978-90-04-36219-2 , p. 303). He had been adjutant to the French general Marquis de La Fayette during the French Revolution . He had signed a "foreign contract" with the city of Hamburg, which allowed him to trade and own property. ( Bärbel Hedinger , Julia Berger (Hrsg.): Joseph Ramée, garden art, architecture, decoration, an international architectural artist of classicism , Altonaer Museum, Deutscher Kunstverlag, Munich, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-422-06436-2 , note 2, p 176.)
8. ↑ On August 26, 1806, an "advertisement for an extraordinary auction of furniture and modern luxury goods, which took place on October 15 ..." was published in the Staats- und schehre Zeitung des Hamburgischen impartial correspondents (No. 136). The auction was founded with the abandonment of the business. Whether this also means the “renewed compilation of the Masson inventory wg. financial difficulties ”, as can sometimes be read in the literature, or whether Masson fled from Hamburg from the advancing French troops is z. Not clarified at the moment.
9. ↑ Uwe Meyer-Brunswieck, p. 126
10. ↑ The son Peter Godeffroy jun. (1782–1835) produced cigars and snuff. On October 28, 1822, he moved into an office at Brauerstrasse 78 ( Hamburger Nachrichten , October 26, 1822, page 5 (advertisement))
11. ↑ Hamburger Nachrichten of June 22, 1857, quoted from Uwe Meyer-Brunswieck, p. 127
12. ↑ Nirrnheim, Melhop, p. 329
13. ↑ Uwe Meyer-Brunswieck, p. 111
14. ↑ Uwe Meyer-Brunswieck, p. 113