Hetzgarten (Berlin)

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The Berlin Hetzgarten in 1693 (excerpt from a medal by Raimund Faltz ).

The Hetzgarten in Berlin was the Baroque period resulting Arena , where in a festive atmosphere was offered the wild fighting bulls against each other or with humans. The Hetzgarten in Berlin existed from 1693 to 1713. It was located in today's Littenstrasse . Its building was used as a cadet house until it was demolished in 1778 .

origin

As part of the ceremonial , stately self-portrayal of the European courts , animal fights also found a place in the transition to the Baroque era . The tradition of animal baiting revived and so "animal baiting" has been part of a princely festival program since the 16th century. For the members of the court there were regular games that had developed from hunting customs , such as " fox jumping ". Locked-off places within castle complexes were used as "rushing places", such as courtyards or kennels . More rarely, long-term facilities such as the Berlin and Königsberg "Hetzgärten", the Nuremberg "Fechthaus" and the " Hetztheater " in Vienna were built for this purpose. The bullring that still exists today goes back to this time.

Origin and function of the Berlin Hetzgarten

From the year 1527 it is handed down that the citizens of Cölln had sold the Brandenburg electoral prince Joachim a piece of land west of the castle for a "Thiergarten", probably to expand an almost natural hunting ground already in the 15th century . In the fenced property held the elector a large number of huntable, domestic animals at any time in the immediate vicinity of his residence to organize Court hunting parties. The extensive complex has been gradually reduced in area and cultivated since the late 17th century. This is how the public parks of the Großer and Kleiner Tiergarten were created .

The medal by Raimund Faltz from 1700 shows the arena of the Hetzgarten on Bastion IX on the east side of Fortress Berlin.

The Berlin Hetzgarten is under the government of the Brandenburg Elector Friedrich III. has been created. Friedrich intended to be crowned king in Prussia . Even before he could implement his plan, he began to implement an ambitious building program in his residence in Berlin to give the city royal splendor. Building projects corresponding to the Roman models, such as the reconstruction of the castle, the erection of the mint tower and the completion of the armory , also included the construction of a "circus". Friedrich chose the platform of Bastion  IX of the bastion wreath of Fortress Berlin created by his father as the building site . There he had his master builder Johann Arnold Nering built “a hunting theater for a delighted audience” in 1693 .

On the side of the arena facing the city center, there was a semicircular gallery with seats for the court society. It had massive end pavilions and in the middle an equally bricked, representative royal box . Opposite was the open part of the amphitheater , where the rest of the audience could sit on simple benches. The cages for the animals were in the basement with barred access to the arena. In the contemporary Universal Lexicon by Johann Heinrich Zedler it says: “In Germany, the Berlin Hetz Garden retains the price above all, partly because the Roman amphitheater (...) built in the form of the old , because in the same all kinds of wild and fierce animals, but especially 3 large and stout lions, white and black bears, a number of tyrants, wild oxen , and cutting pigs are kept. "

One of the tasks of the electoral chief hunter was to keep the animals "always in the best selection in stock" and to direct the animal hunt for the public who came from near and far on such occasions. In 1705, Friedrich had a buyer sent to Tunis in North Africa specifically for this purpose to purchase three panthers, monkeys and other wild animals for the Berlin Hetzgarten, as well as an "ogre". The large predators were spared in consideration of their reuse and were probably also considered a sight. Hunting animals were part of the festival program at the publicly celebrated princely weddings. During the wedding celebrations on December 17, 1708, the young Queen Sophie Luise shot an aurochs from a rifle in the Hetzgarten .

Even in his second residence city of Königsberg , Elector Friedrich III. create a rush garden.

Decommissioning, further use and demolition

In contrast to many of Frederick I's royal innovations, such as the castles and the Academy of Sciences and Arts , the Hetzgarten was not to survive it. Its founding, with which Friedrich did not follow the fashion, but cultivated an "traditionally pleasurable", appears as an expression of an uncertain, not always happy search for forms of royal representation.

After the quarters of the cadet academy , the fencing house in Klosterstrasse , had become unusable due to a fire, Frederick I ordered the cadets to use the Hetzgarten as emergency accommodation. This meant the end of the animal baiting in Berlin. In the following year Friedrich died and under his successor the temporary accommodation of the cadets in the Hetzgarten became permanent. King Friedrich Wilhelm I abolished it briefly when he took office in 1713. The closure was part of the reallocation of government spending, which was implemented with demonstrative severity, in accordance with his paternal-Calvinist ruler ideal . In the case of the Hetzgarten there was also the fact that Friedrich Wilhelm was fond of hunting in the wild, especially par force hunting , and rejected animal fights. In the course of the 18th century, with the spread of the ideas of the Enlightenment, animal hunting lost its position in the courtly and sovereign festival culture. With that it sank to a crude amusement associated with betting on the playgrounds of the common people.

The building of the Hetzgarten was converted by Jean de Bodt after 1717 because of the increased space requirements of the cadet institute by bringing together the pupils in Berlin to form the Royal Prussian cadet institute . Before 1723 it received a three-arched portal projection with a two-armed flight of stairs. The wooden galleries were bricked up, the rest of the half-timbered round building was brought to the same height and two simple half-timbered buildings for the teaching officers were added to the side. Plans for a new building were not carried out for reasons of cost.

Friedrich II had Georg Christian Unger erect a new representative building for the cadet institute around the rotunda in 1776–1779 . Nehrings Arena was demolished in 1777 during construction work on the new square cadet house . The now " Prussian Principal Cadet Institute " was relocated to large new buildings in Groß-Lichterfelde in 1878 and the cadet house served as a district court until 1896, before it - now over 110 years old - had to give way to the expanded and still existing new building. The main staircase of the Berlin Regional Court has been located around the site of the arena since 1905 .

literature

  • Richard Alewyn, Karl Sälzle: The great world theater. The epoch of the courtly festivals in document and interpretation. Rowohlt-Verlag, Hamburg 1959, p. 19.
  • Adolf v. Crousaz: History of the Royal Prussian Cadet Corps. Berlin 1857.
  • Christian Heinrich Gütther: life and deeds of Mr. Friederichs the first king in Prussia. Publisher Johann Jacob Korn, Breslau 1750.
  • Werner Hahn: Friedrich the First King in Prussia. Berlin 1851.
  • Gustav Adolf Harald Stenzel: History of the Prussian State. Third part. From 1688–1739. Verlag Friedrich Perthes, Hamburg 1841.
  • John Toland: Relation of the Royal Prussian and Chur = Hanoverian courts. Frankfurt 1706.
  • Rainer E. Wiedenmann: Animals, Morality and Society. Elements and levels of humanimal sociality. VS-Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, Wiesbaden 2009.

References and comments

  1. ↑ On the research controversies and the following see Folkwin Wendland: Berlins Gardens and Parks from the Foundation of the City to the End of the Nineteenth Century. Classic Berlin . Propylaen-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, Vienna 1979, ISBN 3-549-06645-7 , pp. 113-156
  2. ↑ A critical appraisal of the building and the illustration of a commemorative medal including a Latin text can be found in Ed. Heyck : Friedrich I. and the establishment of the Prussian kingship . Velhagen & Klasing, Bielefeld 1901 (further cited here as “Heyck”), p. 56 and p. 68, see also the figure above.
  3. ↑ A contemporary description of the system can be found in: John Toland: Relation von den Königliche Prussische und Chur = Hanoverian courts. Frankfurt 1706, p. 23.
  4. ↑ Hetz garden. In: Johann Heinrich Zedler : Large complete universal lexicon of all sciences and arts . Volume 12, Leipzig 1735, column 1919.
  5. ↑ Stenzel: History ... , p. 109.
  6. ↑ cf. the information from Stenzel: history ... , p. 109, note 2)
  7. ^ Fritz Röhrig: Das Weidwerk (= second part by Richard B. Hilf, Fritz Röhrig: Forests and pastures in past and present ). Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, Potsdam undated (1938), p. 171f.
  8. ^ Adolf Streckfuß: 500 years of Berlin history. From fishing village to cosmopolitan city. History and legend. In an abridged version and continued by Leo Fernbach until recently . Albert Goldschmidt, Berlin 1900, p. 270
  9. ↑ Stenzel: Geschichte… , p. 109. For the Hetzgarten in Königsberg see: Johann Friedrich Brandt: Zoogeographische und Paläontological contributions. St. Petersburg 1867. p. 139.
  10. ↑ Heyck, pp. 55f.
  11. ↑ On this and the following see R. Borrmann: Die Bau- und Kunstdenkmäler von Berlin. With a historical introduction by P. Clauswitz . Gebrüder Mann, Berlin 1982 (facsimile reprint of the Berlin edition, Springer 1893; cited below as "Borrmann"), ISBN 3-7861-1356-4 , p.
  12. ↑ Crousaz: History ... , pp. 51–57.
  13. ↑ For Friedrich Wilhelm as a hunter see Eduard Vehse: Preussische Hofgeschichten. Re-edited by Heinrich Conrad. Volume II. , Georg Müller, Munich 1913, pp. 128-135
  14. ↑ For the conversion see Borrmann, p. 338
  15. ↑ For the history of the property in the 19th century see Benedikt Goebel: The conversion of old Berlin to the modern city center. Planning, building and ownership history of the historic Berlin city center in the 19th and 20th centuries . Verlagshaus Braun, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-935455-31-3 , pp. 79-81