Bickenbach Hunting Lodge

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The main building of the hunting lodge, the large building , today the town hall of the municipality of Bickenbach

The Bickenbach Hunting Lodge is a modern castle in Bickenbach in the west of today's Darmstadt-Dieburg district in Hesse . It was probably the largest hunting lodge in the Landgraviate of Hessen-Darmstadt . The so-called large building of the property is today the town hall of the community.

location

Location of the facility

The former hunting lodge stands on Bergstrasse south of Darmstadt in the west of the Darmstadt-Dieburg district and on the eastern edge of the Upper Rhine Plain . At the time of construction, the facility was located at the southwestern end of the village and formed the end towards the Hessian Rhine plain . Today it is centrally located in the village of Bickenbach, east of the street Am Jagdschloss with the addresses Darmstädter Straße 1 and 2 .

history

Creation of the hunting lodge

Landgrave Ernst Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt

After the Counts of Erbach had sold Bickenbach to the Landgraves of Hesse-Darmstadt on December 31, 1714 , plans for a large hunting ground began to develop in the Landgraviate, because in 1708 Landgrave Ernst Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt had the parforce hunt , which was so popular in the then absolutist France , a mounted hunt with trained pack of dogs, introduced at the Darmstädter Hof. For the planned new building, Ernst Ludwig von Hessen-Darmstadt acquired land from the community of Bickenbach and the widow of Colonel Greber and had what is probably the largest hunting lodge in Hessen-Darmstadt built there between 1720 and 1721. It was one of the last large systems of its kind. For the water supply, the client had a special pipe laid from the springs below Jossa Castle to the castle. Remnants of it were found during canal construction work in 1969 and 1974.

The palace complex consisted of several buildings that were grouped around a large, rectangular inner courtyard . The entire property was surrounded by a wall against which the buildings leaned. The entrance was on the north side via a gate with a flanking guard house. Even today, there is access to the inner courtyard from Darmstädter Straße . The pillars of the gate made of Odenwald sandstone were decorated with large stone balls . The east side of the courtyard was bordered by the large building . It served as accommodation for the staff. The mansion stood as an extension of the northwest corner . It was reserved for the princely family and their guests. The rooms of the Landgrave and the Hereditary Prince were upstairs, while the first floor housed the chief hunter's lodgings. In the south of the courtyard there was a multi-wing farm yard, which was divided by three corner pavilions . The stables were in its eastern wing , while the other wings housed a coach house , smithy and caretaker apartments. The plans for the complex are attributed to master builder Helferich Müller. The architect Louis Remy de la Fosse , who is in the service of Hesse, is also said to have been involved in the planning. The structure of the hunting lodge is comparable to the Wolfsgarten palace .

Used as a hunting lodge in the 18th century

View of the Bickenbach hunting lodge in the 18th century, painting by Johann Georg Stockmar

From Bickenbach, most of the hunts went to the north-lying area of ​​the Eberstädter Tanne and to the southwest-lying Jägersburger area . There, the hunting lodge Jägersburg and the new hunting lodge Jägersburg, only about a kilometer away, served as the center of the area. His passion for hunting, which he and his son Ludwig VIII of Hessen-Darmstadt indulged in by setting up many hunting grounds and castles, setting up large fenced game parks and introducing large par force hunts, brought the state into the following years through large debts for the construction of many hunting properties the brink of ruin. Nevertheless, the hunting lodge was used intensively by three landgraves for almost seventy years.

In July 1745, the hunting lodge had important visitors when the then Grand Duke of Tuscany and later Emperor Franz I rode with his host Ludwig VIII of Hessen-Darmstadt from Bickenbach into the Eberstädter Tanne on a hunt. In honor of the hunting success of the Grand Duke who shot a stag , Louis VIII had the so-called Kaiserstein set there, on whose memorial plaque the following inscription was placed: “On July 16, 1745, His Royal Highness, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, shot Francis Stephanus, alone a deer bang on the fall ”. The commemorative plaque is no longer there today; it was stolen after the Second World War .

After in October 1768 Ludwig IX. had finally abolished parforce hunting by decree, the hunting lodge was rarely used, but not sold or demolished, as was the case with many other hunting lodges or castles at the time, in order to reduce the state's debt burden. Not least because of the opposition officials and theologians , Ludwig was forced to give up the great hunt for the army. With the death of Landgrave Ludwig IX. In 1790, Bickenbach's use as a hunting lodge finally ended.

Changing uses from 1790

After four years of vacancy , the property then experienced a very eventful history of various uses. From 1794 to 1819 it was used as a military hospital and then as a barracks for the 2nd  Squadron of Light Cavalry . For this purpose, a sutlery was set up and a horse pond and riding arena were created. The castle buildings served as a garrison for another eight years before they were relocated and the property was sold to the postmaster Zimmermann in 1827 . He ran a post office there for 21 years . His widow sold the property for 10,000  guilders to the Duisburg merchant Arnold Bönninger . In 1851 he set up a cigar factory in the castle , for which he not only renovated the historical buildings , but also had the north wing of the farmyard demolished. Apartments for employees were set up in the manor house, the other buildings served as a factory and warehouse. Up to 150 people were employed in Boenninger's factory. When the company ran into financial difficulties in 1860, the previous factory director Georg Max Scriba took over the plant for 16,000 guilders. From him it finally came to the Mannheim company Thorbecke via two other manufacturers . The cigar production was stopped in 1936 and the plant was sold in 1939 to the Grenzhäuser company, which used the buildings as a warehouse for their tobacco stocks.

After the Second World War, the farm yard and the remaining pavilions were demolished and two new building wings were built for residential purposes on the west and south sides. Immediately after the end of the war, a reception camp for refugees was set up in the former hunting lodge . The buildings were then used as emergency housing, workshops and for growing mushrooms .

Modern times and the present

In 1988 the (still) existing buildings were refurbished with funds from the Hessian state equalization fund .

Today there is a branch of the Raiffeisenbank (east entrance) and various small companies (west entrance) in the manor house . The large building has been used as the town hall of the municipality of Bickenbach since the second half of the 20th century. The community library is also located in the building. Chamber concerts are regularly given today in the Citizens' Hall of the Great Building .

Building description

Panorama of the complex, seen from the staircase of the large building

The mansion is a massive two-storey building with a pan-covered hipped roof and its facade structure can be traced back almost to the original. The upper floor consists of plastered half-timbering . The building used to be painted brown, today it is ocher. The inscription “Built as a hunting lodge by Landgrave Ernst Ludwig in 1720” can be found on its northern end at the level of the upper floor. Its main entrance on the east side is crowned by a blown gable , in whose gable field there used to be a coat of arms .

The large building is a two-story building with a high basement. It has thirteen window axes and a mansard roof on the long side . There is a central porch on its east facade, and a flight of stairs leads up to the entrance on the west side . Under this is the earlier access to the cellar with a sandstone portal.

The manor house and large building are classified as cultural monuments because of their historical significance . The inner courtyard is now designed as a green and park area. The Ernst-Ludwig-Weg leading to the south-east and the Am Jagdschloss street leading to the west of the manor house are a reminder of the old complex and its owner.

  • The buildings that still exist today: the Great Building on the right and the mansion on the left

  • The mansion, view from the southeast

  • Memorial inscription on the manor house

  • Today's residential and commercial complex at the location of the old farm yard, view from the north

The castle in art and culture

There is an undated oil painting of the hunting lodge by Johann Georg Stockmar from around 1750 in the painting collection of the Kranichstein hunting lodge .

Another picture by the painter Georg Adam Eger, painted around 1758, with a largely schematic representation of the village of Bickenbach, shows that the layout of the hunting lodge corresponded to about a third of the rest of the village. The painting exemplarily shows the enclosures of the place and the few forest areas, so that the remaining area was free for the par force hunt. Around 1988 the picture was also in the collection of the hunting museum in the Kranichstein hunting lodge.

A glass painting from around 1865 served the Bickenbach artist Jürgen Winnefeld as a template for an oil painting made in 1993. It shows the Bickenbach hunting lodge around 1900, as it housed the tobacco factory. The north cross bar of the farm yard is already missing from the painting.

literature

Web links

Commons : Jagdschloss Bickenbach  - Collection of images

Old views

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Information brochure of the community of Bickenbach, section History , pp. 7–8. ( PDF ; 3.7 MB)
  2. ↑ Jagdschloss Mönchbruch - History , accessed on March 1, 2015.
  3. ↑ Peter Engels: Eberstadt - from the Franconian village to the Darmstadt district p. 10 ( PDF ; 5.5 MB).
  4. ↑ a b H. Buchmann: Castles and palaces on the Bergstrasse. 1986, p. 92.
  5. ^ A b c d Siegfried RCT Enders: Cultural monuments in Hessen. Darmstadt-Dieburg district. 1988, p. 111.
  6. ↑ a b c d H. Buchmann: Castles and palaces on the Bergstrasse. 1986, p. 93.
  7. ^ H. Buchmann: Castles and palaces on the Bergstrasse. 1986, p. 94.
  8. ↑ www.kammerkonzerte-bickenbach.de
  9. ^ Gisela Siebert: Hunting lodges of the Landgraves of Hessen-Darmstadt on pictures of the 18th and 19th centuries. Hessischer Jägerhof Foundation, Darmstadt 2000, p. 19.

Coordinates: 49 ° 45 ′ 14.6 "  N , 8 ° 36 ′ 42.5"  E