Karl Friedrich Schinkel - For the master builder on his 200th birthday

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Movie
Original title Karl Friedrich Schinkel - For the master builder on his 200th birthday
Country of production GDR
original language German
Publishing year 1981
length 36 minutes
Rod
Director Werner Kohlert
script Werner Kohlert
production DEFA studio for documentaries
music Kurt Zander
camera Werner Kohlert
cut Barbara Masanetz-Mechelk
occupation

Karl Friedrich Schinkel - Dem Baumeister for his 200th birthday is a documentary film by the DEFA studio for documentary films by Werner Kohlert from 1981 .

action

In the cemetery of the Dorotheenstadt and Friedrichswerder communities , Karl Friedrich Schinkel's tombstone is being cleaned by two specialists shortly before his 200th birthday.

Around 1800 Berlin had around 160,000 inhabitants in 7,500 houses. It takes a pedestrian four hours to circumnavigate the city. It is the time of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, who can be seen in an oil painting, which was painted in Rome in 1803 and which was burned in World War II , at the age of 21. The painting was created on his first trip to Italy , which took him from Trieste via Venice , Padua , Ferrara , Bologna , Florence and Siena to Rome. He would have liked to have stayed longer, if only he had the money. About the visit to the island of Capri , he writes in his diary that the charms of this happy stretch of earth cannot be made clear to a northerner through words. The people have neither judges nor soldiers, they will never forget to be among these people. He also notes that the further south you go, the more the architecture deviates from ours. Just looking at the works in nature has something surprising. It was not until 1824 that he was able to travel to Italy again, because the artists wanted to study art, but also the way of life. Often disappointed by the social conditions at home, they believed they would find a harmonious world here.

In 1805 Schinkel is back in Berlin and finds a world that does not correspond to his wishes. Napoleon Bonaparte defeats the Kingdom of Prussia , which has been occupied by France for six years . Prussia then prepared for resistance, the Battle of Nations near Leipzig brought about the turning point and the Battle of Waterloo the decision. For builders , of course, this means that they will not receive any orders. In order to bridge the gap, Schinkel paints and draws, only to be commissioned after the war to decorate the Brandenburg Gate with the Iron Cross he designed , which turns the gate into a victory gate. While Prussia gained economic strength, the king , aristocracy and junker again determined politics. The old guard building for the king's bodyguard in Berlin became too small and Schinkel was commissioned to build a new one in 1816. After several changes to the originally planned location and appearance, the Neue Wache, now in its final form, with antique elements, is located between the armory and the university on Unter den Linden .

In 1817 the Berlin theater burns down. Schinkel was commissioned to design a new one, with the stipulations that the old foundation walls were retained, but new additional rooms had to be created. In April 1818 Schinkel presented five drafts, the foundation stone was laid in the same year and in 1821 the house was opened with a prologue written especially for it by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and a stage set designed by Schinkel. In 1824 Schinkel was the most influential and busiest master builder in classicist Berlin and was given the task of building a museum to make the royal art collections accessible to the general public. Programmatically, he juxtaposes the building with the palace in a strictly axial order. The only worry is the constant lack of money, because even with small sums, Schinkel has to go to Friedrich Wilhelm III. go begging. After eight years of construction and furnishing, the Royal Museum opens in 1830.

In the vicinity of Potsdam, Schinkel was commissioned to create an ideal artistic landscape in the style of the time, an attempt to build a Roman garden in the sand of the Brandenburg region. Schinkel designs, he develops the house from the landscape, he builds the landscape around the house and designs the interior down to the last detail. Everything corresponds to his drafts and yet only serves the occasional observation, for selfish purposes, as Schinkel carefully reveals. The house is the summer residence of Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm - Charlottenhof Palace .

At the end of the film one hears Schinkel's definition of what the term architecture means in his sense: In architecture, life has to become visible, a striving, a bursting, a crystallization, a shooting up, a pushing, a splitting, a joining, a drifting , floating, pulling, pushing, carrying, sitting, swinging, connecting, holding, lying down and resting. These are the requirements in architecture.

Production and publication

Karl Friedrich Schinkel - The builder for his 200th birthday was filmed by the document group under the working title Schinkel on ORWO-Color and had its first performance on March 6, 1981.

The dramaturgy was in the hands of Annerose Richter.

criticism

Uwe-Eckart Böttger wrote in the Neue Zeit

“Werner Kohlert's Schinkel film, which is only 32 minutes long, also brings its subject matter to the viewer in harmony with poetic images and information-rich commentary; Personality, work and the historical color of the time become evident, and the sense of our heritage is brought to life using the example of the classical master builder. "

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Neue Zeit of October 23, 1983, p. 4