Kurt Nietner

Kurt Nietner (born May 26, 1859 in Wildpark near Potsdam, † January 17, 1929 in Potsdam ) was a German royal court gardener, after the monarchy garden inspector, in the Babelsberg Park , which is located in the northeast of the state capital Potsdam.

Life

Kurt Nietner came from the gardener family Nietner , who had been in royal Prussian service for generations. His parents, who later became the head gardener Theodor II. Nietner and Dorothea Susanna, called Susette, castle keeper (1832–1930), lived at the time of his birth on the eastern edge of the wildlife park, where his father had an assistant position in the state tree nursery southwest of the New Palace .

Nietner received his first practical training from 1878 to 1879 with Hermann Walter (1837–1898) in the Charlottenhof Palace Park , a garden area in the southwest of the Sanssouci park . He then went to the Royal Gardening College at the Wildlife Park near Potsdam for two years and in 1881 as an assistant to Herrenhausen in the Berggarten , where Gustav II. Adolph Fintelmann had been a court gardener since 1884.

From 1882 to 1884 Nietner completed his wanderings , which took him to Ghent , Holland, Kew , England, Scotland, southern Germany and Switzerland. In Ghent he initially worked in the van Geert commercial gardening company, but soon switched to the local commercial gardening company Louis van Houtte , where his father had also worked. After 1850, both commercial nurseries and a traineeship at the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, which Nietner received in 1883 at the intercession of Crown Princess Victoria , were among the coveted training centers . During his one and a half year stay in England, he also traveled the whole island, saw English and Scottish parks as well as world-famous commercial nurseries and tree nurseries at that time.

Back in Prussia, he got a senior assistant position in the garden of the Bellevue Palace in Berlin in 1884 , managed by the court gardener Hans Jancke (1850–1920) and in 1886 with his father in the New Garden in Potsdam . In addition, from 1887 to 1890 Kurt Nietner took on a teaching post in landscape gardening at the “Royal Gardening College at the Wildlife Park near Potsdam”, which Ferdinand Jühlke was director. It was not uncommon for the son of a court gardener to succeed him. Kurt Nietner also hoped for his father's job when he was unable to do the work for health reasons. In 1893, however, Wilhelm II called the head gardener Max Hoppe (1854–1906) , who had previously worked for his mother, the former Empress Victoria , in the Kronberg Palace Friedrichshof in the New Garden.

It was not until a few years later that he was assigned the post of court gardener in the Babelsberg Park, which had become vacant in 1898, for the retired court gardener Otto Kindermann . Because of the 'isolated location', no one wanted to be the court gardener's successor until Eulenburg appointed Kurt Nietner to do so. He took over the office at a time when the descendants of Wilhelm I had lost interest in the park. Like Kindermann, he tried to clear out the overgrown parts of the park, which had taken on a forest-like character, with few workers and limited resources. In addition, he intensively cultivated roses and peaches. After Wilhelm II abdicated in 1918, the park was nationalized and opened to the public. After the reorganization of civil servant salaries, Nietner was given the title of "garden inspector" and "estate manager" as a new post from July 1, 1920. In this function, he was responsible for the Kongsnæs sailor station in Schwanenallee in addition to Babelsberg Palace and Park until his retirement in 1924 .

family

On December 29, 1903, Kurt Nietner married Katharina, called Käthe, Fintelmann (1879–1973), who was twenty years his junior and daughter of the court garden director Gustav II Adolph Fintelmann . With her he had three children, from whom the son Theodor, born in 1905, also learned the gardening trade and later worked as a gardening authority in Osnabrück.

When Kurt Nietner died in 1929, like his wife Käthe later, he was buried in the so-called “Sello cemetery”, part of the Bornstedt cemetery .

See also

Family tree of the gardener family Nietner (excerpt)

literature

• Foundation Prussian Palaces and Gardens Berlin-Brandenburg (Ed.): Prussian Green. Court gardener in Brandenburg-Prussia . Henschel, Potsdam 2004, ISBN 3-89487-489-9

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Michael Seiler, Clemens Alexander Wimmer : How court gardeners traveled . In: SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 169.
2. ^ Katrin Schröder: Confirmation from Kew Gardens to accept Kurt Nietner as a volunteer, 1883 . In: SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 264.
3. ^ Wimmer: On the history of the administration of the royal gardens in Prussia . In: SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 102. See GStA PK , I. HA., Rep. 89, No. 3247, Bl. 142.
4. ↑ Jörg Wacker: The difficult way to the museum gardens . In: SPSG: Preußisch Grün , p. 107f.
5. ^ Family foundation Hofgärtner Hermann Sello Potsdam , accessed on May 15, 2012.