Lustgarten (Wernigerode)
The Lustgarten in Wernigerode is a park laid out in the 16th century, which was first transformed into a French Baroque garden and then into an English park in the 18th century. The pleasure garden for the state horticultural show of Saxony-Anhalt was completely renovated in 2006 with considerable funds .
development
The pleasure garden extends on a north-facing terrace between the Schlossberg and the city of Wernigerode , the north-western end of which today forms the ensemble of palm house and orangery .
Count Wolf Ernst zu Stolberg was awarded the county of Wernigerode in an inheritance division in 1589. Count Wolf Ernst has held court at Wernigerode Castle many times since the 1870s and since 1587 without interruption. Here he put u. a. the basis for the important Count's book collection. In the first official account of his government from 1589/90, expenses for the purchase of a tower-crowned pleasure house are already mentioned. This small pleasure palace was on the way to Wernigeröder Neustadt. Strictly structured flowerbeds were created around the building based on the model of the Italian Renaissance - the beginnings of today's pleasure garden. In 1618, a fountain in this garden was mentioned for the first time in the service of the pipe drill Hans Helmholt. Count Wolfgang Georg zu Stolberg gave him a. a. the task of producing the water pipeline that led to the Lustgarten and the Wernigeröder Vorwerk at the foot of the Schlossberg.
When the ruling Count Ernst zu Stolberg moved his court seat from Wernigerode to the neighboring Ilsenburg after the Thirty Years' War , the Wernigerode Castle and the pleasure garden there were increasingly neglected. For this purpose, a new garden was built in Ilsenburg, which is still recognizable in its fragments as a pleasure or palace garden behind the Ilsenburg Palace.
After Count Ernst zu Stolberg died on November 9, 1710 in Ilsenburg and his nephew Christian Ernst took over the government in the summer of 1712 when he reached the age of majority, Wernigerode became a royal seat again. The count, who donated the Stolberg-Wernigerode line, had Wernigerode Castle renovated and devoted himself increasingly to the renovation of the old pleasure garden. The first construction work can be verified for July 1713. In keeping with the taste of the time and the prevailing luxury needs of the nobility, Count Christian Ernst had the pleasure garden redesigned into a baroque garden based on the French model.
In December 1713, the excavation work began for a new baroque garden house or pleasure palace on the middle terrace of the new pleasure garden. The 16th century pleasure house was demolished and the topping-out ceremony for the new building was held on November 13, 1716. In 1723 the interior work was largely finished. The pleasure palace had a ground floor and an attic floor with 27 axes each. The front was loosened up by protruding risalits, the colored design of which was only completed in 1727 by the painter Heinric. The hall in the middle of the building extended over seven axes and was richly decorated with stucco, wallpaper, sculpture and painting. The count's family used the castle as a summer residence and as accommodation for guests of the count's house. In 1726 a wooden roof dome was built on the central wing of the pleasure palace for additional decoration. With this structural addition, however, static problems began that could not be resolved afterwards.
In order to ensure the supply of the numerous guests of the pleasure palace, a kitchen wing was necessary, which was initially planned in the cellar vaults of the garden palace. But the kitchen smells were perceived as annoying, so that the count's family decided in 1725 to build a separate kitchen vault. For this purpose, an approximately 25 m long underground corridor was built from the pleasure palace to the northern slope of the pleasure garden and a vault was built at the end of it. It only had windows on the north side, which were installed in 1727. The south and east facing walls of the vault were already underground, while the outer west wall was free. This wall, which pointed towards Brocken , served as an ideal starting point for the construction of a new building, the so-called orangery . Count Christian Ernst zu Stolberg-Wernigerode decided on January 10th, 1727 that the preparations for the construction of a new, stone orangery building should begin in generous dimensions. To do this, he had the necessary wood felled in summer, transported to the construction site in winter, and construction work began in 1728 under the direction of the site manager Johann Paul Keller. The main building material used here was the red sandstone, the so-called Rogenstein. As early as 1727, the first bricks for the new building of the orangery were obtained from the quarry at the northwest end of the pleasure garden. The dark roofing slate, however, was delivered from Elbingerode .
In 1731 the screed was poured inside the orangery and the interior design of the large hall with its self-supporting ceiling was carried out. On July 15 of the same year, Zinzendorf is said to have preached in the great orange hall. On November 24, 1731, the ducal court councilor Anton Heinrich Walbaum visited the orangery, which, as he writes, was "very large [...] and only just laid out". At that time it was already filled with trees that were kept here in the cold season. Several ovens donated the necessary heat, for the storage of which the lowest walls of the building were made around 1.60 m thick. The oversized chimneys, however, had to be removed as early as 1733 because they had proven to be faulty constructions.
The first known exterior view of the orangery does not yet show a coat of arms portal above the main entrance of the building on the south side. It is reasonable to assume that the plastic essay with the two coats of arms of the houses of Stolberg-Wernigerode and Leiningen-Westerburg is a later ingredient.
The pleasure garden with the pleasure palace and the orangery is not only of interest in terms of art and cultural history, but has also been the scene of the Protestant movement of Wernigerode pietism since 1728, with its active charity and lively community life supported by the feeling of the individual for almost an entire century ruled the count's house for a long time. In addition to the city of Halle (Saale) , Wernigerode became a center of Pietism in northern Germany and so it is not surprising that Zinzendorf visited Wernigerode and that the ruling count fed about 600 Salzburg exiles free of charge in the Lustgarten in May and September 1732 , in 1736 / 37 the orphanage in Lindenallee was built or after the great fire of 1751 around 1000 homeless people were cared for in the Lustgarten every day.
A special gem of the pleasure garden was set up in front of the pleasure palace on August 3, 1738: a “sun compass” or “gnomonic attachment”. This baroque sandstone sculpture contained twelve sundials and was designed by Johann Friedrich Penther . It was located in the Wernigeröder Lustgarten until 1790, then it was sold to the Hedwigsburg manor near Pillowbrück and is now in a restored condition on the green field in front of the "Augustea", the Herzog August library in Wolfenbüttel .
When, in 1744, the ruling Count Christian Ernst zu Stolberg-Wernigerode intended to continue the construction of a stone wall around the pleasure garden, he promptly saved the money for the building materials and ordered that the not yet 30-year-old pleasure palace be demolished. As the reason that prompted the Count to demolish it, he stated: “Since the foundations of this house are not correct, and the layout is such that it cannot be adapted for real use without great expense, it would be if it were to remain standing , the loss “almost 1000 thalers a year. Despite various reservations about the demolition, e.g. B. also from the Danish King Christian VI., The count decided to remove the castle.
In 1750 and 1751, the new count's master builder Johann Friedrich Heintzmann and the Berlin architect Friedrich August Hildner drafted plans for the construction of a new palace in even larger dimensions than the previous building. Count Christian Ernst zu Stolberg-Wernigerode participated personally in the designs. On March 30, 1754 the time had come. The court gardener had to use several day laborers to create the necessary construction space for the “library and archive building in the pleasure garden”. The ruling Count Christian Ernst had decided to build the east wing of the planned palace, which was to resemble the orangery in its external form, as a combined library and archive building. Several miners began work on the pit for the basement in September 1754, but construction was stopped after a year and a half. The Seven Years' War had broken out. Due to the prevailing uncertain financial situation, the Grafenhaus was unable to make any special expenses for luxurious palace buildings. Only the court carpenter Möser was granted money to complete a wooden model of the new garden palace. After the end of the war in 1763, construction work was no longer continued due to the continued rise in prices. The foundations were removed and the construction area leveled and linden trees were planted. The resulting area was named Lindensaal.
Only the orangery was now available for the count's family's summer stay in the pleasure garden. An inventory from 1768 shows that the building known as the Orange House had been completely converted into a summer residence with around 30 different rooms at that time. At that time, the large hall was no longer only used to accommodate the plants, but also as a dining and concert hall. There was space for 35 people at a long marble dining table, four more tables with four armchairs each offered additional seating. A special decoration of the hall was a ceiling painting, about which, however, no further information is available. Numerous banquets and concerts took place in the orangery, which also served as a widow's seat for immediate relatives of the count's house.
At that time there was still another building directly at the Lustgarten, the stately servants' house, which was known as the "slate house" because of its dark slate roof. Construction on this house on the southwest corner of the pleasure garden began in 1732 after the work on the orangery had been completed. While the count's officials initially lived in this house, the builder Heintzmann extended the second floor in 1748 for the widowed Countess Friederike Charlotte zu Stolberg-Schwarza. In 1749, the widow moved from Schwarza Castle in Thuringia to the servants' house in Wernigerode. She lived on the top floor of the house with access to the pleasure garden until her death on May 13, 1782. In the later years other family members or friends and servants of the count's house lived here. The alleged visit of Novalis to this building in April 1793 did not take place, it was Count Ferdinand zur Lippe-Weißenfeld who visited his two aunts in this building. During the French War of Liberation, the slate house was used to accommodate hospital patients who were passing through. The last inmate left the building on July 31, 1814. A contemporary report describes the condition of the house as follows: “The slate house currently gives a picture of destruction, willful devastation and a depot of vermin of all kinds, nothing has been spared, the doors are partly their fittings, the windows their wings, their glass , robbed of their fittings, the crates of their boards. ”In August 1814, the demolition of the desolate building began. The remaining foundations were removed as a traffic obstacle at the castle driveway in the following winter.
When Count Henrich zu Stolberg-Wernigerode , who was studying in Strasbourg at the time, visited the slate house in November 1792, he wrote in his diary: “While walking through the garden, I saw the beginning of the new layouts that were being made in the pleasure garden This is the first evidence of the conversion of the pleasure garden into a landscape park with English characteristics. At the end of the 18th century, a change in the view of art had begun in Germany as well. With the slogan “Back to nature”, poets, philosophers and painters united against the “unnatural” of the architecturally determined grounds of the regular baroque gardens and introduced the painterly style in word and deed under the name of landscape or English garden.
In the vicinity of Wernigerode, it was the park in Harbke , which was the first to be converted into an English garden in 1765. A year earlier, the design of an extensive landscape garden had already started in Wörlitz near Dessau. The count's family knew the Wörlitz Park from their own eyes. However, the count was still reluctant to redesign his baroque garden in this way. It was only in 1776 that Count Henrich Ernst zu Stolberg-Wernigerode, who was now in power, had a few statues moved and a small colonnade built on the northeastern edge of the pleasure garden. In the 1880s, the pleasure garden was increasingly neglected as its maintenance was quite expensive. The austerity measures taken by Count Christian Friedrich, who had ruled since 1778, also affected this garden. The count himself and his family stayed several months a year in Halberstadt, where he was cathedral dean. During the summer he spent many weeks in Ilsenburg, so that the Wernigerode pleasure garden was hardly used. The count therefore decided to auction all of the oranges and to have the pleasure garden redesigned into a landscape park. The public auction took place on July 23, 1787 and three years later, on June 1, 1790, the auction of all statues and sculptures in the pleasure garden took place. Many of these works of art went outside. Today we only find a damaged pair of putti in the pleasure garden in addition to the lion gate, which was completed again in 1991, which was re-erected there in May 1993.
The orangery building was rarely visited by the count's family. It served new purposes. B. dried various seeds in the cellar. The last marriage in the orangery can be traced back to February 5, 1801. During the transit of King Friedrich Wilhelm III. of Prussia, he dined on May 30, 1805 together with Queen Luise and Prince Wilhelm as well as 100 people at the court in the great hall of the orangery. During the Westphalian occupation of the city of Wernigerode, the building was also used for military exercises, for example in 1815 for the training of a volunteer hunter group under Count Ferdinand zu Stolberg-Wernigerode, who no longer needed to go to war.
Since the great hall of the orangery was empty most of the time, the ruling Count Henrich zu Stolberg-Wernigerode had the idea of transferring the library at Wernigerode Castle, which was constantly increasing through purchases, into the orangery. In 1826 extensive construction work took place in the building, including two rows of six classicist columns each built into the hall. The library at Wernigerode Castle was closed on November 29, 1826 and reopened on May 23, 1827 “in the newly established local, in the former orangery hall”. As a publicly accessible library, it was one of the most important private libraries in Central Germany. Here worked u. a. For over 50 years the archivist and librarian Eduard Jacobs, who is extremely deserving of historical research in the Harz . During his term of office in 1872/73 the construction of the so-called palm house, which was located in front of the library building in the southwest. The designers of this building were the greenhouse designer Bruns from Bremen and the Count's building inspector Messow. In 1913 this building finally lost its function as a palm house and was converted into an archive building. This is where the princely main archive was housed, which had been managed in the library's attic floor since the middle of the 19th century. Up until 1929 the buildings of the orangery and the palm house formed the ideal ensemble of library and archive for scientific research.
In 1936, around two thirds of the pleasure garden became the property of the city of Wernigerode, and in 1945 the rest of the property followed through the expropriation of Botho Fürst zu Stolberg-Wernigerode.
About 300 m east of the pleasure garden is the natural area monument " Chestnut Grove ".
literature
- Hilde Thoms: A walk through the Wernigerode pleasure garden. In: Neue Wernigeröder Zeitung, Volume 17.2006, Part 1 in No. 16, p. 24; Part 2 in No. 17, p. 21; Part 3 in No. 18, p. 24; Part 4 in No. 19, p. 24.
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 50 ′ 3 ″ N , 10 ° 47 ′ 54 ″ E