Wartenberg Palace
The Palais Wartenberg (later Alte Post ) was in Berlin at the Long Bridge (now the Town Hall Bridge), King Corner Castle Road (now Rathausstraße -Ecke Spreeufer) located, according to plans by Andreas Schlüter built stately, three-story palace , which today no longer exists is.
history
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In 1701, King Friedrich I gave his favorite, Chief Postmaster Count Johann Kasimir Kolb von Wartenberg , the order to demolish the rear building of the post house and have it rebuilt according to Schlüter's design. For this purpose, the house of Hofrat Schardius on the Long Bridge was acquired in 1702. The baroque palace was completed as a residence and office for Wartenberg by autumn 1704 under the direction of Eosander .
Schlüter had designed a cubic-looking building with pilasters and wide window openings. There was a balcony above the portal with two golden post horns. Above that, a heraldic cartouche flanked by genii adorned the entrance area. The roof edge was crowned by nine statues of Greek deities and the facade was decorated with reliefs . A festively decorated suite was set up on the first floor for the Prime Minister and Hereditary Postmaster General . Behind the front of the Spree was the three-axis central hall, to which a cabinet connected to the south and a corner room to the north. The back of the palace was connected to the post office at Poststrasse 1 by a narrow courtyard .
After Wartenberg fell from grace and was dismissed in 1710, the new postmaster general von Kamecke was assigned the main floor as an official residence, the remaining rooms were used for office purposes. When the post office gave up the building complex in 1815, Schlüter's neglected and dilapidated palace building was seriously endangered for the first time. After the main post office moved to Palais Grumbkow in Königstrasse 60 in 1816 , the abandoned "Old Post Office" briefly housed the Ministry of Spiritual Affairs and was then to be privatized. Karl Friedrich Schinkel stubbornly stood up for the preservation of the building, so that King Friedrich Wilhelm III. , convinced of the building's rank, finally decided in 1822 that the buyer would be obliged not to change anything without authorization.
The new owner JB Pascal left the facade largely unchanged. With Schinkel's consent, only the baroque cartouche was removed and the entire central axis on the Burgstrasse side redesigned. Numerous shops were set up. However, in 1889 the building was demolished. Parts of the sculptural work from the Schlueter workshop are now in the Bode Museum . In the Ephraim-Palais the copy of a stucco ceiling is reminiscent of Schlüter's Alte Post. In the Museum for Communication on Leipziger Strasse , visitors to the café sit under the original Schlueter ceiling, which was removed before the demolition and reinstalled here a few years ago.
Successor buildings
In 1892 a new building was completed on the same site. Due to the widening of Rathausstrasse, it had to give way to a similarly designed office building by architect Carl Bauer in 1899. The building, which was badly damaged in the war, was demolished after 1945. The current corner building, erected in the 1980s, housed the cash desk of the Palace of the Republic until 1990 . On the gable you can read the inscription "Berlin - City of Peace" with a pigeon relief by Gerhard Thieme . Berlin was given the nickname "City of Peace" in 1979 by the " World Peace Council ", an organization controlled by the Soviet Union.
literature
- Heinz Ladendorf: The sculptor and builder Andreas Schlueter , Berlin 1935
- Gernot Ernst and Ute Laur-Ernst: The City of Berlin in Printmaking 1570-1870 , Volume 2, Lukas-Verlag, Berlin 2009, ISBN 978-3-86732-055-9
- Guido Hinterkeuser: Andreas Schlüter and the Alte Post . New acquisitions by the Museum for Communication Berlin, published in Museum Journal 16 (2002), No. 3, pp. 46–48
- Martin Mende: Spreeufer in Nikolaiviertel (Burgstrasse) in the messages of the Association for the History of Berlin, 4/2010