Palais am Festungsgraben

Palais am Festungsgraben (2009)

The Palais am Festungsgraben , formerly Palais Donner , is located in Berlin-Mitte directly behind the chestnut wood behind the Neue Wache , next to the Maxim-Gorki-Theater in the Sing-Akademie building . The palace is named after the nearby moat, a canal of the Spree that has now been filled in. It was part of the Berlin fortifications built in the 17th century and later used to handle goods. The palace houses the original furnishings as well as the theater in the palace since 1990 and the Saarland gallery since 2004 . A Tajik tea room, which was exhibited in the Soviet pavilion of the Leipziger Messe in 1974 and later handed over to what was then the central building of DSF , was closed on May 1, 2012, but could be reopened in the Kunsthof Berlin .

history

The building stands on the site of the former Berlin city fortifications. By royal order, King Friedrich II of Prussia gave the property to his valet Johann Gottfried Donner on November 7, 1751 . He had the palace built from 1751 to 1753 according to plans by Christian Friedrich Feldmann . Donner and his daughter's family lived in one half of the palace, which was built with the help of a loan from Johann Ernst Gotzkowsky , while the Prussian general mint master Johann Philipp Graumann lived in the other half . However, the palace was not only used for living, but Donner also ran a timber shop with his son-in-law in the yard and also stored grain under the roof. Graumann's successor tenant was the tax and customs department. In 1759, the Schuch theater company was added from Gendarmenmarkt . In 1787, Donner sold the building to the royal tax authorities, which furnished the official apartment for the Prussian finance minister on the upper floor . Among others, Freiherr vom und zum Stein lived here for four years. In 1797 the right wing was raised by one floor.

The building as the seat of the Prussian Ministry of Finance (1930)

From 1808 the palace became the official seat of the Prussian Ministry of Finance. In the years 1863 and 1864 the building was rebuilt according to plans by Georg Heinrich Bürde and Hermann von der Hude (due to the fact that Robert von Patow was Prussian finance minister at that time, and his country seat Schloss Zinnitz , which was rebuilt around the same time, strong stylistic similarities with both the Palais am Festungsgraben as well as the Singakademie, there are professional opinions that this work can also be traced back to Bürde and / or van der Hude).

The palace underwent a further structural redesign in 1934 by the then Prussian finance minister Johannes Popitz , who had the Schinkel festival hall of the demolished Weydingerhaus from Unterwasserstraße built into the ground floor .

The building as the House of Culture of the Soviet Union with a decorated facade on the occasion of the fifth anniversary (1952)

During the Second World War , the palace was damaged by air raids and the fighting around Berlin at the end of the war. The Soviet military administration in Germany had the building repaired and rebuilt after the end of the war and then used it for their own purposes. In 1947 the palace was opened to the public as the House of Culture of the Soviet Union . From 1950 to 1990 the palace, as the House of German-Soviet Friendship (or House of Culture of the Soviet Union ), was the central seat of the GDR organization of the same name , the Society for German-Soviet Friendship .

After German reunification , the listed palace became the property of the State of Berlin and is used for cultural, museum and gastronomic purposes under the new name Palais am Festungsgraben . Since 1991 the theater has been located in the Palais on the ground floor of the building. From 2004 to 2016, 200 m² of exhibition space in the Palais was used for the Saarland Gallery .

In 2017 the property was transferred to the special fund for services of general interest (SODA) in order to secure it in the long term for strategic reasons in the ownership of the State of Berlin.