Rousseau Island (Great Zoo)
The Rousseau Island is an artificially created, small round island in a watercourse of the Great Zoo in Berlin . It bears its name in honor of the French - Swiss philosopher, writer and educator Jean-Jacques Rousseau , to whom a listed column erected on the island is dedicated.
location
The Rousseau Island is located in the area of the Neue Partie , designed in 1792 , southeast of the Großer Stern , at the approximate intersection of the Großer Stern-Allee and the Jungfernallee (also called Kleine Stern Allee ). The larger Luiseninsel is located around 430 meters downstream (east) .
history
The royal planner Justus Ehrenreich Sello , who had already laid out a few new avenues in the western zoo, designed the first section of the baroque forest park in 1792 as a new part in the English landscape style . Sello chose a previously underdeveloped terrain for this. There, a ditch serving for drainage was formed into a long lake with a winding shoreline and a small island. An artificial hill offered a good overview of the area. The result was one of the most attractive parts of the Great Zoo to date.
The island was dedicated to Jean-Jacques Rousseau around 1797, who had advocated a "return to nature". It was modeled on the Île des peupliers in the park of Ermenonville near Paris , where the sarcophagus of Rousseau, who died in 1778, rested under poplars. On the Rousseau Island in the Tiergarten, on the other hand, a symbolic grave pedestal with a decorative urn, probably initially made of wood, was erected, as was previously the case in Wörlitzer Park . Instead of poplars there were alders. The lake developed into the popular winter ice-skating area for Berliners in the 19th century. The original Rousseau monument has been lost over time.
Peter Joseph Lenné changed the area around the Rousseau Island in 1835 as part of his extensive redesign of the zoo in the English style. He created an elongated arm of water with many windings and bulges, reaching south to Luiseninsel , which was widened like a lake on the Neue Partie . The Rousseau Island received two larger counterparts. The walking paths in this area were brought particularly close to the shore in order to offer many lines of sight of the waterway and the islands.
When the park was redesigned in the 1950s after the destruction of the Second World War , Willy Alverdes , in charge of the zoo administration, also paid particular attention to the walking paths in the area around Rousseau Island. A lot of those rhododendrons were planted here , which became the trademark of the re-emergence of the park under the leadership of Alverdes. Since 1951, there has been a memorial close to Rousseau Island, with which Berlin thanks those cities whose tree donations made it possible to replant the Tiergarten during this time.
In 1987 a new Rousseau column was erected on the island to replace the memorial stone with a decorative urn that was lost in the 19th century. The sculptor Günter Anlauf designed the column .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Folkwin Wendland: The Great Tiergarten in Berlin. Its history and development in five centuries . Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin 1993, ISBN 3-7861-1631-8 , pp. 72, 80-82. Landesdenkmalamt Berlin (Ed.): Monuments in Berlin. Mitte district. Districts Moabit, Hansaviertel and Tiergarten . Imhof, Petersberg 2005, ISBN 3-86568-035-6 , p. 45.
- ↑ Wendland: The Great Zoo . Pp. 72-73. Monuments in Tiergarten . P. 45.
- ↑ Wendland: The Great Zoo . Pp. 116-125; Klaus von Krosigk: Peter Joseph Lenné's beautification of the zoo 1833–1839. The plan documents in the Berlin State Archives . In: Berlin in the past and present. Yearbook of the Berlin State Archives . 1989, ISSN 0175-8446 , pp. 7-20.
Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 43.9 " N , 13 ° 21 ′ 29.4" E