Bellin Castle
The Bellin Castle , the mansion of a large manor in Bellin in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern . The neo-baroque building from 1912 is a listed building and has been used as a hotel and for events since 1997 .
history
In May 1910, the Hamburg entrepreneur and businessman Henry B. Sloman bought the approximately 1,050 hectare estate for 1,475,000 marks from Gerhard Freiherr von Marschall . Shortly afterwards he also acquired the neighboring Steinbeck manor (400 hectares) from the Wunderlich family for 500,000 marks.
The mansion, which was newly built by order of Slomans, replaced a classicist predecessor, which was built by Christian Friedrich von der Osten-Sacken at the beginning of the 19th century in place of an older moated castle. The so-called “goldfish pond” in the park of the castle, which still exists today, is probably part of the castle moat that was not filled at the time.
Sloman had bought the property as a retirement home; after his death in 1931 he was buried in a mausoleum built for him in Bellin. In 1935 his eldest son Enrique Sloman took over the management of the estate. When a capital red deer trophy from Belliner's own hunt was shown at the exhibition of a hunting ring in 1940 , the Reichsjägermeister Hermann Göring became aware of the game-rich property and in vain offered the Sloman family to buy the property from them. In 1941 mountain troops were billeted on their way to Norway. In 1944 and 1945, students from Rostock were housed in the castle to protect them from bombing attacks.
At the end of the war in 1945, Soviet troops first moved into the building. The interior was looted and the mausoleum was desecrated: The coffins of Sloman, his wife Renata Sloman b. Hillinger and their daughter Adelaida were broken into, the remains distributed in the area and a gas station set up in the mausoleum itself. In 1950 the administration school " Wilhelm Häcker " was set up in the castle, in which around 90 students were trained. In 1951 the roof of the castle burned down for an unknown cause. From 1963 to 1979 there was a branch of the Schwerin District Party School in the castle.
Namibian refugee children
On December 18, 1979, eighty Namibian children of kindergarten age came to Bellin via Berlin-Schönefeld Airport . At the instigation of Margot Honecker , the castle was set up as a children's home for a short time .
After South African troops attacked the SWAPO headquarters in Cassinga as part of the so-called Cassinga massacre on May 4, 1978 , SWAPO President Sam Nujoma approached the Central Committee of the SED with the request to take in partial and complete orphans and refugee children to help them to bring them to safety from the South African occupying forces. The GDR leadership supported the project in the hope that Namibia would become a communist state in the future and envisaged the education of the children as future cadres of this state.
As part of the program, around 430 Namibian children came to the GDR by 1986. A total of 298 of them were accommodated in Bellin. After completing the primary school classes, Bellin moved them to Stassfurt for further education . The Belliner castle children were raised by Namibian and German teachers and a Namibian instructor. In addition to German school lessons, the children received little training in Oshivambo , Namibian dance and singing. There were roll calls and military drill, and the use of rifles was also taught. Margot Honecker and Kovambo Theopoldine Nujoma were often visiting.
The stay was initially only planned temporarily, as a victory for SWAPO was expected soon. Shortly before German reunification , the children between the ages of 8 and 17 were hastily flown back to Namibia by the de Maizière government on August 26, 1990 . Due to the years of alienation from their Namibian roots and their poor language skills, the integration of the young people in their homeland was difficult. Some of them later returned to Germany.
One of the Belliner children in the home, Lucia Engombe, published her experiences in the book Kind No. 95. My German-African Odyssey , which was published in 2005 by Ullstein Taschenbuchverlag . The story of another child, Oshosheni Hiveluah (1982–2019; film producer in Windhoek ), was the subject of a special issue of Geo magazine in 2008. In spring 2007, Marion Nagel and Martin made the low-budget film When Two Mountains Separate Us Reinbold on this subject.
The accommodation of the refugee children in the castle until shortly before reunification meant that the building was always serviced and heated, so that the building fabric was preserved.
After the turn
In the fall of 1990, Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands and her husband Claus visited the castle. There was a meeting with the German Federal President Richard von Weizsäcker .
After leasing the agricultural land and facilities of the former LPG in the early 1990s , the former Hamburg private banker Friedrich-Wilhelm Sloman, a grandson of the builder, also bought the castle back in 1996 from the special assets of the Treuhandanstalt . The Hamburg architects Ehrensberger & Oertz began converting the building into an apartment hotel in autumn 1999 . The hotel opened in January 2000.
architecture
The manor house is an important work by the regional architect Paul Korff . It was built according to the client's specifications in a restrained neo-baroque style with neoclassical echoes. Construction began in 1911, with completion in 1912. The already plastered building includes two floors above a basement floor and a mansard - hipped roof . To the courtyard, the mansion has a powerful central buttress with a triangular pediment and a supported by four pillars Altan . A flight of stairs was created on the garden side . During the renovation work in 1999, the originally glass-covered winter garden was given a concrete ceiling and a balustrade, the balusters of which are modeled on those of the outside staircase, and which today serves as a terrace for the rooms on the first floor. The largely glazed room below with access to the outside staircase is 35 meters long and is now used as a dining room.
ensemble
The original baroque ensemble structure of the inner manor from the 18th century has been almost completely preserved. The interior area, which used to be partly used as a courtyard and partly as a service courtyard , extends from the gatehouse around 160 meters south to the present mansion, which was erected directly behind it before the previous classical building was demolished. With the new construction of the manor house, the courtyard was lengthened by around 20 meters, and the adjoining park was reduced by around 30 meters. The small, originally three-winged, plastered cavalier's houses facing each other symmetrically on the courtyard side date from the Baroque era. An original triangular gable with the year 1746 in the house east of the courtyard has been preserved. The cavalier's house to the west is in poor condition.
The two large farm buildings with hipped roofs on the long sides of the courtyard, which adjoin the gatehouse and were originally set back around 20 meters, were extended and renewed by Henry B. Sloman. The farm building to the east is no longer preserved today, it was replaced by two smaller buildings (closer to the courtyard) in the post-war period. In the cattle yard area to the west, Sloman also renewed stable buildings. He also built a machine center and a machine hall on the estate. The large green areas in the middle of the courtyard are now bordered by linden trees planted by Sloman.
Gatehouse
The impressive gatehouse of Bellin is probably originally a plastered brick building with a mansard roof and a hood-topped lantern tower from the middle of the 18th century. It is one of the few manor houses in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania that has survived from the Baroque period, although it has been redesigned several times. The central projection on the street side contains a gate passage as well as two flanking side entrances only on the street side. The gable contains a sandstone coat of arms of the Sala family. The lantern base contains a clock on the street and courtyard side. The weather vane bears the years 1910 and 1982.
park
The baroque park in the south of the manor house, laid out around 1750, was redesigned into a landscape park in the 19th century. With the new building of the manor house reaching into the park in 1912, it was given a neo-baroque design. A framing rose garden no longer exists today. The park, which is heavily forested on the sides, extended - bounded in the north by the large park pond or the “goldfish pond” - to the fields in the south of the facility, which Sloman had made accessible through drainage . The park area is now surrounded by a stone wall. The park's trees and trees include English oaks , red beeches , tulip magnolias , giant arborvitae , Japanese cedars and pyramidal oaks . A small pavilion, presumably from the Baroque era, stands by the park pond. The park pond is enclosed by walls and stairs. Sloman had the park pond ensemble designed based on the water staircase of the Kleine Alster on Hamburg's Rathausmarkt .
Entrance area and staircase on the ground floor
Paneled large hall salon with fireplace, view of the park
Staircase on the first floor
Hall
Use as a hotel / media presence
The building, now known as the “Bellin Hunting Lodge”, offers guests apartments of up to 180 square meters with a total of 42 beds. Around 2,000 of the 3,600 square meters of floor space will be made available for hotel use. The park, which guests can enter, covers around 10 hectares. The castle can be rented completely for celebrations.
In 2003, during the production of the NDR - Polizeiruf-110 - Episode Verloren , the hotel was temporarily used as an apartment for Chief Inspector Tobias Törner (played by Henry Hübchen ), who according to the script had been transferred from Berlin to his new office in Schwerin at short notice. In spring 2010, NFP Neue Film Produktion shot a documentary wedding short film here, directed by Anja Schütze.
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d e Bellin ( Memento of the original from September 28, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. on orte-in-mv.de
- ↑ Information on the book Kind No. 95: A German-African Odyssey at DW-World.de (Deutsche Welle Online)
- ↑ Film producer in Windhoek on geo.de (GEO special issue 5/2008)
- ↑ When two mountains separate us
- ↑ a b Detlef Jens: The fine Mecklenburg art ( Memento from September 3, 2010 in the Internet Archive ). In: Hamburger Abendblatt Online from October 4, 2003
- ↑ according to Article Hanseaten mit Herrenhaus on Welt Online from October 14, 2001
- ^ Gerhard Meir: Bellin Castle, Bellin. In: Süddeutsche Zeitung Magazin , issue 7/2005
- ↑ polizeiruf110-lexikon.de ( Memento of the original from October 19, 2007 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
literature
- Circle of friends of the Sloman family (ed.), Michael Fleissner: Bellin. The hunting lodge in Mecklenburg. Berlin 2010.
Web links
- Literature about Bellin Castle in the State Bibliography MV
- Website of today's hotel
Coordinates: 53 ° 42 ′ 28.6 " N , 12 ° 11 ′ 21.5" E