Eller Castle
Schloss Eller until the first half of the 20th century, mostly house Eller called, is a 1826 instead of a medieval moated castle built mansion in the Düsseldorf district of Eller .
Location and surroundings
The former Eller Castle was the nucleus of the village of Eller, which was an independent municipality until 1909 and is located southeast of Düsseldorf city center. Today's palace with its outbuildings is surrounded by the Eller Palace Park, which was laid out in the shape of an English landscape park and, with an area of more than 30 hectares, is one of the largest parks in Düsseldorf. The island park at the castle was designed in the first half of the 19th century, and the forest park to the south about 80 years later, at the beginning of the 20th century. In addition to the castle pond, the park has a bird protection pond, both of which are fed by the Eselsbach. Adjacent is the former Eller estate, which used to belong to the castle and is still used for agriculture today. The castle and park, which was once far from the gates of Düsseldorf in a rural area, is now a green island surrounded by typical suburban housing estates of the 20th century, delimited by the Cologne-Duisburg railway line , the A 46 motorway and Heidelberger and Deutzer Strasse. The nearby city forests of Eller Forst, followed by Unterbacher See and Hasseler Forst, have been preserved as remnants of the earlier forests.
history
Eller Castle from the Middle Ages to 1800
The castle Eller was the first time in 1309 as castrum Elnere mentioned, but was certainly much older, as the Lords of Elnere since 1151 as an influential and begütertes knights were called and were probably the largest landowners in what is now the city of Dusseldorf. The von Eller family died out in 1819 and is continued in the name of today's Barons von Eller- Eberstein . As early as 1230 there was reports of a castle chapel , later consecrated to St. Gertrudis , which was moved to the village in 1827 as the parish church of St. Gertrud . A memorial stone for the old Gertrudis chapel donated by the local Kolping family in 1950 is now at its former location in front of the castle. After the Lords of Eller were able to successfully oppose the establishment of full sovereignty by the Counts and Dukes of Berg with their political and military power until the 15th century , the castle was finally conquered in 1424 by Duke Adolf von Jülich-Berg and the knight Heinrich von Elnere / Eller can only be returned against a fief . Weakened by frequent inheritance divisions, the Lords of Eller had to sell their ancestral seat in 1448 to Knight Adolf von Quade, who laid down the old castle and instead had a moated castle built by 1469. This castle, mainly consisting of the still preserved tower, lay on a, formed by the inner moat, almost square island and was by the outer moat of another island with bailey surrounded and farmyard. There are no views of the old Eller moated castle, only a map drawn up in 1821/22 with the drawing of the castle buildings, according to which one must imagine this castle similar to the Quadenhof in neighboring Gerresheim , when it was still surrounded by water. After Bertram Quade died in 1599 without heirs, Duke Johann Wilhelm von Jülich-Kleve-Berg Eller moved in as a settled fief . After twenty years of legal dispute over the property, Johann von Harff finally took over the inheritance in 1621. One of his descendants, Baron Josef Clemens von Weichs , exchanged Eller Castle in 1710 with the Jülich Elector Johann Wilhelm (Jan Wellem) for the Schönforst House near Aachen. The prince had the manor converted into a state domain the following year. In the years that followed, the castle fell into disrepair, became the official residence of the Bergisches Oberjägermeister in 1743 and ultimately only served as the home of the district forester. The first Eller cemetery was located immediately to the west of the outer bailey on the site of today's district museum since 1775, until it was moved to the site of today's comprehensive school in 1809.
New construction of the classicist mansion by Baron Plessen 1823–1826
After the Congress of Vienna , the palace complex fell to the Prussian government in 1815. This sold the ailing Eller Castle in 1823 to the royal Prussian Chamberlain Baron Carl von Plessen (* 1794 in Katelbogen ; † 1843 in Reez ), who came from Mecklenburg-Schwerin and who had previously lived in Eller Castle and where his three were between 1821 and 1825 Children were born. Immediately after the purchase, Plessen had the medieval complex removed down to the castle tower and part of the inner moat filled in. After the demolition of the old castle complex, today's classicist castle building was built between 1824 and 1826 including the medieval castle tower according to plans attributed to the master builder Adolph von Vagedes and the largely preserved landscape island park with the garden parterre in place of the former outer bailey. Several plane trees, red beeches and sequoias that characterize today's castle park date from this time. The much-cited design of the palace gardens by Maximilian Friedrich Weyhe , for whom a memorial stone was later erected on the small island next to the palace, is conceivable, but not proven. There were no plans or planting lists for the Eller Palace Park in his estate. The memorial stone with Weyhe's year of death 1846, which was originally crowned by a bowl, was once located in a neighboring, extensive park between Kikweg and Eselsbach east of the Jägerhaus inn and only became part of the palace park after this park was deforested in the 1920s or early 1930s Eller moved.
Plessen was able to acquire considerable additional land and achieved that House Eller was included in the register of manorial estates eligible for the state assembly by cabinet order. Despite his great efforts, Baron Plessen sold Eller Castle as early as 1838 to the domain councilor and tenant of the Bergisches Schulfonds Johann Heinrich Wolters from Düsseldorf. Plessen returned to his Mecklenburg homeland, where he had the Reez manor built from 1838 to 1840 with the proceeds from the sale . In 1842, after only four years, Domain Councilor Wolters sold Eller's property to Count Werner von der Recke-Volmarstein , a relative of the previous owner Carl von Plessen. He, too, only remained the owner of the castle for one year and apparently sold it again because of the building license granted in 1843 for the railway line adjoining the castle grounds to the south.
Princess Luise of Prussia as mistress of the castle from 1843 to 1882
Princess Luise von Prussia , born in 1799 and born Princess von Anhalt-Bernburg , had been with Prince Friedrich of Prussia , a nephew of King Friedrich Wilhelm III , since 1817 . , married, with whom she had two sons, Prince Alexander (1820-1896) and Prince Georg (1826-1902). From 1821 the family lived at Jägerhof Palace in Düsseldorf, where Prince Friedrich had been transferred as division commander. For the young Princess Luise and her sons, Eller Castle, with its English park and subsequent forest, was the preferred excursion destination until she was finally able to purchase Eller Castle and Manor herself in 1843. At first she defended herself unsuccessfully against the construction of the railway line opened in 1845 south of the palace area, but then she devoted herself to her new property with great love. Because of the revolution of 1848 , she and her family had to move back to Berlin . There Princess Luise fell ill with a severe nervous disease that she had inherited from her mother, and during a visit to Eller in 1855 her illness worsened so much that the planned summer stay became a permanent one. Until her death on December 9, 1882, she lived in seclusion with her small court, headed by the chamberlain Count von Roedern , at Eller Castle. Her husband stayed in Berlin, but annually celebrated the couple's birthday in Eller. Princess Luise devoted herself to parks and gardens and, as a talented draftsman, to painting. Some of the views of the castle and the surrounding area that her son Georg bequeathed to the Düsseldorf City Museum in 1902 have been preserved . Her drawing and painting teacher Friedrich Heunert produced an oil painting from Eller Castle, which is now also in the possession of the City Museum and which was reproduced as a porcelain art plate on the occasion of the 1987 Federal Garden Show .
Eller Castle owned by the Vohwinkel / v family. Kruger from 1883 to 1938
Luise's son Prince Alexander sold the palace and estate in June 1883 to the Gelsenkirchen timber wholesaler and secret councilor Friedrich Vohwinkel , who had the terrace to the east of the main house built together with a pillar loggia with a balcony that had been removed after 1950. Kommerzienrat Vohwinkel was one of the founders of the Rheinische Bahngesellschaft in March 1896 . The entrepreneur initially only used Eller Castle as a summer residence and as a destination for his numerous hunting parties before he finally moved his residence there in 1898 and died there in September 1900.
After Vohwinkel's death, the property passed to his son-in-law, the Prussian Privy Councilor Hermann von Krüger, who was born in Berlin in 1859 and who married Clara Vohwinkel (* 1871 in Gelsenkirchen) in 1891 in Eller. Hermann von Krüger gave the palace, outbuildings and park their present form. In 1902 he had some extensions in the style of the main house added to the main building: the two-story wing behind the tower, the extension of the west wing around a window axis and a wood-paneled hall on the ground floor on the east side of the palace. From 1902, according to plans by architect Josef Kleesattel, he also had the old farm buildings in the outer bailey replaced by the buildings that still exist today with apartments for the employees and stables, and in 1909 the boathouse with a gardener's apartment above and a separate chauffeur's house in front of the west gate, today's district museum , on the site of which the first Eller cemetery was located from 1775 to 1809 . A new manor was laid out west of the outer ditch for commercial operations. The castle park, whose southern boundary was previously the Eselsbach, was expanded to the south by afforestation. A forest park with extensive meadow areas and a new pond system was created, accessible through curved park paths. It increasingly formed a natural unit with the former island park at the castle. In 1909 Eller Castle was incorporated into Düsseldorf.
The Lutheran couple donated the land and capital in the predominantly Catholic Eller for the construction of the nearby Evangelical Eller Castle Church , which was inaugurated in 1905, and for the parsonage belonging to it. Von Krüger also initiated archival research on the history of Eller Castle and its owners by the future State Archives Councilor Hans Schubert , who published his research results in the book Haus Eller near Düsseldorf in 1911 . The von Krüger couple were expropriated from the majority of the lands belonging to the castle in 1919, but received compensation. Since it remained without descendants and the area increasingly assumed a more urban character, they sold the palace together with the remaining lands for 2.4 million Reichsmarks to the city of Düsseldorf, which was particularly interested in acquiring new building land, during von Krüger's contractually lifelong right to live in the palace was assured. In formal legal terms, the city did not become the owner of the palace and park until 1948, after the last installment of the purchase price had been paid - a few days before the currency reform, when this money was de facto worthless. Hermann von Krüger died after a long illness on April 2, 1940 in Düsseldorf-Eller. His widow Clara had moved to Süppelbach near Wermelskirchen long before his death , where she built a children's home for orphaned boys in 1913 and which she later converted into a rest home, where she also died in 1954.
Eller Castle has been in municipal ownership since 1938
The city of Düsseldorf initially intended to expand the Eller Palace Park into a kind of public park and to build a larger outdoor pool in the area of the forest park. However, the Second World War prevented the implementation of far-reaching plans.
In the following years the building served temporarily as a home for the Hitler Youth , after the Second World War it was first confiscated by American and then British troops and used as a retirement home after their withdrawal. In 1950 the entire palace park, essentially as it had been sold to the city by Krüger in 1938, was opened to the public with a large folk festival. The network of paths in the forest park was expanded and a spacious children's playground was created. The park received a designed, square-like main entrance on Deutzer Straße. The older island park at the castle building remained almost unchanged in terms of design. The Eller water playground was opened in 1959 in the orchards north-west of the castle that belong to the castle and was demolished and rebuilt in 2014.
Eller Castle was completely renovated in 1969, in order to accommodate the Düsseldorf Fashion School, which had been founded twenty years earlier, on September 1, 1970 in the manor house. However, the renovation has not yet been carried out on the basis of monument protection , which is why the interior of the castle was rather defaced by the functional adaptation to the school use. The Eller adventure playground was set up in October 1973 on the grounds in front of the main portal belonging to the palace area. After the fashion school left the building in 2003 and moved to Mönchengladbach, the manor house stood empty for seven years. The farm buildings of the castle were inhabited by municipal employees of the gardening department until 2007 and then stood empty for almost ten years, during which the structural condition, especially of the half-timbered structures, deteriorated and static safety measures were required.
In October 2003, the city of Düsseldorf initially awarded the contract for a 30-year rental of the palace to Provinzial Rheinland , which intended to set up its training center there. During the lengthy rental negotiations, the city accommodated the Provinzial and finally offered her the conclusion of a long lease for 50 years. The contract was publicly controversial, especially after it became known that the Mayor of Düsseldorf Joachim Erwin had a seat on the administrative board of the Provinzial group and received payments for it. However, after three and a half years, the contract negotiations in 2007 were unsuccessful because no solution could be found for the location of a guest house requested by the Provincial in the vicinity of the castle.
In January 2008, the castle was finally leased to the city subsidiary Industrieterrains Düsseldorf-Reisholz Aktiengesellschaft (IDR) , who had the manor house renovated under the direction of IDR board member Heinrich Pröpper and according to plans by the Düsseldorf architectural office RKW Rhode Kellermann Wawrowsky and under monument conservation aspects reopened on March 6, 2010. After the long lease of a maximum of 99 years has expired, the castle and all its ancillary buildings will be returned to the city of Düsseldorf in 2109 at the latest. The representative rooms from the 19th century were restored by exposing walled-up doorways, repainted wood paneling and wall friezes. In the keep, in which a new exposed concrete staircase with elevator was installed, the old masonry of the 15th century has been made visible under the wall sludge. The IDR is the operator of the manor house and rents the rooms for meetings, seminars, weddings, public receptions and private celebrations. The state government of North Rhine-Westphalia under Hannelore Kraft received Sweden's Crown Princess Viktoria and her husband Prince Daniel with a festive dinner on January 28, 2014 . The interior of the castle, which is otherwise not open to the public, has been open to the public for a fee since 2011 on an autumn weekend at the annual "Düsseldorf Autumn Festival Schloss Eller". Since 2015, Schloss Eller has also been the permanent seat for the closed meetings of the German Institute for Knowledge Development (INFW) founded in the same year.
In the former forestry and chauffeur house west of the castle, the Culture Working Group in District 8 opened the historic district museum "Forum 8 - District Museum for Eller, Lierenfeld, Unterbach and Vennhausen" with a permanent exhibition that is open on weekends. After the planned renovation of the farm buildings in the castle courtyard, the IDR wanted to set up a boarding house with apartments for business people and possibly a café in the boathouse, but was not in a position to carry out an economic renovation due to the requirements of the monument protection. The private investor Rolf Heitmann entered into the IDR's leasehold contract in 2016 and began the renovation of the farm buildings and the boathouse at the end of the same year, where he had built 13 rental apartments between 70 and 200 m² by 2018 in coordination with the preservation authorities. The castle itself and the forester's house remain with the IDR.
architecture
The mansion was built in the classicism style as a simple, long rectangular two-storey structure with a flat gable roof . The symmetrical main facade with originally nine window axes is structured by a three-axis central projection crowned with a triangular gable , to which three-axis side wings are attached on both sides. Krüger had a further window axis added to the western wing, but the symmetrical impression is not too impaired by the mighty trees surrounding it. In the central axis behind the building from 1826 is the medieval keep of the former moated castle , behind which another short wing, the so-called kitchen and servants' building, was added in 1902 by Hermann von Krüger in the style of the main house. The tower is crowned with a roof dome built as a mansard construction with roof turrets , which is still borrowed from the Baroque . The system, which is painted yellow, has a uniform overall effect despite the different ages of the components. The shutters added in 1902 were removed again during the renovation in 2009, while the clock from the same period in the triangular gable of the central projection was preserved.
Inside the house, the entrance hall with apse-shaped wall niches and restrained stucco décor as well as the large hall on the upper floor, now called the Prince's Hall, with pilasters , ornamental stucco décor on the walls and coffered ceiling and two original stoves in niches in the style of classicism from the 1820s have also been preserved the wood-paneled hall furnished in 1902 with a restrained neo-baroque decor on the ground floor, which has been called "Salon Princess Luise" since the renovation. The hall above on the upper floor (“Salon Prinz Georg”) has a decorative wooden beam ceiling with stylistic echoes of the geometric Art Nouveau . In the adjoining adjoining room, remnants of the wall and ceiling paintings were uncovered and made visible after the restoration. The other rooms have always had no interior decoration worth mentioning, and there was never a representative staircase until the organically shaped outside staircase was installed in the medieval tower in 2009, which with its exposed concrete surfaces and stainless steel railing is creatively differentiated from the rest of the house.
The medieval and picturesque two-storey farm buildings of the castle including the boathouse were not built until 1902 to 1909 in Gothic or Renaissance-like forms and replaced older buildings. The upper floors are designed as visible half-timbering and have a few bay windows and turrets, the plastered areas of the facades are painted pink. The architectural model was this type of house, in particular the "Bacharach House" that served as a wine house at the Düsseldorf trade exhibition of 1902, which the lord of the castle von Krüger had particularly liked. This Bacharach house, in turn, was an adaptation of the "Old House" in Bacharach , built in 1389 , which received its present-day appearance around 1586 with the striking Renaissance half-timbering.
The castle and farm yard are on an island formed by the outer moat of the former castle. The main house rests on retaining walls not far from the rear and east side and borders there directly on the moat that has widened to the pond. The garden parterre in front of the castle was originally determined by a central bed rotunda, which was abandoned in the first half of the 20th century.
The castle, along with the farm buildings, boathouse and forester's house, was entered in the list of monuments of the city of Düsseldorf in 1984, the castle park was designated as a garden monument and the complex surrounded by the castle moat as a ground monument. The monumental value of Eller Castle is based on the largely preserved ensemble from the classicistic redesigned castle complex at the beginning of the 19th century and the small island park that was created at the same time, as well as the approximately 80 years later - also landscaped - extension of the forest park to the south.
credentials
- ↑ Düsseldorf and the dead children from Eller RP online from June 11, 2015, accessed on August 29, 2015
- ^ Walter Kordt : Adolph von Vagedes, Ratingen 1961, p. 99
- ↑ Schlosspark Eller: Wrong track leads to Weyhe RP online from August 7, 2014
- ↑ How the city got Eller Castle, RP came online from October 9, 2013
- ↑ Archived copy ( memento of the original from March 11, 2015 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. About Clara von Krüger
- ↑ A playground becomes history Rheinische Post online from May 17, 2014
- ^ History of the Eller adventure playground , accessed on June 9, 2014
- ↑ Schloss Eller is open again ( Memento of the original from March 8, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. Article Rheinische Post and RP-Online.de from March 6, 2010.
- ↑ Düsseldorf Autumn Festival Schloss Eller 2014 www.castlewelt.com, accessed on September 20, 2014
- ↑ Foundation German Institute for Knowledge Development (INFW) non-profit GmbH , accessed on June 26, 2015
- ↑ Eller: History Museum is open Rheinische Post online from October 25, 2011
- ↑ Schloss Eller farm yard is finally gutted Westdeutsche Zeitung online from November 28, 2016, accessed on December 16, 2016
- ^ Fritz Wiesenberger: Schloßromantik next door , Düsseldorf 1980, p. 22
literature
- Karl Bernd Heppe: Our Eller - From the knight's seat to the district. Stadt-Sparkasse, Düsseldorf 1984.
- Harald Müller : Rector and chapel in Eller. A previously unknown testimony from the 13th century. In: Düsseldorfer Jahrbuch. 66th volume. Droste, Düsseldorf 1995, ISBN 3-7700-3039-7 , pp. 121-141.
- Hans Schubert : Eller House near Düsseldorf. History of a noble seat in the Lower Rhine region. Bagel, Düsseldorf 1911.
- Gregor Spohr: How nice to dream away here. Castles on the Lower Rhine. Pomp Verlag, Bottrop et al. 2001, ISBN 3-89355-228-6 , pp. 22-23.
Web links
- Homepage of the IDR of Schloss Eller
- District museum Forum 8 of the working group culture in the city district 8 of the city of Düsseldorf eV (in the former chauffeur house of the castle)
- Dieter Jaeger, Eller Castle, donkeys at the Eselsbach
- Entry in the monument list of the state capital Düsseldorf at the Institute for Monument Protection and Preservation
- Entry in the monument list of the state capital Düsseldorf at the Institute for Monument Protection and Preservation
Coordinates: 51 ° 11 ′ 43 " N , 6 ° 50 ′ 58" E