Hohenaltheim Castle

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Hohenaltheim Palace, aerial view (2016)
Access to Hohenaltheim Castle
View over Hohenaltheim Castle with the main building in the background
Castle chapel
View from the south
Border stone with the coat of arms of the von Oettingen-Wallerstein in front of the entrance to the castle
View of the baroque-style park
"Green castle wall"

Hohenaltheim Castle is located at the northern entrance to Hohenaltheim in the Donau-Ries district . It is the seat of the noble house of Oettingen-Wallerstein . The entire area is not open to the public, but it is clearly visible from the outside, especially during the leaf-free seasons.

history

A small water castle once stood where today's castle stands. This was demolished in 1710 and had to make way for a new baroque building, which Prince Albrecht Ernst II of Oettingen-Wallerstein had built in 1710. The construction work took about twenty years. The construction director from 1700 to 1712 was the engineer Wilhelm Heinrich Behringer , who probably also designed most of the plans:

As with his other building projects, Prince Albrecht Ernst II wanted to see his dreams realized as quickly as possible in Hohenaltheim, and this was only possible at the expense of the quality of the building material and thus at the expense of durability - especially since there was always a lack of money. Of course, in the year 1711 everything was far from finished and so in the following twenty years until the Prince's death the craftsmen were always busy adding, replacing or changing something. Much has changed in the furnishings of the castle rooms in the course of later times, but hardly anything has changed in their division (Volckmar 1995, p. 384).

Many important personalities stayed in Hohenaltheim, including Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart , who in October 1777 applied to be the new conductor in vain. Other guests were: King Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia and his son Crown Prince Friedrich , Margrave Karl Wilhelm Friedrich of Brandenburg-Ansbach , Duke Ludwig Rudolf von Blankenburg etc.

Building description

The main building takes up almost a third of the entire building complex. The upper floor is occupied by the hall as the representative part of the house. In addition, there are the two prince buildings, the kitchen, the riding arena and orangery, a chapel and the garden room. The entire Aral is surrounded by a baroque palace park :

The description from 1741 names two avenues of beech and three lined with fruitful espalier trees, of which the middle one was used for passage ... When a landscaped garden was laid out on the adjacent property around 1800, parts of the old garden were also added to it. In the course of the 19th century, however, people found their way back to the regular layout in the median (Volckmer 1995, p. 400).

The current state of Hohenaltenheim Palace essentially corresponds to the demands that the building theory of the 18th century placed on a royal residence - only on a smaller scale:

The main building, the Corps de Logis, stands with lower side buildings around a courtyard of honor, the Cour d'honneur, which is used to receive the guests and must therefore be large enough for a carriage to drive up in it and turn around easily. The main building stands between the courtyard and the garden and, depending on the different functions of these two open spaces, it has two types of facade. It turns its representative, strictly structured front side towards the courtyard. In contrast, the façade is loosened up towards the more private garden space, leading further into the embroidery patterns of the flower parterres, the parterres de Broderie (Volckmar 1995, p. 391).

literature

  • Volker von Volckmar: From the land of the counts and princes of Oettingen . Wallerstein 1995.

Web links

Commons : Hohenaltheim Palace  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ http://www.iwoe.de/Heimatbuch/Hohenaltheim.html

Coordinates: 48 ° 47 ′ 7.5 ″  N , 10 ° 32 ′ 10.4 ″  E