Hohenfels Castle

The Hohenfels Castle rises since 1840 at the height Ernst in Coburg above the Callenberger road. It was planned at the same time as the ducal Saxon court theater by Balthasar Harres and was the residence of the opera singer Natalie Eschborn , ennobled as Baroness von Grünhof , for 50 years .

history

Duke Ernst Alexander von Württemberg (1807–1868), a nephew of Duke Ernst I von Coburg and brother of Duchess Marie , commissioned the architect Balthasar Harres, a pupil of Karl Friedrich Schinkel , on the green hill of the former zoo for himself and in 1837 his future wife to build a castle-like country estate. After leaving Harres in 1838, Vincenz Fischer-Birnbaum completed the building in the classicism style in 1840 . The palace and park were named Ernsthöhe after their builder.

Ernst Alexander von Württemberg later fell in love with the then famous opera singer Frassini , whom he had met at the Kassel court theater. He persuaded the Hessian landgrave Ferdinand , Natalie, who was actually called Eschborn and derived her stage name from the Italian word Frassino for ash, as Baroness von Grünhof (after a family estate near Mitau in what is now Latvia ) to raise the nobility to a bearable class difference Decrease degree. The wedding followed on August 18, 1860 in Hamburg.

Duke Ernst II of Coburg had met Frassini in London at one of her performances. He, who raved about the opera and its attractive representatives (see Schloss Ketschendorf ), persuaded her to sign a guest contract at the Coburg court theater. There she embodied Gilda in Rigoletto with great success and was so impressed by the quiet residential town on the Itz that she asked her future husband to move their joint residence to Coburg. After the death of Ernst von Württemberg in 1868, who was buried in the ducal mausoleum in the Coburg cemetery on Glockenberg , she lived as a widow on the Ernsthöhe until 1890. She moved to Berlin and left the property to her daughter Alexandra. This sold him in 1893 to the factory and estate owner Julius Heinzel from Łódź , who was later ennobled as Baron Heinzel von Hohenfels and thus made Hohenfels Castle out of the Ernsthöhe. Heinzel set up a stud not far from the palace , which was the winners of the Hoppegarten trotting track in Berlin in 1906 and 1907 .

In 1918 Heinzel sold the entire property to the Berlin electronics entrepreneur Sigmund Bergmann († 1927), who had the house adapted to his needs by the Berlin architect Otto Rehnig .

On November 1, 1932, the castle, stud farm and park became the property of the city. From September 1933 the city used the outbuildings as a labor camp for women. From May 1934 to 1944 the first Reichsschule of the Nazi women's union was housed in the castle . A Reich Labor Service camp for young women was affiliated in 1939. From 1945 to 1954 the property was empty.

Todays use

1954 moved Medau School of Marine Sports School in Flensburg - Mürwik in the castle Hohenfels over. The school in question was founded in Berlin in 1929 as a private school for gymnastics , but had to close there as a result of the Second World War . Since 1979 it has been Germany's only school with integrated gymnastics and physiotherapy training. A vocational school for speech therapy was attached to it in 1999 . In 2004, the Hohenfels University of Applied Sciences , a state-recognized private university for specialist therapies in health care, was also founded, which offered two bachelor's degree programs until they moved to Bamberg in 2010. The Medau school with its courses continues to exist under the same name. Since autumn 2010, the IB University Berlin has been running the health sciences course alongside training. The study events take place as face-to-face lessons once a month on the weekends on the school premises.

literature

Fritz Mahnke: Palaces and castles in the vicinity of the Franconian Crown. Druck- und Verlagsanstalt Neue Presse, Coburg, 1974. pp. 20–21
Hildegard Erbguth, Hans Medau: Portrait of a gymnastics school. Verlag Hofmann, 1991. ISBN 3-77803700-5