Ketschendorf Castle
The neo-Gothic Ketschendorf Castle is located in the Coburg district of Ketschendorf at the foot of the Buchberg .
The Baroness von Stolzenau had it built in the middle of an extensive park at the beginning of the 19th century. The castle is one of the perfect buildings of the neo-Gothic belt of Coburg and has had nine different owners in its history. It has been used as a youth hostel since 1956 and was closed until further notice on December 1, 2010 due to a planned renovation.
history
Original building
Keczendorff , as Ketschendorf was called around 900 years ago, was a defenseless village outside the city walls of Coburg on the western slope of the Buchberg. The few inhabitants suffered a lot from the Hussite invasions in 1430 and from the horrors of the peasant war in 1525 . The plague passed through the town twice, in 1567 and 1626 . In 1632, during the siege of the Veste Coburg , Wallenstein moved into his personal quarters in Ketschendorf under high demands and only two years later the imperial Colonel Schlitz destroyed the whole place with his Croats . It took a good 150 years for Ketschendorf to overcome the consequences of this catastrophe to some extent, but it was not until 1804 that Duchess Auguste , wife of Franz Friedrich Anton of Saxe-Coburg-Saalfeld , had a summer palace built in Empire style as the first aristocratic residence in the old town , an economic boom began.
After the Duke's death, Ketschendorf Castle remained Augusten's widow's seat. In addition to their seven children, many princes were visiting the Duchess, such as their sons-in-law, Duke Alexander Friedrich Karl von Württemberg , Grand Duke Konstantin Pavlovich of Russia and Eduard August, Duke of Kent and Strathearn . Friedrich Ludwig, Hereditary Prince of Mecklenburg-Schwerin and the parents of Constantine, Paul I and Sophia of Württemberg as well as his brother Tsar Alexander I of Russia were guests in the palace.
In 1831, after the death of the duchess-widow Auguste, Ernst I's second wife , Marie von Württemberg , moved into Ketschendorf Castle and lived here until she died in 1860. The property was now owned by Duke Ernst II. In 1868 he sold the supposedly ailing building to the French woman Victorine Noël.
Raisin Stoltz
Born in Paris in 1815 , Victorine Noël was already a celebrated opera singer at the age of 22 under her stage name Rosine Stoltz . She has performed in famous houses such as the Theater de la Monnaie in Brussels, the Paris Opera , the Theatro Municipal in Rio de Janeiro and La Scala in Milan . The composers Giacomo Meyerbeer and Gaëtano Donizetti are said to have composed roles especially for them. Although known as an eccentric intriguer and notorious liar, she enjoyed the highest recognition in professional circles and among aristocratic audiences.
Duke Ernst II of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was not only "a friend of art and singers", but composed himself, including the opera Santa Chiara . Rosine Stoltz sang the leading role in this romantic work at the Brussels Opera in 1856. It was there at the latest that Ernst met the scandal-ridden diva. An intimate relationship developed in the course of which Rosine Stoltz stayed more and more often and longer as a guest of the Duke of Coburg in Gotha , without ever having performed at the court theaters in Gotha or Coburg.
Ernst II finally raised her to the nobility in 1865 . She was now allowed to call herself Baroness von Stolzenau and from 1868 Baroness von Ketschendorf. After 1865 she only fulfilled her guest contract at La Scala in Milan and then stopped performing publicly as a singer.
Her large fortune enabled the newly ennobled baroness and baroness to acquire Ketschendorf Castle and the associated parkland for 100,000 francs , allegedly for her illegitimate son Charles, whose father, according to the Baroness, was none other than Napoleon Bonaparte and who is now Karl Freiherr more or less befitting of his class von Ketschendorf was allowed to name. His real sire could have been Ernst II, who publicly boasted that outside of his marriage he was by no means childless.
New castle building
In 1868, the Baroness von Ketschendorf commissioned the Coburg building officer Georg Konrad Rothbart , who had built the Edinburgh Palace two years earlier , with the renovation of the ducal Empire palace. Rothbart, however, designed a new, larger and more solid castle next to the original building and condemned the building, which was only 63 years old, to be demolished, as its “enclosing walls were largely rotten”. Within less than a year, he realized the new building with the help of 70 craftsmen, with the stonemasons having the hall in the old castle as a workshop so that they could continue working even in the harsh winter of the year. In June 1869 the new Ketschendorf Castle was finished and the old one could be removed. The demolition material was used to build a villa in Oberen Klinge 3 in Coburg, which in the overall system and through the use of the original arbor with its classicist columns reproduces the appearance of the old Ketschendorfer building. This villa is therefore also called the "Old Ketschendorfer Castle".
The new castle with an almost square floor plan was built from sandstone and red bricks and is considered a prime example of the neo-Gothic castle style of historicism in the Coburg region. All four sides are flanked by octagonal, crenellated corner towers and each have in the middle a porch protruding over the eaves edge with stepped gables decorated with tracery . The porch on the south side is designed as a particularly elaborate park entrance. A loggia with a terrace rises above the gate in front of the baroness's bedroom. Columns on the northern entrance front imitate the central projection on the south side in a simpler way. The client had her new family coat of arms , carved in sandstone, attached to the north-western corner tower . The shield of the coat of arms shows a harp and a helmet with a baron's crown and two closed wings. The motto below is "Vis in Corde" (strength in the heart). In the gable you can see the coat of arms of the later owner Freiherr von Mayer, the coat of arms shows: Split left a soaring lion - right three ears of corn, above a spangenhelm with a crown and above a soaring lion's body. The motto below is: "Fortes Fortuna Adjuval".
Inside the building, the stairwell with the cast iron ornamental railings and the view through the tracery church windows on the south front form the representative center of the castle. Stuccoed ceilings in almost all rooms and a large, finely paneled music room reflect the high standards of the new lady of the castle. A food elevator from the kitchen to the hall above, which she attached great importance to, was also installed.
After only two years, in 1871, the Baroness von Ketschendorf sold the entire property again for only 90,000 francs and moved back to Paris to devote herself to charitable services. When she died in 1903, she no longer owned a centime and was buried in the common poor grave at the expense of the poor authority in Paris . The new owner of the castle was for a few months the Coburg city architect Julius Martinet , known as the architect of the Luther and Rückert Schools.
The American William Tilden acquired the property in 1872 and sold it to the Kommerzienrat Karl Rudolf Epner from Berlin as early as 1873 . In 1891 the Jewish Baron von Mayer put an end to property speculation and bought the palace and park as a family residence. In 1893, he had Johannes Köhler create a flight of stairs with a tracery parapet as a park entrance. In 1940, under the National Socialist administration of the district, there was a foreclosure auction because of alleged debt of 145,000 marks Reich flight tax and the expulsion of the von Mayer family. The city of Coburg bought Ketschendorf Castle, including inventory and park, for 45,000 marks and set up accommodation for Bessarabian German returnees. From 1942 until the end of the war, the castle was used as a part of the main hospital in the Coburg trade school, then until 1955 as a TB ward of the rural hospital.
Egon Freiherr von Mayer received the family property back through a reparation procedure in 1954, but did not move back to Ketschendorf, but sold it again in 1955 to the city of Coburg, which has been running the property since 1956 as a youth hostel in the DJH -Landesverband Bayern e. V. operation. On January 1, 1990, the sponsorship for the structural ensemble of the castle and the new building / extension from 1979 was transferred to the DJH regional association. Part of the historic park, equipped with play, sports, meadow and pond areas, remained with the city.
park
The castle park, which is open today, was considerably expanded in 1868 when the castle was rebuilt by adding some additional properties. In this way, was also the former for the water supply of households Ketschendorfer important community wells included in the area. The old spring feeds the castle pond in the middle of the park. As a replacement for the no longer accessible community fountain, the baroness donated the Karlsquelle, named after her son, next to the former blacksmith's shop in Wassergasse . This pretty complex bears the sandstone coat of arms of those of Stolzenau-Ketschendorf and an inscription plaque. This spring version was moved there after the park was opened to the public after 1974.
At the edge of the castle pond stood the massive greenhouse that belonged to the park. In the post-war years it fell into disrepair and was finally sold in 1959 to the Ketschendorf sports club , who converted it into a training hall for weightlifting and a club bar and in 1995 added a large open terrace to the bar on the lake side.
Todays use
The romantic Ketschendorf Castle has housed a youth hostel since 1956 (130 beds until 1979). The historic equipment in the input staircase (stucko lustro) and in the music room (wall panels) are partly still present, but completely in the representative offices of the main floor , the magnificent color combined stucco and painting ceilings and lintels . In 1960 the porticoed pillars on the northern entrance front were demolished because they were in disrepair. In 1979/80 today's monument received a new building to the east. In addition to two new guest floors with 88 beds, the guest services, manager's apartment and technical center were relocated here. Today around 130 guest beds are again available in the ensemble due to the increased guest demands. The timely implementation of the plans for an approx. 7.1 million euro renovation including a renovation of the youth hostel was not foreseeable in 2011 due to the unclear financing.
The villa in the Oberen Klinge , known as the Altes Ketschendorfer Schloss , received two awards in 2005 for exemplary and detailed expansion in terms of monument protection .
In 2012 and 2013 the castle served as a film set for the films in the Ruby Red series .
In 2013 the lock was sold to Kaeser Kompressoren , which will use the building as a training center.
The former greenhouse at the castle pond, which was converted into a gymnasium, became the property of the city in 1996. In 2002 the Seemanns-Chor Coburg acquired the commercial part of the building and has been running it since then as a cabin , its clubhouse. The choir regularly organizes summer concerts in the palace gardens.
The Coburg-Bamberg cycle path has been running through the park for several years.
literature
- Fritz Mahnke: Palaces and castles in the vicinity of the Franconian Crown , printing and publishing house Neue Presse, Coburg, 1974, page 25-30
- Otto Friedrich: Ketschendorf
- Arthur Pougin: La Stoltz, L'intermédiaire des chercheurs curieux , No. 1208 Vol.LIX, Paris 1909
- Renate Reuther: Villas in Coburg. Veste Verlag Roßteuscher, Coburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-925431-31-9 , pp. 97-106
Web links
Coordinates: 50 ° 14 ′ 35 ″ N , 10 ° 58 ′ 28 ″ E