Monbijou Castle

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Monbijou Castle, central building by Eosander von Göthe, 1939

The monbijou palace [ mɔbiʒuː ] ( French for My jewel ) in the Berlin district of Mitte was a castle of Hohenzollern , which compared to today's Bode Museum between Spree and Oranienburgerstraße was. Built in 1703 by Eosander von Göthe as a summer house in the late Baroque style, it was expanded by two wings by Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff in 1740 and by a gate by Georg Christian Unger in 1789 . Since 1877 it has housed the Hohenzollern Museum . In the Second World War damaged the lock on the decision of was SED -Magistrats demolished in 1959 and in its place the Monbijoupark created. A citizens' initiative is currently campaigning for the reconstruction of the gate.

prehistory

Monbijou Castle on the Straubeplan, today's Bode Museum below , 1910

At this point, the former Spandau (today Heerweg Oranienburgerstraße ), then still under the walls of Berlin, was in the Middle Ages a kurfürstliches Vorwerk with a dairy farm . After the Thirty Years War the area was devastated.

In 1649, Elector Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg (the Great Elector ) ordered the land to be cultivated again and gave it to his first wife, Luise Henriette von Oranien . With great commitment, she set up a model estate with agriculture and dairy farming based on the Dutch model. The first potatoes in the Mark Brandenburg grew here as ornamental plants and curiosities . After Henriette's death in 1667, the Vorwerk became the property of the Elector's second wife, Dorothea Sophie von Brandenburg . Now a garden with a small summer house was laid out, the nucleus of the palace and palace gardens.

In 1686 the Huguenot and religious refugee Pierre I Mercier was appointed a court wallpaper maker by the Great Elector. Together with his brother-in-law Jean I Barraband, he founded a tapestry that was set up in Monbijou Castle. Under Mercier's successor Jean II Barraband , the factory was steadily expanded, so that in 1718 the ground floor of the Marstall also had to be made available for this task. A factory, the Delon stocking factory, was located in these rooms.

Friedrich I , Elector of Brandenburg after the death of his father in 1688 and King of Prussia from 1701 , decided to expand the complex. Count von Wartenberg , his chief minister and favorite, acted as the builder for a "Lust-Haus", a small castle with a floor area of ​​only 400 m², which was built by court architect Eosander von Göthe between 1703 and 1706 in the late Baroque style. Friedrich I left it to the Countess von Wartenberg , his mistress . Her husband, however, was in 1710 when Crown Prince in disgrace and was dismissed by the king. He gave the castle back to the king for compensation.

Residence of the queens

Monbijou Castle with the Sophienkirche in the background , painting by Dismar Degen , around 1740

From 1712 the castle served as the summer residence of Sophie Dorothea , married to Friedrich Wilhelm , the son and successor of Frederick I since 1706. Her name, but also her father-in-law, is ascribed: Monbijou, after the French mon bijou (my jewel). The high hall of mirrors rising over two floors, formerly known as the Sallet à la Grecque , was used by her for both family and official cultural events such as concerts. Sophia Dorothea spent the summer months there every year, giving soupées , masked balls and concerts - amusements that the Braunschweig ambassador Wilhelm Stratemann reported in detail in a diary between 1728 and 1733. After the royal Prussian court orchestra of Frederick I was dissolved by her husband after his accession to power in 1714, the hall of mirrors was initially the only one that regularly served music, which she apparently organized independently. Her musical guests included the violinist Johann Georg Pisendel , the flautist Johann Joachim Quantz , the lutenist Silvius Leopold Weiss and others. Wilhelmine von Bayreuth, eldest daughter of Sophie Dorothea, reports in her memoir about these festivities in Monbijou. In 1717, Tsar Peter the Great of Russia and his court stopped at Monbijou Castle for two days. According to contemporary reports, after the departure of the Russian guests, the property was " in a completely ruined state ".

Frederick II (the great) had his mother's castle modernized and considerably expanded immediately after he took office. His architect Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff , supervisor of all royal buildings and architect of Sanssouci , had new extensions and ancillary buildings built, which expanded the complex to the Spree to several times its original size. In 1742, the " Berlinische (n) Nachrichten " reported the handover of the keys to the Queen Mother, which " aroused a tremendous amount of pleasure in the very same ". The castle had its own boat landing stage, since the gentlemen often preferred to arrive comfortably by water than to struggle over the bumpy roads.

After the death of Queen Sophie Dorothea in 1757, the castle remained uninhabited for a long time. From 1786 on, it was the main residence of Queen Friederike Luise , the King of her husband Friedrich Wilhelm II. (Popularly the thickness Willi or thickness Lüder Jahn ), with numerous love affairs and two official morganatic marriages was humiliated and died in Monbijou 1805th As a residence for members of the court, the castle was then obsolete, even though the tradition of cultural entertainment was continued. In the years 1819–1820, private performances of two scenes from Goethe's Faust took place there under the direction of Prince Anton Heinrich Radziwill , one of the first ever Faust performances.

Hohenzollern Museum

Plan of the Hohenzollern Museum in Monbijou Castle, 1904

Around 1820 the so-called " Germanic - Slavic antiquities" were spun off from the Royal Chamber of Art and housed as the "Museum of Patriotic Antiquities" in Monbijou Castle. After the collections had been constantly expanded to include new categories (paintings, jewelry, porcelain), Emperor Wilhelm I finally had the castle with its 42 halls open to the public as the Hohenzollern Museum on March 22, 1877, the emperor's 80th birthday . The facility saw itself on the one hand as a cultural and historical educational institution, on the other hand as a place where the Hohenzollern dynasty celebrated its own history and importance. Robert Dohme was the director from 1877 to 1896 , and Paul Seidel from 1896 to 1923 .

The museum survived the abolition of the monarchy in Germany. Its holdings remained the property of the House of Hohenzollern, and the state took over their management, making Monbijou Castle available for this purpose and undertaking to maintain the museum in its usual form. It only came to an end in World War II. Large parts of the collections were relocated during the war and were taken to the Soviet Union or other locations after the war . In 1940/41, Albert Speer suggested, as part of the planning of the World Capital Germania project , that the castle should be implemented in order to create space for three large-scale new museum buildings opposite the Museum Island . Monbijou Palace was to be completely demolished and, according to his proposal, rebuilt across from Pfaueninsel on the banks of the Havel, while Hitler preferred to see it in the park of Charlottenburg Palace , for which the north-western part of the building was intended and only argued about a possible east-west orientation of the building .

Damage, demolition and the future

After the windows had been bricked up as a precaution in 1940, the castle burned down to the outer walls in an air raid in November 1943. The ruins of Monbijou stood until 1959, when the East Berlin SED - magistrate decided to demolish it against violent protests from museum experts and parts of the West Berlin public.

Some names have been preserved. On the site between Oranienburger Strasse and the Spree, a three- hectare green area with a children's swimming pool, today's Monbijoupark, was created . Nearby are Monbijouplatz, Monbijoustraße and the car-free Monbijoubrücke , which connects both banks of the Spree and the Bode Museum at the northern tip of Museum Island .

Wolf Jobst Siedler spoke out in favor of rebuilding Monbijou Castle. The Friends of Monbijoupark Berlin advocates a reconstruction of the baroque gatehouses on the western edge of Monbijouplatz.

gallery

literature

  • Paul Seidel: The Royal Monbijou Castle in Berlin until the death of Frederick the Great . In: Hohenzollern-Jahrbuch 3, 1899, pp. 178-196.
  • Management of the State Palaces and Gardens: Guide to the Monbijou Castle Museum . Berlin 1927. 2nd edition Berlin 1930.
  • Folkwin Wendland: Berlin's gardens and parks from the founding of the city to the end of the nineteenth century (The classic Berlin). Propylaeen, Berlin 1979, ISBN 3-549-06645-7 , pp. 247-257.
  • Thomas Kemper: Monbijou Castle. From the Royal Residence to the Hohenzollern Museum . Nicolai Verlag, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-89479-162-4 .
  • Ulrike Eichhorn : True stories about Berlin palaces . Tauchaer Verlag, Taucha 2012, ISBN 978-3-89772-205-7 , pp. 60-69.
  • Hans Georg and Katrin Hiller von Gaertringen: The Hohenzollern Museum , in: Dies .: A history of the Berlin museums in 227 houses . Berlin / Munich 2014, pp. 72–75.

Web links

Commons : Monbijou Palace  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Eduard Muret: History of the French Colony in Brandenburg-Prussia. Büchsenstein, Berlin, 1885, p. 46 ( digitized version ).
  2. cf. quoted website
  3. Thomas Kemper: Monbijou Castle. From the royal residence to the Hohenzollern Museum. Ernst von Siemens Art Fund, Berlin 2005, p. 20 ff.
  4. ^ Wilhelm Stratemann: Vom Berliner Hofe at the time of Friedrich Wilhelm I. Reports of the Braunschweigischen ambassador in Berlin, 1728–1733 , ed. by Richard Wolff (= writings of the Association for the History of Berlin , issue 48/49). Berlin 1914 ( digitized version ).
  5. See there and in particular Wilhelm Stratemann: Vom Berliner Hofe at the time of Friedrich Wilhelm I. Reports of the Braunschweig Ambassador in Berlin, 1728–1733 .
  6. Wolf Jobst Siedler , Auf der Pfaueninsel: Walks in Preussens Arkadien Siedler, Berlin 1986, ISBN 3-88680-236-1 , p. 70
  7. http://www.planamt.de/domkandidatenstifttext2.htm
  8. http://www.bant.com/monbijoupark/monbijoupark_2.0/fragen.htm

Coordinates: 52 ° 31 '24 "  N , 13 ° 23' 48"  E