Rosenau Castle (Waldviertel)

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Rosenau Castle (HK)

The Rosenau Castle is a castle in the village Rosenau Castle west of Zwettl in the Waldviertel ( Lower Austria ). It has been rebuilt and renovated several times over the years and changed hands a few times.

history

Copper engraving by Georg Matthäus Vischer (1672)

In 1593 the von Greiß gentlemen expanded an already existing square courtyard into a renaissance palace .

From 1720 to 1803 Rosenau was owned by the Counts Schallenberg . The first owner was Leopold Christoph Graf von Schallenberg , who bought the estate in 1720. He had the palace rebuilt in the Baroque style according to the plans of the builder Joseph Munggenast and furnished rooms for a Masonic lodge there. In addition, the almost completely preserved estate settlement was built during this time . The old people's home (hospital), the forester's house, the former Meierhof, the ribbon weaving mill, the carriage house , the rectory, the elementary school and the parish church of the Holy Trinity bear witness to this estate . Josef Graf Schallenberg sold the castle in 1803.

It was acquired by Ernst Christoph Georg August Graf Hardenberg , the royal Hanoverian envoy in Vienna, whose nephew sold it in 1832 to the economist Freiherr Andreas von Stift.

In 1863, Creszentia Stummer, widow of the Brno merchant Carl Stummer, became the owner of the castle after the heirs of the monastery had sold the estate. Just five years later, the railway technician Mathias von Schönerer acquired the castle and manor.

Georg Heinrich Ritter von Schönerer inherited the property in 1883 and managed the estate until his death in 1921. In 1907 he had the only Bismarck tower in Austria built north of the castle . For the well-being of the local population, he created numerous social and economic institutions on the estate and in the surrounding area. His daughter managed the inheritance until 1928.

In 1943 the German settlement company took over the castle. Baron Lazarini-Zobelsperg was lord of the castle from 1943 to 1945. After the end of the war, Soviet troops devastated the castle, which was then confiscated by the occupying power or the USIA , and returned to Baron Lazarini-Zobelsperg after the end of the occupation in 1955. In 1964 he sold the castle, which had become uneconomical due to the destruction, to the Lower Austrian Settlement Society.

After considerable investment by the state, the castle hotel and restaurant were opened on September 26, 1974. A year later the Austrian Freemasons Museum opened in the castle. In the parish church, a ceiling fresco attributed to the painter Paul Troger shows the adoration of the Holy Trinity .

Significance and use as a Freemason Museum

Rosenau Castle, floor plan of the Masonic Museum: A - Staircase and vestibule with Masonic frescoes; B– exhibition room 1; C– showroom 2; D– exhibition room 3 (former entrance room of the lodge); E - Dark Chamber; F– exhibition room 4 (former dressing room of the lodge); G– Exhibition room 5 (former dining room of the lodge); H– exhibition room 6 (marble cabinet); I - Temple of the Lodge; J– Exhibition room 7 (access room to the church gallery); K– Castle Church; L– showroom 8; M– courtyard.

Count Schallenberg was a high-ranking official at Maria Theresa's court and there came into close contact with the Enlightenment and their spiritual child, Freemasonry . It was the social component of the Enlightenment movement that prompted him to develop his estate in Rosenau into an institution for the benefit of the simple people who worked and lived on the farm in the manorial environment of the castle. He was a Freemason himself - like Maria Theresa's husband, Franz Stephan von Lothringen - and set up a box in the castle that served as a meeting place for the brothers who lived in the neighborhood and who passed through. It is very likely, if not completely provable, that the famous Freemason Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart stopped in Rosenau on the way from Vienna to Prague .

The palace, which was rebuilt in the 18th century, still stands out today thanks to the work of the master builder Joseph Munggenast , the painters Paul Troger, Daniel Gran and the "Welschen perspective painter " Rincolin , who is buried in Rosenau. The owners who followed Schallenberg's death in 1800 - including Georg Ritter von Schönerer , who was notorious for his anti-Semitic activities - no longer knew of the special importance of the castle as a Masonic place of activity. The symbolic paintings were covered and painted over.

It was not until 1972, when the castle and the estate settlement were to be saved from decay in a joint effort by the surrounding communities and the Lower Austrian provincial government and renovated with public funds, that the Masonic symbols were discovered in the course of the renovation work . On April 23, 1975, the Masonic Museum started operations. Officials of the Lower Austrian provincial government had succeeded in persuading the Austrian Freemasons to set up a museum. In the first year there were already more than 35,000 visitors; in 2017 there were 8,000.

In addition to numerous loans from the Grand Lodge of Austria, exhibits from the German Freemason Museum in Bayreuth , from the construction works of St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna and from the Lower Austrian State Museum are shown. Most of the exhibitions were supervised by members of the Quatuor Coronati research lodge . They also managed to bring objects from private collections and from the holdings of the English Grand Lodge to the museum.

literature

  • Gerd Braun: Contribution to the origin and meaning of the staircase frescoes by the locksmith Rosenau in Lower Austria. In: Burgen und Schlösser 5th vol. (1981 / I) pp. 29–40.
  • Castles, monasteries and chateaus, Waldviertel regions, Danube region, South Bohemia, Vysočina, South Moravia ISBN 978-3-9502262-2-5 , p. 94 ff
  • Magdalena Bader: Construction and furnishing of Rosenau Castle in the Waldviertel. Diploma thesis University of Vienna - Faculty of History and Cultural Studies, Vienna 2013 ( digitized version )
  • Edith Wagesreither, Wilhelm Wagesreither: Small Chronicle of Rosenau Castle. Rosenau 1964 (2nd extended edition 1972, 3rd revised edition 1976, 4th edition 1989)
  • Roman Zehetmayer: The rulership archive Rosenau in the house, court and state archive. In: Das Waldviertel, 50th (61st) vol. 4 (2001) pp. 383–391.
  • Roman Zehetmayer: On the history of the Rosenau rule in the Waldviertel up to the beginning of the 14th century. In: Communications from the Lower Austrian Provincial Archives 12 (2005) pp. 45–57.

Web links

Commons : Rosenau Castle  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Bismarck Tower Rosenau. In: bismarcktuerme.de. Retrieved October 23, 2018 .
  2. ↑ Jürgen Zahrl: Schloss Rosenau: Country northeast seeks new tenant. In: kurier.at. August 12, 2018. Retrieved August 12, 2018 .

Coordinates: 48 ° 36 '4 "  N , 15 ° 3' 49"  E