Rosenau Castle (Coburg)

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Rosenau Castle (around 1890)

The Rosenau Castle is a castle surrounded by a park in lower Wohlbach , a district of Rödental . It is the birthplace of Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha , who later became the husband of Queen Victoria . Today Rosenau Castle is used as a museum .

history

Knight of Rosenau

Map of the park and castle Rosenau
Rosenau Castle

Although the castle was first mentioned in a Sonnefeld document in 1439 as the property of the "noble lords of Rosenawe" , it can be assumed that it existed before 1424 when these lords built the Rosenauer castle on the Rittersteich in Coburg. Since it was customary for a noble family to name themselves after their ancestral seat, in this case the Rosenau, at least one manor or bower of this name will have already existed near Oeslau . The Rosenau family has been documented as the "Knight of Rosenawe" since the second half of the 13th century. The family, who were also wealthy in southern Thuringia , owned the Coburg Mintmaster's House with Germany's oldest half-timbered house from 1410 , and from 1429 the moated castle Oeslau , the villages of Gauerstadt and Eichhof castle, as well as the moated castle Mitwitz and a number of manors in the Coburg region. In 1501 the village and Castle Ahorn were added.

For three centuries the name of those von Rosenau, whose wealth consisted of agricultural goods, was closely associated with the castle on the steep bank of the Itz . In the so-called early capitalism from the end of the 16th century, handicrafts and, above all, the large landowners felt the consequences of the flourishing of long-distance trade in connection with industrial publishing . The economic yields declined alarmingly for the Rosenauer, this led to the increasing indebtedness of the extensive family property. New Year's Eve von Rosenau, friend of Luther and Melanchthon , bequeathed the castle and goods to his son Hans Berthold, already heavily in debt. Even he could not lead the legacy to a new bloom, so that his successor Adam Alexander von Rosenau had to sell the old castle to Duke Johann Casimir , but was able to reverse the sale in 1637.

Rosenau Castle east side
Rosenau Castle south side
Rosenau Castle and its surroundings
Rosenau Castle west side

In 1704 the Rosenau family of the same name was finally lost. The Austrian baron Ferdinand Adam von Pernau , Coburg consistorial advisor and chamberlain to Duke Albrecht since 1690 , acquired the castle and its outbuildings as a summer residence and study place for his ornithological research.

At that time, the more castle-like property consisted of the palace with a round tower attached to it, the remains of the original ring walls with two defensive tower ruins and the outer bailey with stables, all surrounded by a spacious, overgrown park. Inside there was an arcade building from the 17th century, open to the east, called the courtyard, which the Italian master builder Giovanni Bonalino had designed with Gothic elements

Dukes of Coburg

After von Pernau's death in 1731, Rosenau Palace and Park were sold to Duke Friedrich II of Gotha , who employed tenants for the management . Already in 1805 the ownership changed again and fundamentally: The princely throne and marriage broker Duke Franz Friedrich Anton von Sachsen-Coburg-Saalfeld acquired the property for his son and successor Duke Ernst I of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha as a summer residence.

From 1806 to around 1817, Duke Ernst had the castle converted into a representative palace in the neo-Gothic style according to plans by Karl Friedrich Schinkel and the park rebuilt as an English garden . The renovation from the romantic spirit of the time hardly changed anything in the existing building of the original castle . It is one of the first examples in Germany to revive the Middle Ages in an idealized form.

Early Gothic stepped gables were placed on the two gable sides of the palace . The window shapes were made in the late Gothic style and small balconies and coat of arms stones complemented the facade decorations. The tower, which in the oldest illustration from 1700 still had a Welsche dome , received a crenellated crown and the formerly massive gable roof to loosen up a number of dormers of different sizes and a simulated central projection . The ruined tower of the old south-western curtain wall was left as a ruin in the spirit of romanticism .

The northeast tower was restored as the picturesque corner of the balustrade that closed off the rear terrace . The “princess kitchen” was set up in this tower, a playroom for the princely descendants. The terrace parapet comes from Bonalinos Söller in the former court of honor, which was exposed by Schinkel's renovation and provided with a bowl well. The lower bailey was removed. They were replaced by farm buildings and servants' dwellings with ogival arbors and decorative turrets in the neo-Gothic style. The lion fountain was also set up there.

  • Honor courtyard with bowl fountain

  • Farm buildings

  • Lion fountain

The interior layout, also designed by Schinkel, has nothing in common with the original. The ground floor received two representative rooms, on the one hand the marble hall, which occupies the entire south gable side and whose door and six windows lead to the front terrace. The hall is divided into three naves by two rows of bundles of pillars, which have to support a vault covered with fine golden stucco tendrils . Adjacent to the Marble Hall is a small, eleven-shaped library , the walls and winding vaults of which are entirely wood-paneled. The library was later converted into a Russian Orthodox chapel. Ernst's wife Dorothea Luise von Altenburg was very impressed by the scenes painted in seven arched fields from the minnows of a knight, and the then 17-year-old duchess described this painting vividly in numerous letters.

  • Marble hall

  • Living rooms in the castle

  • Drawing room

  • Ernst I's bed

The cavalier house

Duchess Dorothea Luise was the mother of Duke Ernst II and Prince Albert , who was born at Rosenau Castle in 1819 and married the British Queen Victoria in 1840 . The couple stayed frequently on the Rosenau until Albert's death, and Viktoria often returned later, most recently at the age of 75, where she could relax in the park from her affairs of state without much courtly etiquette . There she once wrote in her diary: "If I weren't what I am, this would be my real home." In her grief during the widow years on the Rosenau, she always felt particularly close to her beloved Albert.

Duke Ernst II, in the government since 1844, concentrated his interest on Callenberg Castle and left Rosenau to his nephew and successor Alfred , the second son of Queen Victoria and Prince Consort Albert. Alfred died in 1900 in the gentleman's house in Rosenau. His widow Maria Alexandrovna , a daughter of Tsar Alexander II of Russia , lived in the cavalier's house until her death in autumn 1920.

After 1920

Before Coburg was annexed to Bavaria in 1920, the castle and the properties belonging to it were transferred to the Coburg State Foundation. In 1927 the area that had belonged administratively and regionally to Oeslau for centuries was assigned to the community of Unterwohlsbach.

The property was leased to Duke Alfred's daughters until 1938. During the Second World War , from 1941 onwards it served as accommodation for the female National Socialist labor service .

After American agencies moved in in 1945, the buildings were available to the refugee commissioner as a rest home for displaced persons from 1946 . From 1948 it was used as a retirement home for the district of Coburg for over 20 years .

After a long vacancy, the Free State of Bavaria bought the property in 1972 , which was meanwhile in a desolate condition and had to be painstakingly restored.

Orangery
Tournament column
Hermitage

Rosenau Park

The redesign of the former castle complex after 1805 must not be viewed in isolation. It is precisely the harmony of castle, park and landscape that makes Rosenau so attractive as a "total work of art" of the Romantic period. The landscaped garden, based on English models, still merges with the surrounding area without walls or bars, thus demonstrating the bond with nature and the people who inhabit it.

The park, which spanned over 200 hectares from 1805, is now reduced to a sixth of its original size, but still has echoes of the horticultural art of an English landscape garden with typical design elements and structures. Apart from the actual castle with its outbuildings, the park is dominated by the classicist orangery , built in 1820 , which was used until 1989 for the wintering of valuable exotic plants such as palm trees and citrus plants . A small rose garden extends in front of the glass front of the elongated building.

In the three-winged tea house with its paved terrace and on the meadows of the Rosenau, festivals were once celebrated at which "the entire population of the surrounding villages were guests of the ducal house". On the occasion of Ernst I's wedding with Dorothea Luise, a large tournament was held to the delight of the citizens and farmers , in which the invited guests of the nobility appeared as the main actors in medieval armor and robes. To commemorate this extraordinary event, a "tournament pillar", a rectangular pillar with four coats of arms and a small sundial, was erected on a hill near the swan pond. Not far from there, embedded in the slope of the Itz, there is an artificial waterfall , an equally artificial grotto and a little downstream below the palace the Hermitage , which conceals an ice cellar carved into the rock .

The already mentioned “Kavaliershaus”, an imposing, half-timbered gardener's house on a hill, and the adjoining coach houses and stables complete the ensemble.

A dairy called "Schweizerei" ensured that the castle was supplied with agricultural products. Duke Ernst I had the manor built in place of the village of Hamberg on the southern edge of the large original park near the village of Oeslau. In 1820 the main building, designed in the style of a Swiss dairy farm, was completed. To make the illusion perfect, the duke brought three herdsmen and three maidservants from Switzerland to run the farm. 18 gray cattle and one bull also came from Graubünden . The Swiss farm was used as an agricultural business until the 1990s. Due to the insolvency of the owner, the porcelain factory W. Goebel , the listed building stood empty for a long time until a family bought it in 2011.

On the northern edge of the park, directly on the village of Unterwohlsbach in the Itztal, the “Prinzessinnenbad”, a small bathing establishment for the ducal family and their guests , was built with several buildings in the Far Eastern architectural style . In the long run, however, the pretty complex did not withstand the Itz, which regularly overflowed its banks, and was demolished around 1905. Only the remains of two stone bridges have been preserved.

Tea house, today a park restaurant
Stables converted into a museum shop
Switzerland

Todays use

The exemplary restored Rosenau Castle has been open to the public again as a museum since 1990 . All rooms on the two lower floors and the original furniture from the Biedermeier period can be viewed on a guided tour lasting just under an hour . The Russian Orthodox chapel has been restored to the original state of equipment of a library. Summer concerts take place regularly in the marble hall.

Since 2003, the former stable building in front of the entrance to the castle has housed the cash desk and the museum shop as well as a small bistro .

Since 1989 the museum for modern glass has been housed in the former orangery as a branch museum of the art collections of the Veste Coburg . Contemporary glass art objects from all over the world were exhibited on 350 square meters of exhibition space, from everyday objects such as drinking glasses and vases to sculptures. After a year of construction, a modern new museum building with 1260 square meters of exhibition space was opened on October 12, 2008 opposite the orangery under the name European Museum for Modern Glass.

Since the 1970s, the tea house has been a popular restaurant for upscale restaurants with a shady café garden. An extensive riding facility with hall and tournament area is attached to the west .

On one summer weekend a year, the town of Rödental organizes a folk festival with a medieval touch on the extensive meadows below the castle .

The former Schweizererei outside the park at the beginning of the access avenue has been used as a restaurant with a beer garden since 2012.

Famous guests

Rosenau Castle has hosted countless guests from the European nobility in the course of its history. Artists and writers also enjoyed the seclusion of the idyllic summer residence at the invitation of the dukes. From 1854 to 1860 the world traveler and at the time the most popular travel writer Friedrich Gerstäcker lived with his family as a guest of his princely friend and patron Ernst II. He wrote his book Under the Equator there .

literature

  • Walther Heins: Rosenau Castle and its history. In: From Coburg city and country. 1954, ZDB -ID 1256305-5 , pp. 34–40 (reprinted in: Herbert Ott (Red.): 800 years Oeslau. Oeslau community, Oeslau 1962, pp. 47–53).
  • Sabine Heym: Rosenau Castle and Park. Official leader. 1st edition of the new version. Bavarian Administration of State Palaces, Gardens and Lakes, Munich 2011, ISBN 978-3-941637-09-2 .
  • Friedrich Hofmann : Homesickness . In: The Gazebo . Issue 28, 1866, pp. 438-441 ( full text [ Wikisource ]).
  • Fritz Mahnke: Palaces and castles in the vicinity of the Franconian Crown, 1st volume . 3. Edition. Druck- und Verlagsanstalt Neue Presse GmbH, Coburg 1974, pp. 64–68.
  • Norbert H. Ott: Rosenau Castle. A noble seat in northern Franconia. New press Coburg, Coburg 1970.
  • Hermann Schleder: Ida von Rosenau. An opera that takes place at Rosenau Castle and in front of the inn in Oeslau. In: Herbert Ott (Red.): 800 years of Oeslau. Municipality of Oeslau, Oeslau 1962, pp. 103-107.
  • Richard Teufel : Architectural and art monuments in the district of Coburg. Published by the district of Coburg. Riemann, Coburg 1956.

Web links

Commons : Schloss Rosenau (Coburg)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Community of Oeslau: 800 years of Oeslau 1162–1962 . Druckhaus A. Roßteuscher, Coburg 1962, p. 67
  2. ↑ Coburger Tageblatt 13./14. August 2011
  3. ^ European Museum of Modern Glass . Upper Franconia culture atlas

Coordinates: 50 ° 17 ′ 53 ″  N , 11 ° 1 ′ 21 ″  E