Schlobitten Castle

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Schlobitten Castle
Schlobitten Castle around 1860, Alexander Duncker collection

Schlobitten Castle around 1860, Alexander Duncker collection

Data
place Słobity
builder Jean Baptiste Broebes
architect Johann Caspar Hindersin (construction management)
Joachim Ludwig Schultheiß von Unfriedt (appraiser)
Joseph Anton Kraus (interiors)
Client Abraham von Dohna, Alexander zu Dohna-Schlobitten
Architectural style initially renaissance, reconstruction and extension baroque
Construction year 1622–1624 (previous building) and 1695–1722 (reconstruction and expansion)
demolition 1945 (destruction)
Coordinates 54 ° 8 '27.4 "  N , 19 ° 47' 9.8"  E Coordinates: 54 ° 8 '27.4 "  N , 19 ° 47' 9.8"  E
Schlobitten Castle (Warmia-Masuria)
Schlobitten Castle

Schlobitten Castle is an ensemble of buildings that has only existed as a ruin since 1945. It is located in today's Polish municipality of Słobity , formerly Schlobitten , which belonged to the Prussian Holland district in the former East Prussia from 1816 to 1945 . It existed since 1624 and was the ancestral seat of the Schlobitten line of the German aristocratic Dohna family . In 1945 it was looted and set on fire and has been listed on the Polish list of historical monuments since March 19, 1968 under the number 587/69 .

Alexander zu Dohna-Schlobitten gave the building ensemble its basic shape through conversions and extensions. He had the previous building redesigned into a baroque castle between 1696 and 1736 . Alexander Fürst Dohna-Schlobitten was able to relocate a significant part of the inventory of Schloss Schlobitten shortly before the end of the war , before it was destroyed by arson after the occupation by the Red Army in 1945 .

history

The family of the Burgraves of Dohna , who came from Saxony, came to this area in the 15th century. Peter von Dohna (* 1483, † January 18, 1553) was in 1525 by Albrecht of Brandenburg , the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order , for his services to the estate and village Schlobitten invested . His son Achatius von Dohna (* May 17, 1533; † October 18, 1601) from his marriage to Catharina von Zehmen , relocated the family seat to Schlobitten and replaced an older manor house with a permanent house surrounded by moats , which he owned from 1589 inhabited.

Achatius' son Abraham (* March 13, 1579; † 1631) had the first castle built in the early Baroque style based on Dutch models between 1622 and 1624, the three-tiered decorative gable of which was linked to the Dutch Renaissance . The appearance of the castle is passed down from a drawing by the client. Investigations by Polish experts indicate that Abraham's building integrated the cellar vaults of the porch from the 16th century. During the Polish-Swedish war , the castle was devastated by looters and only poorly restored by Abraham.

While his widow lived in parts of the property for a few years after his death, his nephew and heir Friedrich von Dohna , former governor of the Principality of Orange in the service of the House of Orange , resided at Coppet Castle on Lake Geneva. The connection to the Orange came through Friedrich's parents, Christoph zu Dohna and Ursula, geb. Countess of Solms-Braunfels ; The latter had two sisters: Amalie zu Solms-Braunfels , who was married to the Dutch governor Prince Friedrich Heinrich von Oranien , and Louise Christina, who had married the Dutch army chief Johann Wolfart van Brederode . Through this connection there was also a relationship to Amalie's grandchildren, the kings Wilhelm III. of England and Frederick I of Prussia .

Frederick I, who founded the Kingdom of Prussia in 1701 , wanted his new kingdom to be provided with some magnificent baroque palaces for reasons of cultural representation; Thus, in competition with one another, the Schlodien castles (also belonging to the Dohna), Friedrichstein and Dönhoffstädt (Count Dönhoff), Finckenstein (Count Finck von Finckenstein) and Capustigall (Count Waldburg) were created - the latter two should later also come to the Dohna . Of these residences, only Dönhoffstädt is still intact today.

Friedrich's son Alexander zu Dohna-Schlobitten rebuilt the Schlobitten castle ruins in the years 1695 to 1722 in the style of high baroque according to designs by Jean Baptiste Broebes , expanded the manor house with a second gallery and added two perpendicular wings, so that the building enclosed a court of honor in the shape of a horseshoe. His brother Christoph had the nearby Schlodien Castle built at the same time . The further expansion from 1704 took place under the direction of Johann Caspar Hindersin : the outer Marstallhof was surrounded by low connecting tracts, the manor house was added a third floor and a mansard roof. With this, Hindersin created “a highly original, highly attractive assembly group that encompasses two square inner courtyards”. The ballroom with its magnificent stucco was decorated by Joseph Anton Kraus in 1713 .

Schlobitten Castle.jpg
Schlobitten Castle around 1720
Schlobitten Castle, large ballroom, 1713, sculptor Joseph Anton Kraus.jpg
Ballroom from 1713
Schlobitten palace.jpg
Castle ruin


In 1696 and 1732, the building complex was expanded into a representative residence. Numerous Prussian kings were welcomed here, who used it as a travel station during their stays in East Prussia. Friedrich II stayed here repeatedly. There were more than 70 rooms, a large ballroom and an extensive library. In addition to numerous paintings, there was a coin collection and rare faiences in the castle . The estate comprised around 1500 hectares of land which was farmed by 160 families. After 1918 there was also a home for single elderly people. Thanks to the “Eternal Testament” of 1621, through which the Schlobitten family branch had made its property an indivisible family affide, the family's estates and collections were preserved until 1945.

In January 1945, the residents of the castle and the employees headed west under the leadership of Prince Alexander zu Dohna , a total of 330 people, 140 horses and 38 carriages. They also brought 31 valuable Trakehner mares with them from their breeding. The castle was burned down and devastated during the invasion. As early as 1944, parts of the valuable art collection, which consisted of numerous baroque furniture and paintings, tapestries and Delft faience and which also included a tobacco box adorned with diamonds, belonged to the last lord of the castle, Prince Alexander zu Dohna, partly in trains, partly with a group of refugees , including part of the associated breeding stud, was evacuated to the west. The outsourced works of art were housed in various castles belonging to families who were related or friends, including Muskau Castle , but two-thirds of them fell victim to looting at the end of the war. The Dohna family was only able to receive the items stored in the Hessian castle Laubach after the war. Parts of the collection confiscated in the GDR could be added back to the inventory after German reunification . "Prince Alexander zu Dohna's wish to exhibit the rescued art inventory of the Schlobitter Palace as a closed complex prompted him to also offer the inventory items that were kept in the depots of various GDR museums until reunification and returned to him for sale in the Prussian palaces and gardens." . In 1992 and 1999, the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg took over the Dohna-Schlobitten collection , consisting of over 1000 individual pieces, including 72 paintings, 35 pieces of furniture, over 200 porcelain and faience, 48 glasses, and over 600 objects made of precious and base metals , 250 individual handicraft items of various materials and more than 500 textiles.

Part of the collection is currently in the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin in the “Dohna-Schlobitten” collection. Since 2009 some of the rescued works of art from Schlobitten have also been on view in Schönhausen Palace , but most of them are stored in depots. The entire collection is to be exhibited in Doberlug Castle from 2020 .

Architectural style

Schlobitten Castle around 1915

The two-storey main building was initially designed as a massive plastered building with a basement in the Renaissance style and had dwelling houses with three-zone tail gables . In 1627, a single-storey library building with an elongated gallery, which was spanned by groin vaults, was added, somewhat separated from the main building. In the years from 1696 to 1736 a new building in the baroque style was commissioned. Initially, the builder Jean Baptiste Broebes was responsible for the planning; he drafted the plan for the palace complex and built the east wing. From 1704 Johann Caspar Hindersin took over the management. The palace builder Joachim Ludwig Schultheiss von Unfriedt was at his side as an expert. For interior design Alexander was the Schlüter -Students and plasterer Joseph Anton Kraus (* Berlin, † 21 January 1721) and the painter and fresco painters Giovanni Baptista Schannes bind († 1719) for several years on the project. Kraus designed - possibly in collaboration with the plasterer Johann Georg Pörtzel  - the ballroom , the central castle , the stairwells and the royal rooms. "Seen as a whole, Schlobitten was the most important complex that the Dohnas created."

Art collection and library

The castle's art collection, of which considerable remains have been preserved in the Dohna-Schlobitten collection to this day, consisted of handcrafted furniture, carpets, household items, textiles, porcelain and Dutch faience, of 450 paintings, as well as drawings, miniatures and small sculptures as portrait busts. In addition to a few still lifes and biblical pieces, the collection, which largely survived the Second World War , was dominated by portraits from the 17th to the 19th centuries. Particularly noteworthy are 22 portraits of the Orange and 31 pictures of the Hohenzollern from Elector Friedrich Wilhelm to Kaiser Wilhelm II. The Orange were related and politically related to the Dohnas, through this connection there was also a relationship to the Prussian royal house of the Hohenzollern , the Schlobitten as Use travel quarters. However, the artists of all of these portraits are not known. There are pictures in the style of Michiel van Mierevelt , others could be by Jan de Baen , Gerrit and Willem van Honthorst , as well as Antoine Pesne are also included in the collection. But many paintings are only replicas of well-known portraits from other princely collections. In addition to portraits, family portraits take up a large space. A large-format family piece by Johannes Mytens from 1644 is significant. Some of these pictures were subsequently supplemented by other painters, mostly after the birth of children, grandchildren and nephews. At that time there were traveling painters who went from castle to castle and did commissioned work for princes and landed nobility. Their names are often preserved in signatures, also on the back of the pictures, but their works are usually not of a high artistic level. But the Dohnas could also afford more important artists. These included, for example, Johann Friedrich August Tischbein and well-known Königsberg artists such as Johann Eduard Wolff in the 19th century .

The old library around 1915

In Schlobitten Castle there had been a library since 1627 which, in addition to the Dohnas archive, contained first editions of the well-known classical literature that had been published since the 16th century; Song books and travel literature and Dutch novels that were used as entertainment reading around 1700. But also political science works and theological controversial literature from the time of religious struggles after the Reformation were part of the library. There were a few cradle prints , of which the sermons of well-known theologians of the 15th century such as Johann Geiler von Kaysersberg and Johannes de Bromyard are worth mentioning . From the 16th century came works by Erasmus of Rotterdam , a Bible from 1556, handwritten by Philipp Melanchthon , ten volumes of sermons by Martin Luther from 1555 to 1558 and an edition of Paracelsus ' Philosophia ad Atheniensis from 1564. A catalog from 1858 lists over 55,000 volumes. At the end of the 19th century the inventory had grown so much (Richard Wilhelm was a book collector) that the existing space had to be expanded. Until then, the library was housed in a 33-meter-long, six-meter-deep and 4.30-meter-high room with a cross vault in the extension east of the main house, built at the time of Abraham von Dohna. Now the library rooms have been added to the corresponding extension on the west side of the castle.

literature

  • Carl Grommelt, Christine von Mertens: The Dohnasche Schlobitten Castle in East Prussia . with the participation of Alexander Fürst zu Dohna, Lothar Graf zu Dohna and Christian Krollmann, by Carl Grommelt and Christine von Mertens. W. Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1962, OCLC 25081482 .
  • Alexander zu Dohna, Carl Grommelt, Christine von Mertens: The Dohna Castle Schlobitten in East Prussia. Architectural and artistic monuments of the German East, Series B, Volume 5, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1965.
  • Lothar Graf zu Dohna: The Dohnas and their houses. Profile of a European family. Volume 2. Schlobitten. Wallstein, Göttingen 2013, ISBN 978-3-8353-1237-1 , pp. 701-715.
  • Schlobitten Castle in the Alexander Duncker Collection (PDF; 295 kB).

Publications

  • The documentary Our History - East Prussian Forgotten Castles deals with an initiative of scientists and researchers from Germany, Poland and Russia who are looking for dilapidated cultural assets in the former East Prussia and attempt to virtually relocate these buildings that were destroyed in the course of the last war and post-war years for posterity create. This concerns the two ruins of Schloss Schlobitten and Schloss Schlodien and Friedrichstein Castle in today's Russia. State-of-the-art technology is used to document what is left of the buildings.

Web links

Commons : Schlobitten Castle  - Collection of Images

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Słobity, zespół pałacowy (PDF, p. 17.) on nid.pl. (Polish).
  2. ↑ Schlobitten Castle Monument Protection List on zabytki.org (Polish).
  3. ↑ Slobity / Schlobitten Castle, listed building in the database of the Warmia-Masurian Voivodeship with the number A-834 on nid.pl (Polish).
  4. ↑ Alexander Fürst Dohna-Schlobitten : Memories of an old East Prussian. Pp. 314-328, ISBN 3-8003-3115-2 .
  5. ↑ a b c d Lothar Graf zu Dohna: The Dohnas and their houses. Profile of a European family. Volume 2. Schlobitten. Pp. 701-715. Wallstein Publishing House. Göttingen 2013.
  6. ^ Johann Heinrich Zedler : Large complete universal lexicon of all sciences and arts . Volume 7. Zedler, Halle / Leipzig 1734, column 1166 ( digitized version ).
  7. ^ Wustrau: Schlobitten Castle - Slobity. masuren.de, accessed on May 26, 2016 .
  8. ↑ In what was formerly North East Prussia, Germans are looking for lost family silver and works of art - a Russian ex-colonel helps them. In: Der Spiegel. 3/2003.
  9. ↑ LR Online from April 6, 2018
  10. ^ Dohna-Schlobitten Collection. (No longer available online.) Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation, archived from the original on May 25, 2016 ; accessed on May 26, 2016 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.spsg.de
  11. ↑ Time (history) from 350 years. Museumsportal Berlin, accessed on May 26, 2016 .
  12. ^ Photo archive East Prussia, Schlobitten, Prince's castle at Dohna-Schlobitten. bildarchiv-ostpreussen.de, accessed on May 26, 2016 .
  13. ^ A b Manfred Höhne: History of Slobity - Schlobitten - East Prussia. ostpreussen.net, accessed on May 26, 2016 .
  14. ^ Kraus (Krauss, also Kruse), Joseph Anton. In: Herbert Meinhard Mühlpfordt: Königsberg sculptures and their masters 1255-1945 . Holzner, Würzburg 1970, OCLC 4261883 , p. 110 .
  15. ^ Anton Ulbrich : The sculptor Kraus, Krauss or Kruse. In: Anton Ulbrich: History of sculpture in East Prussia from the end of the 16th century to around 1870. Volume 2. Gräfe and Unzer, Königsberg 1926–1929, p. 428 ( digitized version ).
  16. ↑ Anton Ulbrich : Poertzel (Pertzel), Johann Georg and Matthias . In: Hans Vollmer (Hrsg.): General lexicon of fine artists from antiquity to the present . Founded by Ulrich Thieme and Felix Becker . tape 27 : Piermaria – Ramsdell . EA Seemann, Leipzig 1933, p. 184 .
  17. ^ Anton Ulbrich: The sculptor Johann Georg and Matthias Pörtzel. In: Anton Ulbrich: History of sculpture in East Prussia from the end of the 16th century to around 1870. 2 volumes, Königsberg 1926–1929, pp. 427–429.
  18. ^ Anton Ulbrich: The sculptor Kraus, Krauss or Kruse. In: Anton Ulbrich: History of sculpture in East Prussia from the end of the 16th century to around 1870. Volume 2. Gräfe and Unzer, Königsberg 1926–1929, pp. 454–462 ( digitized version ).
  19. ↑ Carl Grommelt, Christine von Mertens: The Dohnasche Schlobitten Castle in East Prussia. Kohlhammer Stuttgart 1962, p. 202 ff.
  20. ↑ Carl Grommelt, Christine von Mertens: The Dohnasche Schlobitten Castle in East Prussia. Kohlhammer Stuttgart 1962, p. 361 ff.
  21. ↑ Schlobitten Castle. from minute 4:30 on ndr.de