Schwöbber Castle
Schwöbber Castle is a three-wing water castle built in the 1570s near Aerzen-Königsförde near Hameln in Lower Saxony . It is one of the most important buildings of the Weser Renaissance and was once famous for its gardens.
Today it is used as an upscale five- star hotel .
history
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From around 1510 to 1919 Gut Schwöbber belonged to the Lower Saxon noble family of Münchhausen , from which the famous Baron of Lies came from. In 1510 Stacius von Münchhausen , pledge holder of the district castle Aerzen , as well as his brothers as feudal people of the St. Bonfatiusstift in Hameln with three Meierhöfe in Schwöbber are mentioned. Stacius' fourth son, Hilmar von Münchhausen , royal Spanish colonel in the service of Philip II , became one of the richest men of his time as a mercenary leader . He and his sons, Statius (1555–1633), and Hilmar the Younger (1558–1617), were among the great builders of the Weser Renaissance ; As their main works they built the castles Leitzkau , Bevern and Wendlinghausen next to Schwöbber .
Castle construction
After he had made money from the pledge at Stolzenau Castle in 1562 (he only kept a Burgmannshof there ), Colonel Hilmar acquired the former Leitzkau monastery near Magdeburg in 1564 and began to renovate it in the following years a lock. Also in 1564 - after long negotiations - he received the enfeoffment with Schwöbber as a newly enrolled manor , along with the sovereign permission to build an inheritable noble seat there. To do this, four farms had to be relocated, the owners of which moved a little further into the valley, taking their half-timbered houses with them. One of them was called Schwöbber and this name was retained for the new Edelhof. From around 1566, the Hamelin master builder Cord Tönnis planned the construction of the palace, which began before Hilmar's death in 1573 by means of drainage, leveling and excavation, perhaps even bricking up, and then his widow Lucia von Reden 1574–1578 with the construction of the Middle wing was executed. In 1570 Hilmar took over the pledge at the Countess Hoya'schen Castle Steyerberg with the domain of Kloster Schinna , where he died in 1573. A little later, his family succeeded in expanding the small arable land of the farms in Schwöbber by 16 1/2 hooves and in exchange for the village of Grupenhagen .
When the sons were divided up in 1574, the fourth son, Hilmar the Younger von Münchhausen (1558–1617), redeemed the Schwöbber estate and Burgmannshof in Rinteln , which Colonel Hilmar and his brothers had acquired in 1527 as a fiefdom of Schaumburg . In 1588 he added the gate wing, from 1602 to 1607 the northern wing of the pond. There is a double coat of arms of Münchhausen above the gate entrance, namely that of the black line of Hilmar the Younger, and that of the white line of his wife Dorothea (1568–1624), a sister of Ludolf von Münchhausen in Hessisch Oldendorf ; as well as Claus on Apelern and Otto, builder of Schwedesdorf Castle in Lauenau .
The castle, including the tithe barn and the surrounding moat , originally had a farmyard in front of it, so that the complex was also completed on the fourth side. One of Hilmar the Younger's daughters, Hedwig, married Gerhard Clamor von dem Bussche in 1607 ; The couple built a new castle based on the Schwöbber model on his Hünnefeld estate in Osnabrück , but in simple baroque forms instead of the Renaissance decor.
In 1668 Schwöbber passed to the grandsons of Hilmar the Younger, Otto I von Münchhausen (1643–1717) and his brother Burchard; from 1690 it belonged to Otto alone. Around 1700 a garden that was still in the Renaissance style was laid out. The garden in Schwöbber was so well known at the time that it was also described and illustrated in 1714 in the copperplate engraving “Nürnbergische Hesperides” by the merchant Johann Christoph Volkamer . It is known for the year 1715 that the Russian Tsar Peter I the Great was a guest in Schwöbber, as he was interested in what was then the largest collection of plants in Europe and the orangery with its pineapple culture (see picture pineapple monument).
Garden art
In 1717 Otto's son-in-law and nephew Friedrich von Münchhausen inherited Schwöbber, and in 1741 his son Landdrost Otto II von Münchhausen (1716–1774), who was scientifically involved in fruit and horticulture, as the author of the horticultural and agricultural textbook "Der Hausvater", which was widely used at the time. ; who is considered the founder of agricultural science and was well informed about the current trends in gardening art . In 1750 he converted the palace gardens into one of the earliest English landscape gardens in continental Europe (and according to current research probably the earliest German park of around eight hectares). Zedler's Universal Lexikon from 1743 reports on the “curious Münchhausischer Garten” , “where you can look at the most beautiful and rarest foreign plants from the East and West Indies for strange delight: pineapples, coffee trees, dates , mastic , two hundred types of pomeranian ...” . Otto von Münchhausen's tree nursery was one of the most important of the time; it was one of the first in Germany to have trees from North America. The friend Carl von Linnés already recognized that the English parks were not easily transferable to German conditions:
“One can lay out princely gardens in the style of English parks; but if we German noblemen wanted to follow them and turn our estates into parks, we would have to raise so many thousands of pounds from our plantations in the West Indies. "
Otto's daughter Sidonie married Johann Friedrich von Veltheim (1731–1800) in Destedt in Braunschweig in 1766 , where from 1768 - following the example of Schwöbber's Park - she expanded the small French garden there into a spacious landscape park, with the assistance of the gardener Lenke from Schwöbber. Sidonie's brother, Hamelin District Administrator Otto III, took over this park in 1774. von Münchhausen (1753-1828), whose wife Wilhelmine von Reden from Hameln in 1815 inherited the Silesian possessions around Niederwedeldorf from her brother, the Prussian Mining Minister Count Reden , which was then passed on to her daughter and her husband, Otto III, nephew Adolf von Münchhausen from Stolzenau, fell.
Otto III, his son - Otto IV (1786-1853) - had the palace chapel built in Schwöbber in 1840. The chapel, furnished in the neo-renaissance style, is one of the earliest examples of regional renaissance forms; about ten years before this reached its first high point in Schwerin Castle . From the middle of the 19th century Schwöbber Castle was a center of regional cultural life and became a tourist destination. However, Otto IV's brother and heir August (1798–1861) let the famous greenhouses in Schwöbber go down. His son Johann (1838-1919) leased Schwöbber and bought land in Slovenia .
20th century
In 1900, Johann ceded Schwöbber Castle to his nephew Burchard (1867–1940). In 1907 it came under compulsory administration by the knighthood . In 1908 the pond wing burned down by a lightning strike and in 1920 the estate and palace, which had been in the Münchhausen family's possession since 1511, were sold for 126,000 gold marks (1.5 million marks inflationary value). A cousin of the last owner wrote: "I have known Schwöbber for a century ... I saw the splendor of the house. 16 furniture vans full of Schwöbber ended up in the second-hand shop."
The acquirer, Eduard Meyer (1859–1931), leaseholder of a seed company in Friedrichswerth , rebuilt the burnt-out pond wing and had the interior furnishings redesigned in an eclectic way by the architects Wangenheim and Lübke and the painter Oscar Wichtendahl from 1920 to 1922 ( with borrowings from the Middle Ages, Baroque, Rococo, Empire, Classicism and Symbolism), whereby - in addition to a few fires that destroyed others - only the smallest part is preserved today in its original state. However, the design from the 1920s is now a listed building.
During the Second World War , from 1943 onwards, some of the works of art in the Kunsthalle Bremen were relocated to Schwöbber Castle. After the Second World War it was used as a teacher training home. From 1985 to 2002 it was used as the clubhouse and hotel of the Schloss Schwöbber golf course . In October 1992 there was another major fire in the middle wing. In 2002 Ursula and Friedrich Popken, the owners of the fashion boutique chain “ Ulla Popken ”, acquired the building, which was now in danger of collapsing, and restored and modernized the castle for 35 million euros. In 2004 the 5- star Schlosshotel Münchhausen was opened there.
Destruction of the war in 1945 as well as a lack of care and adverse interventions after 1960 led to an almost complete abolition of the former historical structure and importance of the park. The restoration, which began in 2003, was based on the plans of the architects Heinrich Zeininger and Jürgen von Wangenheim (1875–1956) from Wunstorf - son of Walrab von Wangenheim from around 1920. The former network of paths could only be made visible again through thorough archaeological excavations . After the wild growth that had developed over almost 50 years has been eliminated , the old lines of sight are free again and reveal the special quality of the facility as a landscape park.
Entrance area with gate wing (2006)
Side view from the park (2006)
The pond wing restored in the 1920s (2016)
Palace Chapel (2006)
literature
- Hans Joachim Tute (author), F. Popken (ed.): Schwöbber castle: history and present . Quensen, Hildesheim / Lamspringe 2005, ISBN 3-922805-89-2 .
- Bernhard Schelp: The structural changes to Schwöbber Castle . In: " ... laid out for adornment and jewelry ... ". (Materials on the history of art and culture in North and West Germany; 22) 1996, pp. 109–138.
- Claus Bieger: Schwöbber Castle: from the history of a cultural monument . In: Niedersächsische Denkmalpflege , 15.1991 / 1992 (1995), pp. 73–80.
- Marcus Köhler: Early North German landscape gardens between 1750 and 1770: the landscape gardens and parks of Schwöbber, Harbke and Marienwerder . Berlin, Freie Univ., Master's thesis, 1992.
- Marcus Köhler: "When we are used to seeing a garden laid out in the wild ...": The early landscape gardens of Harbke and Schwöbber. In: Die Gartenkunst 5 (1/1993), pp. 101–125.
- Ernst Andreas Friedrich : Das Schloß Schwöbber , pp. 182-184, in: If stones could talk. Volume IV, Landbuch-Verlag, Hannover 1998, ISBN 3-7842-0558-5 .
- Gebhard von Lenthe u. Ernst Mahrenholtz: Family Tables of the von Münchhausen Family , Part II (text volume), Rinteln 1976.
Web links
- Aerial photo and dates of the palace and garden on the website of the Schlosshotel Münchhausen
Individual evidence
- ↑ title. In: Johann Heinrich Zedler : Large complete universal lexicon of all sciences and arts . Volume 36, Leipzig 1743, column 549.
- ↑ Ov Münchhausen: The householder , 1st part. 3rd edition, Hanover, 1771, p. 2.
- ↑ Staats von Wacquant de Geozelles (son of Johann von Münchhausen's sister Anna) in a letter of February 22, 1928 to the poet Börries Freiherr von Münchhausen , quoted from Lenthe and Mahrenholtz, Stammtafeln der Familie von Münchhausen , issue 36 (biographical text part) of the Schaumburger Studies , Verlag C. Bösendahl, Rinteln 1976, p. 293
- ↑ Archived copy ( Memento from April 13, 2015 in the Internet Archive )
Coordinates: 52 ° 4 ′ 8.7 ″ N , 9 ° 15 ′ 6.2 ″ E