Wendgräben Castle
Wendgräben Castle is a former manor house built in 1910 in the style of English country houses in the area of the town of Möckern in Saxony-Anhalt.
geography
The castle is located 500 meters north of the small Wendgräben settlement , a former Vorwerk . Today the castle and settlement form a district of the same name in the city of Möckern. To there, as well as to Loburg , it is about four kilometers. Deciduous and pine forests of West Fleming surround the facility, which is located in the Loburger Vorflming nature reserve .
Client
Hans Waldemar von Wulffen , manor owner in Groß-Lübars, placed the order to build the manor house . He is the offspring of an old noble family whose history is closely linked to the former town of Loburg. He was born in 1864 as the son of a Prussian lieutenant colonel and died in 1942 by suicide. He left a wife and four children.
architect
Von Wulffen entrusted the Berlin architect Hermann Muthesius (1861–1927) with the planning and construction management , as he thought he was best suited to realizing his ideas of a manor house in the English country house style. At the beginning of the 20th century, Muthesius began to introduce this architectural style, which he called the “English House”, as a contrast to historicism and Art Nouveau in Germany.
Building description
The facility is a three-part structure, which is divided into a residential wing, the utility area and a 31 meter high round tower. The outer walls are clad with gray-violet granite boulders that were salvaged from the Wulffschen Gut Groß-Lübars. The gable roofs are covered with tiles.
The south side of the building is lavishly designed. It is flanked by two protruding, pointed-gable additions that frame a terrace with three round arches in front that support a balcony that covers the terrace. The rear wall of the balcony is formed by three gables that protrude over the eaves of the main roof.
The east and west sides are almost identical. The facade is interrupted by a three-storey bay window offset to the south, also with pointed gables, to which an entrance hall formed by three round arches with a gable roof is presented on the west side equally offset to the south. In the north is the commercial wing, which towers over the west facade of the main building by about four meters, but only covers the north facade by a third.
The round tower, which was erected in the northeast corner between the main house and the farm building, slightly offset to the north, ensures the visual cohesion of the main house and the business section. It is seven storeys high and has a tent roof. The tower is a 1: 1 copy of the keep of Loburger castle .
The palace is surrounded by a garden park, which was designed in 1911 by the Düsseldorf garden architect Walter von Engelhardt . It is essentially formed by a north-south axis starting from the house, starting with a stone water basin and ending in the landscape.
history
While the shell construction was completed within two years of 1912, the interior expansion dragged on until the twenties. In 1922, the owner von Wulffen was still talking about his house from a torso . He justified the delays in the completion of the fact that he had volunteered early in the First World War. The von Wulffen family did not use their “mansion” for very long, because from 1938 they leased the castle to the National Socialist People's Welfare Association , which used it as a maternal convalescent home and maternity home.
From 1945 to 1947 Wendgräben Castle served as a reception center for displaced persons and refugees from eastern Germany.
With the land reform in 1947, the von Wulffens were expropriated of their entire property and thus also lost Wendgräben Castle. From 1947 to 1975, the Wendgräben home high school was located in the castle, an extended high school with boarding school for students aged 9–12. Classes with around 160 students per year. About 1000 students graduated from this school. From 1975 to 1991 it was used as a school for children with learning disabilities. This one-week school with boarding school for 40–50 students per year was moved to Zerbst in 1991.
In 1991 the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung acquired the entire facility and carried out extensive renovations and modernization from 1993 to 1997. In 1997, Wendgräben Castle was opened as the foundation's educational center.
In December 2013, Wendgräben Castle was sold to the Munitor Group.
Today there is a private specialist clinic for psychosomatics and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) in the building with the focus on stress-related illnesses and trauma-related disorders.
literature
- Norbert Böhnke, Irene Roch-Lemmer: Wendgräben. In: Palaces and gardens in Saxony-Anhalt. Issue 6, Berlin 2007
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Map services of the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation ( information )
- ↑ Wendgräben Castle , accessed on April 3, 2018
Coordinates: 52 ° 8 ′ 54.1 ″ N , 12 ° 3 ′ 3.1 ″ E