Wiesenburg Castle (Brandenburg)

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Wiesenburg Castle seen from the castle park

The Wiesenburg Castle is located south of the center of Wiesenburg in the state of Brandenburg , Potsdam-Mittelmark district on the edge of the Brandtsheide in the Hoher Fläming Nature Park . The associated, publicly accessible castle park extends between the castle and the Wiesenburg train station and has been a listed building since 1982 .

The roots of the complex go back to a medieval castle from the 12th century, which was replaced by a new castle after a fire in the 16th century. Over the centuries it was gradually expanded to its present size. The castle was given its neo-renaissance style during renovation work in the 19th century when it was owned by the von Watzdorf family . Used as a school from 1946 and later as a boarding school, the facility was sold to private investors in 1998. They had the castle buildings extensively renovated by 2003 and converted them into an exclusive residential and office complex.

history

Beginnings

The history of Wiesenburg Castle goes back to the 12th century. A first official mention as Burgwardium found by Albrecht the Bear castle built in a letter from the Bishop Wilmar of Brandenburg to the provost Vigbert from the year 1161. 1180 the plant came to the Duchy of Saxony and was in the early 13th century, subsequently fixed . Together with the castles Rabenstein and Eisenhardt , it was supposed to secure the High Fläming against the Archbishop of Magdeburg and the Margrave of Brandenburg .

After frequent changes of ownership , the Saxon Elector Friedrich II enfeoffed Friedrich Brand von Lindau in 1456 with the castle and the "little town" Wiesenburg. This also included the villages of Jeserig, Reetz, Schlamau and some villages that were later devastated . During the Schmalkaldic War , Spanish mercenaries in the service of Emperor Charles V set the castle on fire in 1547 and destroyed it. Only a few remains of the curtain wall and the massive keep survived the conflagration.

New castle building

In 1550 Friedrich III. Brandt von Lindau to rebuild the complex on the foundations of the destroyed castle as a palace in the Renaissance style . The reconstruction probably took 20 years. Under him, the fore lock area with the so-called Mannekentor as an entrance and a gatehouse with a simple gable , which was to serve as a portal to the main castle. Friedrich's son Benno continued the work started by his father and expanded the complex into a handsome castle. The Saxon Elector Johann Georg I , who often hunted in Wiesenburg, planned to buy the vast forests of the Brandtsheide from the lord of the castle Benno, who called himself “the rich”. Benno asked for an egg for each tree as the purchase price. This was unaffordable even for the elector.

When the Thirty Years War reached Wiesenburg in 1634, the residents left the castle. Subsequent multiple looting of the vacant complex by soldiers (including 1636) severely damaged large parts of the castle or even destroyed them. It took many decades for the Brandtsheide and Wiesenburg to recover from the devastation of the war. The castle owners who returned after the end of the war had the buildings repaired. From 1730 the main palace was extended and rebuilt under Adam Friedrich Brand von Lindau . The lord of the castle had work carried out on today's west wing in particular. He was also the last male owner of the castle from this family, because through the marriage of his daughter Luise Sophie, the property was inherited by the von Watzdorf family.

From the Watzdorf family until today

Wiesenburg Castle on a lithograph from around 1860

In the 18th century, the Saxon Chamberlain, Appellationsrat , court judge in Wittenberg and tax collector of the Kurkreis Adam Friedrich August von Watzdorf owned the castle. This received its current appearance from 1863 onwards during a radical redesign in the neo-renaissance style under his great-grandson Curt Friedrich Ernst von Watzdorf . At the same time, today's palace gardens and the English landscape park were laid out. The reason for the renovation was a lightning strike in the keep and its subsequent renovation. The lead architect for the work was Semper student Oskar Mothes . For example, he provides the plans for an increase in the old keep and for its conversion into a lookout tower. He was also responsible for the redesign of the south facade. Curt von Watzdorf died in 1881, in the same year the 18 years of renovation work came to an end. Curt's heiress was his younger sister Elisabeth, who had been married to Count Adolf Karl Alexander Alexis le Camus von Fürstenstein since 1862 . Her daughter Viktoria brought Schloss Wiesenburg to the family of her husband, Prince Heinrich XXVI. Reuss-Köstritz , who in 1887 assumed the title of Graf von Plauen . Although the last lord of the castle, Enzio Graf von Plauen, emigrated to Sweden in 1942 , the complex remained the property of his family until 1945. In 1944 it was used by the Army High Command for several weeks before the castle was subsequently used as a hospital . After the end of the war, the von Plauen family was expropriated and the state of Brandenburg became the owners of the castle. From 1947 a school with a focus on Russian and an integrated boarding school ( Erich Weinert Oberschule ) was housed in the buildings. The interior of the palace was completely redesigned for this type of use: For example, the palace chapel was converted into a TV room, the garden hall was used as an auditorium and the knight's hall was converted into shower rooms.

Todays use

School operations ceased in 1992 and the castle was empty in the following years. In 1998, a group of private investors acquired the facility and had it completely renovated in the following years, after the first restoration had already taken place in 1965 . The renovation work was completed in spring 2003, so that today the exterior facades have been restored in the design of the late 19th century. Modern apartments, offices and studios have been created inside the castle. The castle courtyard, which is normally not open to the public, and the garden hall are sometimes opened for events.

In the gatehouse, the so-called Heimatstube provides information about the Wiesenburg and the history of the palace with a small exhibition. The tourist information office is also located there. The keep, which can be climbed for a small fee, offers a panoramic view of the surrounding area of ​​Wiesenburg.

description

Castle building

The two-storey main castle is a closed four-wing complex with an irregular, pentagonal floor plan. To the east of this is the castle area with the former coachman's stable, which has been home to a restaurant since 1997. Access to the farm yard is provided by the round-arched Manne Gate , built around 1570 , which bears the figure of a knight on its carved gable top .

The oldest part of the castle is the 48 meter high keep on the northeast corner of the main castle. The core of the round tower dates from the beginning of the 13th century and was part of the predecessor of today's castle. He has an on consoles cantilevered and covered tour, which, however, is an addition from the second half of the 19th century. The keep is closed off by a polygonal helmet with a weather vane . The tower masonry consists of hewn field stones . The same applies to the remains of the former curtain wall, which are up to two meters thick.

The keep is adjoined on the east side by the gatehouse with a barrel-vaulted gateway from the second half of the 16th century. The brick passage vault overlaps an older Romanesque gate . The arched entrance to the building is flanked on both sides by Corinthian columns . They come together with the robe of red stone and richly decorated gables of conversions from the time from 1864 to 1866. On the first floor of the gatehouse is the former court room, a room with a groin vault .

The inner courtyard of the castle is defined by an elaborately designed well house that was imported from Italy and built in 1609. The corresponding year in its decor indicates this. However, the building only got its current place during the redesign from 1863, before it was in the palace garden. The portal walls of the individual palace wings are also valuable in terms of art history . They date from the 17th and 18th centuries and owe their good state of preservation to a renovation after 1846 using older parts. One of them shows the coat of arms of the castle founder Friedrich III above the lintel . Brandt von Lindau and his second wife Maria von Pflug. In 1957, the linden trees in the courtyard replaced the chestnuts that had existed until then .

The garden-side façade of the south wing comes from a redesign of the palace under Kurt Ernst Friedrich von Watzdorf from 1863. It is divided into nine axes by windows and has a column in the center , to which stairs lead up from the garden terrace on its west and east side . Both floors are divided vertically by pilasters with a rustic look. The first floor also has other, smaller pilasters with Ionic capitals as decoration. A stone balustrade adorned with vases forms the upper end of the south facade .

  • Mannequin Gate

  • Gatehouse with volute gable in the neo-renaissance style

  • Keep

  • North and Northwest Wings

  • View of the inner courtyard with the well house

Castle Park

General plan of the Wiesenburg Palace Park
View of the palace garden

The 110-  hectare castle park with its rich stock of foreign trees has been declared a landscape protection area. Another source distinguishes a 13 hectare core area, which is followed by a 113 hectare forest park. It was laid out around the middle of the 19th century by the lord of the castle, Curt Friedrich Ernst von Watzdorf. Until then, the area had mainly served the count's owners as a game reserve ( pheasantry ). The forester Gebbers was the actual creator of the park area. He gave it its present-day appearance through extensive plantings, especially of conifers from Western Europe, America, Japan and China. The cultivation of the fast-growing Douglas fir in closed stands is particularly worth mentioning. This softwood species, which was introduced from North America in the middle of the last century, was, after a few unsuccessful attempts at cultivation in Schleswig-Holstein , initially only planted as a single trunk, in the rarest cases as a group.

The fir is represented most numerous with hemlock, spit, and giant sitka fir . It is followed by the spruce with dwarf, dwarf-tail, tiger-tail and blue spruce . A multitude of cypress and cedar species , various magnolias and large areas of azaleas convey foreign impressions. In addition to gold and turkey oaks, the rare ginkgo biloba grows here . The rhododendrons have developed into a dendrological specialty . They cover large areas in the southern part of the park as a substructure in oak and beech trees. At the edge of the trees there are giant trees with an age of more than 400 years and a circumference of more than five meters. These old beeches and oaks are surpassed by a black and a Canadian poplar - both are around 125 years old - in size and height. They reveal the poplar as a fast growing type of wood.

A staircase, the walls of which are overgrown with wisteria , leads over the main terrace of the castle on the balcony . Beautiful groups of figures and richly decorated vases by the Berlin sculptor Alexander Calandrelli arouse the visitor's interest. These works are made from majolica . The large silver linden tree in the east part of the main terrace shades an Italian pergola with three wall reliefs depicting spring, summer (grain harvest) and autumn (grape harvest). Mythical stone animals form supports for the benches.

The castle was built on a hill that previously flattened out in steps into the park and ended in a wide, lined castle moat. As it turned out that the narrow slope did not give the castle enough support, especially its foundations, the moat was filled in in 1864 to fortify the castle and a brickwork supported by strong buttresses was erected in front of the castle . The space between the masonry and the castle was filled with sand and earth. This is how today's terrace was created. From here you can reach a semicircular square. It is bordered by artificial groups made of Nordic erratic boulders and tuff stones from the Bad Kösen area. To the left of the semicircle are some fieldstone grottoes. The path leads past the spacious flower arrangements to the castle pond, where swans, Chinese hump geese and Turkish high-flying ducks arouse the visitor's interest.

literature

  • Hans-Joachim Dreger: Landscape Park, Wiesenburg. In: Bund Heimat, Umwelt in Deutschland (Ed.): White paper on historical gardens and parks in the new federal states. 2nd Edition. Bund Heimat und Umwelt in Deutschland, Bonn 2005, ISBN 3-925374-69-8 , pp. 53–54.
  • Peter Feist : Wiesenburg Castle (= The historical place . Issue 5). Kai Homilius, 1995, ISBN 3-931121-04-6 ( reading sample ).
  • Paul Marth, Roger Rössing: Castles and mansions in Brandenburg . Weltbild, Augsburg 1995, ISBN 3-89350-795-7 , pp. 80–81, 122–123.
  • Georg Piltz: Palaces and gardens around Berlin . Seemann, Leipzig 1968, pp. 15-16.
  • Dirk Schumann, Ulrich Jarke: Wiesenburg (= castles and gardens of the Mark . Issue 79). 1st edition. German Society, Berlin 2007.
  • Alexander Duncker (Ed.): The rural residences, castles and residences of the knightly landowners in the Prussian monarchy, along with the royal family, house fideicommiss and casket goods . Volume 7. Duncker, Berlin 1864/65, undated; zlb.de (PDF; 245 kB).

Web links

Commons : Schloss Wiesenburg  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d e f Information according to the information board on site
  2. ↑ a b History of Wiesenburg ( Memento from February 1, 2014 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ↑ a b c d e G. Piltz: Palaces and gardens around Berlin. 1968, p. 15.
  4. ↑ Information about the castle at brandenburg-info.com; Retrieved January 18, 2014.
  5. ↑ a b c d e f Castle history on the website of the Förderverein des Schlosspark Wiesenburg; accessed on December 12, 2016.
  6. ↑ a b Information on Schloss Wiesenburg in the GenWiki ; Retrieved January 20, 2014.
  7. ^ P. Marth, R. Rössing: Castles and mansions in Brandenburg. 1995, p. 123.
  8. ↑ Information about the castle on flaeming-burgen.de; Retrieved January 18, 2014.
  9. ^ A b Karl-Heinz Piltz: Castles and palaces . Brockhaus, Leipzig 1981, p. 202.
  10. ↑ The latest history of the castle on the website of the Friends of the Wiesenburg Castle Park; accessed on December 12, 2016.
  11. ↑ a b History of the Wiesenburg castle complex on the website of the Friends of the Wiesenburg Castle Park; accessed on December 12, 2016.
  12. ↑ a b c d e P. Feist: Wiesenburg Castle. 1995.
  13. ↑ reiseland-brandenburg.de accessed on January 19, 2014.
  14. ^ Community Wiesenburg / Mark (ed.): Schlosspark Wiesenburg - The most important garden monument between Potsdam and Wörlitz , Flyer, p. 4, without date

Coordinates: 52 ° 6 ′ 45.9 ″  N , 12 ° 27 ′ 9.2 ″  E