Palais Mendelssohn

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The Palais Mendelssohn (also: Landhaus Mendelssohn ) is located in the Berlin district of Grunewald on the corner of Bismarckallee and Herthastraße. It originally served as a noble residential building and is used multifunctionally after renovations and extensions in the 1960s. It has been called St. Michaels Heim since 1957 .

history

The property belonged to the von Mendelssohn family of Berlin bankers. Franz von Mendelssohn (1865–1935) had the architect Ernst von Ihne build a palace in the style of an English manor with a landscaped park in the 1890s . On the other side of the Herthasees , which then belonged to the property , on Koenigsallee , the brother Robert von Mendelssohn (1857–1917), daughter Emma Witt (1890–1957), née. von Mendelssohn, and their son Robert von Mendelssohn (1902–1996) own houses. During the time of National Socialism , the Mendelssohns were driven from their property. During the Second World War the palace was badly damaged and the other Mendelssohn residential buildings were completely destroyed.

After 1945, the British occupying forces took over the property and cautiously repaired the remaining parts of the palace. They were used as a school for the children of British military personnel. After the school was relocated and the building returned to the Mendelssohn heirs, the Johannische Kirche purchased the property in 1957 and renamed the building St. Michaels Heim . In the early 1960s, the exterior of the palace had retained much of its original appearance and served as a film set. From 1963 to 1967 the new owner carried out extensive renovations and additions that greatly changed the appearance of the building. Today the building is used as a social center, youth hostel and hotel. After 1960 residential houses were built on the site across from Lake Herthas.

Structure of the original Mendelssohn country house

Landhaus Mendelssohn in its original appearance, reception side with courtyard circumference, built as a two-wing complex with a small stair tower in the courtyard corner and thus based on the appearance of small castles from the Renaissance period; According to the principle of English mansions, there is a separation into manorial and economic wings.
Sea side, two-wing system, differently complex facade designs and different construction heights between the manorial and commercial wing.
Two-storey stair hall with representative stairs; Outside of the building in the area of ​​the hall window free of additions, which is why the hall window extends over one and a half floors.
Two-storey staircase hall with a gallery running around two sides, with the gallery aisles resting on the ceiling beams of the adjacent ground floor rooms, resulting in a certain lateral extension of the hall on the upper floor; the expansion of the hall also makes it appear particularly stable and dignified.
Floor plans on the ground floor and upstairs show the two-storey staircase hall as the central room of the manorial wing, around which all other social and living rooms (ground floor) or more intimate living rooms (upper floor) of the manorial family were arranged in a U shape. The kitchen wing (ground floor) and the guest wing (upper floor) are located in the utility wing.

The former Mendelssohn country house was the largest building (net area on the ground floor approx. 700 m²) and one of the most magnificent palaces in the Grunewald villa colony , which was built on the largest residential property (approx. 22,000 m²) in the villa colony. The area was located directly on Lake Herthasee and was surrounded on two sides by the lake shore. The imperial court architect Ernst Ihne - a close, personal friend of the client Franz von Mendelssohn - had designed the country house after he had previously drawn up the plan for the widow's residence built by Victoria Kaiserin Friedrich (net area on the ground floor around 1,600 m²) from 1889–1893 . The owner of the Friedrichshof Palace was an English princess, daughter of Queen Victoria.

Similar to the imperial Friedrichshof Palace in the Prussian part of Hesse (located in Kronberg im Taunus ), he also subdivided the Landhaus Mendelssohn into a manorial wing (net area on the ground floor approx. 480 m²) and a commercial wing (net area on the ground floor around 220 m²) according to the building structure of English mansions ). Following the English example and Schloss Friedrichshof possessed the reign wing a higher architecture (facades complete with Haustein blinded details on a small scale at Castle Friedrichshof reminiscent) than the business wing, whose upper floor (along with the gable areas) with a down-Saxon - Frankish half-timbered mixture was disguised . Both wings had different heights depending on their importance and use.

In terms of its castle-like appearance, the Landhaus Mendelssohn resembled a "two-wing complex with a (small) stair tower in the right corner of the courtyard" and was therefore modeled on comparable castle structures (small aristocratic seats) from the Renaissance period (see Rhede Castle in Westphalia). With regard to the courtyard angle of 90 °, Landhaus Mendelssohn differed significantly from similarly structured buildings such as the imperial Friedrichshof Palace in Hesse and the ducal Wiligrad Palace in Mecklenburg (built in 1896/1898, net area on the ground floor around 900 m²), both of which have one had a wide spread of wings of 135 °.

The stair tower of Landhaus Mendelssohn in the corner of the courtyard was modestly integrated into the overall structure and, in contrast to the stair tower of Wiligrad Castle located in the same place or the main tower on the mansion wing of Friedrichshof Castle, did not appear dominant.

In addition to Schloss Friedrichshof, the Landhaus Mendelssohn probably served as an architectural inspiration for the Mecklenburg Castle Wiligrad, especially since the builder of Wiligrad, Duke Johann Albrecht zu Mecklenburg , was a personal friend of Kaiser Wilhelm II , who certainly liked his court architect Ernst Ihne had recommended to the Duke of Mecklenburg for advice.

Ernst Ihne, who grew up in England, chose the principle of the “English Hall” as the central “distribution room” for the interior access of the manorial wing - similar to Friedrichshof Palace. While the "hall" at Friedrichshof was only one-story and the representative staircase to the upper floor was housed in a separate staircase (with an open connection to the hall), he chose a two-story "English Hall" for the Mendelssohn country house.

The two-story staircase hall with a representative angled staircase running along the walls of the hall and a gallery on the upper floor, as it exists in the Landhaus Mendelssohn, was somewhat widespread in the construction of new buildings in the Wilhelmine Empire of the 1890s - probably as a further development of the single-story English hall Villas and mansions found. It was understood as the central main room of the country house or villa. The remaining rooms of the villa were grouped around them in a U-shape - on the ground floor mainly the common rooms and on the upper floor the private living rooms of the gentlemen. The circumferential gallery served to reach the rooms on the upper floor. Similar to Wiligrad Castle, which was built later and can still be experienced today, the gallery at Landhaus Mendelssohn was not drawn into the open air space of the hall. The gallery corridors rest here completely on the ceiling beams of the surrounding ground floor rooms, which means that the two-story staircase is stepped towards the outside.

The utility wing of Landhaus Mendelssohn comprises the kitchen wing including the dressing room on the ground floor and the guest wing on the upper floor. Here, too, the spatial conditions are comparable to those at Wiligrad Castle in Mecklenburg.

Film set

Before the renovation in the 1960s, the Palais Mendelssohn was used as a location for some CCC film production by producer Artur Brauner :

literature

  • Egon Hessling (Ed.): The Villa Colony Grunewald - Facades, interiors and floor plans of the most interesting Grunewald villas , part 2; Berlin / New York, 1900. Contains approx. 100 panels (panels 14–35 Palais Fürstenberg, panels 64–97 Landhaus Mendelssohn).
  • Peter-Alexander Bösel: Berlin-Grunewald in historical views , Sutton-Verlag, Erfurt 2005 (with photos of many Grunewald villas from the Wilhelmine era to the post-war period ).
  • Heinz Reif (Ed.) In collaboration with Moritz Feichtinger: Berliner Villenleben - the staging of bourgeois living spaces on the green outskirts of the city around 1900 , Gebr. Mann Verlag, Berlin 2008 (with a clear map of the Grunewald villa colony from 1904).
  • Valerian Arsène Verny: The Palais Mendelssohn - A symbol for the rise of the Jewish upper middle class in Berlin? Verlag der Johannische Kirche Weg und Ziel, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-9813822-5-9 .

Web links

Commons : Palais Mendelssohn  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 52 ° 29 ′ 18 ″  N , 13 ° 16 ′ 38 ″  E