Town house (Unterseen)

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Townhouse (2016)

The town house in the old town of Unterseen has been the linchpin of public life over the centuries in the town and the surrounding area, the Bödeli with Interlaken , which was founded in 1279 . It was used as a department store, hotel, inn, restaurant, tavern or as a town hall and town hall and is a cultural asset of regional importance under monument protection.

history

In 1470 Unterseen burned down to the ground. Immediate rebuilding began; In the middle of the square, the new department store was built as the central building, a predecessor of the later town hall. A town house should have existed before the fire. Around 1600 the town house was renovated as a department store. From 1628 it was also used as a town hall and town hall (place of court and political meeting place). In 1764/1765 there was a severe storm in the Unterseen district. The Lombach burst its banks several times and wreaked havoc. In 1772 Unterseen received permission to hold weekly markets as well as annual markets. The town house was partly used as a granary, but always as an inn. The first tourists who came to the Bernese Oberland stopped here. Probably the most famous guest was the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe . On his trip to Switzerland on October 9, 1779, he stayed in the town house and enjoyed trout in a sour sauce.

After the first Unspunnen festivals (1805 and 1808), many a guest came to visit because of Elisabetha Grossmann , the "beautiful boatwoman of Brienz". She was one of the most famous women in the early days of tourism at the beginning of the 19th century and had married the landlord's son around 1816. A major renovation took place around 1819 and the townhouse took on its present form. Afterwards it was leased to the Ritter-Grossmann couple as a business house. Elisabetha Grossmann's marriage to Peter Ritter, the town housekeeper, failed and she got her divorce - an extraordinary project for the time. With her tenacity, she fought for her children, her reputation and her existence.

Town house and Stedtli Unterseen, 1819

The composer Felix Mendelssohn had a particular fondness for the region, he visited Interlaken between 1822 and 1847 and was a guest in the town hall several times. There he composed the sonnets Die Liebende writes to the poem by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1807/1808) in 1831 and in 1847 painted, among other things, a watercolor of Unterseen.

The town house was majority owned by the municipality until 1867 and was then auctioned off to private tenants, followed by nine different owners. In 1981 the community of Unterseen acquired the town house, also known as the Oberlandhaus , and carried out a comprehensive restoration from 1989 to 1991. In 2012 the Untere Gasse was extensively renovated.

architecture

The former Hotel Stadthaus from 1818/1819 is a dominant four-storey plastered building with 9 × 5 axes under a slightly bent full hipped roof . Even today, the ground floor, especially the arcade with limestone pillars and the arcades that imitate stone houses , largely corresponds to the floor plan of the earlier department store from 1470. Rebuilt around 1876 and renovated between 1989 and 1991, various parts of the previous building continued to expand used. The window frames are partially made of Malmkalk or wood and plaster marbled with painterly means.

Use today

A restaurant based on a concept by René Schudel has been operating in the town house since 2014 .

literature

  • Therese Bichsel: Near the ice giants. Celebrities in the Alpine Province from Goethe to Hodler. Bern 2008, ISBN 978-3-7296-0760-6 .
  • Therese Bichsel: Beautiful skipper. On the trail of an exceptional woman. Bern 1998, ISBN 978-3-7296-0558-9 .
  • Christian Hill, Barbara Kössling: Jena table stories: A culinary journey through five centuries. 2013, ISBN 978-3954000845 , p. 80.
  • Ernst Schläppi: Unterseen: Part II - In the new canton. Unterseen community, Interlaken 2008, p. 75, 416–418.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Unterseen: Part II - In the new canton. Unterseen municipality, Interlaken 2008
  2. ↑ Jena table stories: A culinary journey through five centuries. Retrieved June 15, 2020.
  3. ↑ Stadthaus Unterseen building inventory of the canton of Bern, February 27, 2017, accessed on June 12, 2020.

Coordinates: 46 ° 41 '12.7 "  N , 7 ° 50' 58.6"  E ; CH1903:  631.44 thousand  /  170710