Villa Reitzenstein

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The east side of the villa
The main entrance to the park area
The Kretschmann I cabinet on May 12, 2011 after being sworn in in the state parliament on the outside staircase to the park of the villa
The west side of the villa, between the tall trees of the park

The Villa Reitzenstein in Stuttgart is the official seat of the State Ministry of Baden-Württemberg and the incumbent Prime Minister. It is located in the Stuttgart-Ost district and is halfway up a hill on the slope of the Bopser, southeast of the Stuttgart valley basin .

history

Villa Reitzenstein was built between 1910 and 1913 for Baroness Helene von Reitzenstein . She was the second daughter of the Stuttgart publisher Eduard Hallberger .

The architects of the villa were Hugo Schlösser and Johann Weirether . In the run-up to the work, the client sent both on a trip to France ( Paris and Loire castles ) and Italy in order to collect ideas for the exterior and interior design of the villa. The building was built based on the French baroque style as a two-storey three - wing complex made of Maulbronn sandstone and provided with a mansard roof. It was already equipped with hot water central heating , which was not yet common at the time. Due to the professional origins of the owner family, special emphasis was placed on the interior design of the villa's library. The total construction costs of the villa including the park amounted to 2.8 million gold marks . This corresponds to the equivalent of around 14 million euros.

The two and a half hectare garden of the villa was laid out in 1912 according to the designs of the garden architect Carl Eitel, partly in the French-regular style , partly in the English style by the gardener Georg Stirnweis, an employee of the landscape gardening company Carl Eitel, and maintained over the following four decades. The garden consisted of solitary trees , a rosarium , several ponds and a tempietto dedicated to Cupid . Various outbuildings are part of the enclosed complex. After the Second World War, a residential building for the American military and an administration building were built in the park, so that today only less than one hectare of the park remains.

Helene von Reitzenstein only lived in her villa for nine years. She left Stuttgart during the First World War and the building was temporarily used as a reserve hospital for officers. After the baroness moved her residence to Darching in Bavaria, Johannes von Hieber , President of the Free People's State of Württemberg , had the villa acquired by the state during the inflationary period in 1922 for an inexpensive 5.5 million paper marks (approx. 400,000  gold marks ). The government had intended to bring the Reich Administrative Court to Stuttgart and place it there. However, this plan did not materialize; the court was initially supposed to be established in Karlsruhe, but was not established in Berlin until 1941. The villa was rebuilt and from 1925 served as the seat of the Württemberg state president . President Wilhelm Bazille was the first to live there. He is the only head of government so far who not only had his official, but also his private residence there. He was followed in 1928 by Eugen Bolz , who was deposed in Württemberg in March 1933 at the beginning of the National Socialist era and executed in 1945. The Villa Reitzenstein was the seat of the NSDAP party leadership in Stuttgart for twelve years under the Reichsstatthalter and Gauleiter Wilhelm Murr , who had also been Reich Defense Commissioner since 1939 . A tunnel - now bricked up - under the actual basement of the villa, which was built for Murr, also dates from this time. Prisoners and foreign workers were also used in its construction. After Murr's flight from Stuttgart on April 20, 1945, a ministerial councilor named Karl Benz prevented the destruction of the villa, which Murr had prepared according to the Nero order .

On April 22nd, the mayor handed over the city to French troops. They briefly took possession of the villa, after the end of the war the US military governor, General Lucius D. Clay had his seat there. The state council convened by Clay (consisting of the prime ministers of the US-occupied states) also met in the tapestry hall. From 1948 the villa was the official residence of the Prime Minister of Württemberg-Baden , Reinhold Maier , and since 1952 it has been the official residence of the Prime Minister of Baden-Württemberg . On June 19, 1983, the Stuttgart Treaty, a solemn declaration within the framework of the Single European Act , was drawn up in the so-called corner room of the house by the then German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher and his Italian counterpart Emilio Colombo . In this treaty, the states of the European Community undertake to review the progress made in the field of interinstitutional relations, competences of the Community and political cooperation and, if necessary, to incorporate them into a new treaty on the European Community.

In the summer of 2013, extensive work began on the ten State Ministry buildings located on the Villa Reitzenstein property, with an estimated cost of 27.8 million euros. This included the renovation and technical modernization of the villa, combined with the demolition of the extension built in the 1970s, which will be replaced by a new building. The Prime Minister's return to the villa took place in autumn 2015.

Naming

The villa is named after the deceased husband of the client, Carl Friedrich Sigmund Felix Freiherr von Reitzenstein , from the Franconian noble family of the Reitzenstein . He was chamberlain to Queen Charlotte of Württemberg and son of General Karl Bernhard Freiherr von Reitzenstein , who had led the Württemberg troops in the Franco-German War of 1870/71. Baron von Reitzenstein was fond of gambling and died in 1897 at the roulette table in Baden-Baden. From 1848 through Edward Hall Berger , the father of the building owner, founded publishing and in 1831 by his father Louis Hallberger founded Hallberger'schen publishing firm was formed by merger in 1881, the German publishing house (DVA), at the 1920 Industrial Robert Bosch , the Majority acquired.

literature

  • Thomas Borgmann: The Villa Reitzenstein. Power and Myth . Silberburg-Verlag, Tübingen 2016, ISBN 978-3-8425-1446-1 .
  • Horticulture in the Empire. A monthly with pictures for the garden and flower lover, lover and specialist , 5.1924.
  • Kurt Gayer, Heinz Krämer , Georg F. Kempter: The Villa Reitzenstein and its masters. The history of the Baden-Württemberg seat of government . DRW-Verlag, Stuttgart 1988, ISBN 3-87181-257-9 .
  • Gerhard Konzelmann : Villa Reitzenstein: History of the seat of government of Baden-Württemberg . Hohenheim Verlag, Stuttgart u. Leipzig 2004, ISBN 3-89850-104-3 .

Web links

Commons : Villa Reitzenstein  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The life dates of the garden architect Karl Eitel are unknown (mentioned 1912–1927). Together with H. Aldinger, he was the owner of the Carl Eitel landscape gardening company in Hauptmannsreute 40 in Stuttgart. The company still exists today under the name Eitel Garten- und Landschaftsbau GmbH .
    Georg Stirnweis (born August 8, 1879 in Kersbach , also mentioned from 1912 to 1955) lived with his wife Emma and two sons in the right gatekeeper's house of Villa Reitzenstein. See: #Gardening 1924 ; #Gayer 1989 , pp. 68, 268, 271; #Konzelmann 2004 , page 41.
  2. ↑ www.stuttgarter-zeitung.de : Report from the Stuttgarter Zeitung from December 4, 2012

Coordinates: 48 ° 46 ′ 17 "  N , 9 ° 11 ′ 35"  E