Veste Wachsenburg
| Veste Wachsenburg | ||
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 The Wachsenburg from the southwest |
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| Alternative name (s): | Wachsenburg | |
| Creation time : | 930 | |
| Castle type : | Höhenburg, summit location | |
| Standing position : | Counts, clericals | |
| Place: | Wachsenburg Office | |
| Geographical location | 50 ° 51 '30 " N , 10 ° 52' 35" E | |
| Height: | 420.8 m above sea level NHN | |
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The Veste Wachsenburg , often just called Wachsenburg for short , is a medieval hilltop castle belonging to the Three Equals in the area of Holzhausen , a district of the municipality of Wachsenburg in the Ilm district in Thuringia . In the course of its history, the castle changed hands frequently, was destroyed and often rebuilt and expanded: especially from 1900 to 1913 to accommodate the extensive Wachsenburg collections on local history and army history. The latter was lost in 1946 and the local museum had to close in 1962. Today the Wachsenburg serves, as it has for a long time, as an excursion restaurant, since 1966 as a hotel, and it houses a small, privately run museum.
history
930 to 1860
First buildings on the conical, 420.8 m above sea level. NHN high Wassenberg ( Old High German for steep mountain ) probably already existed around 930. The construction was driven by the Hersfeld Imperial Abbey to secure the extensive possessions in the Arnstadt area .
From 1090 to 1098 the Hersfeld abbot Friedrich lived at the castle and died there. He had the castle , which had been badly damaged by feuds, restored. Around the year 1100, the imperial abbey left the castle to the Landgraves of Thuringia . The chronicler Ekkehard von Aura reported in 1120 that the Saxons had locked imperial knights who ravaged Thuringia in the castle Wachsenburg ( in castello Wassenburc ) by individual teams and finally drove them out after they were weakened by hunger. The first document with the mention of the Wachsenburg comes from the year 1140, in which a knight Adelher von Wassenburg is mentioned. In the course of the armed conflicts between the Hohenstaufen and Guelphs , the castle was drawn into the fighting at the end of the 12th century, and the Welfisch-minded Archbishop of Cologne established himself there.
In the following decades, the castle was the scene of conflicts between rival forces within the empire on several occasions . In 1204, Philip of Swabia took the castle. Then the owners changed between the Counts of Käfernburg , Orlamünde and, from 1306, Schwarzburg-Blankenburg . Under Count Günther XII. who owned the castle from 1306, it experienced its heyday. In 1366, the subsequent owner, Johann II von Schwarzburg , had to sell the castle to pay off war debts. In spite of all efforts by the city of Erfurt to acquire it, the castle came into the possession of the Thuringian landgraves in 1369, who subsequently felt obliged to pledge the castle several times. In this way, it came into the hands of Apel Vitzthum the Elder at Roßla in 1441 , who became known as the “fire chief of Thuringia”. The city of Erfurt later took action against this notorious robber baron by besieging the Wachsenburg in 1451 with the support of the imperial cities of Mühlhausen and Nordhausen. After a four-week siege, during which the castle's shield wall was undermined (by Mansfeld miners), Apel Vitzthum was finally forced to give up. The damaged facility gradually fell into disrepair.
In 1640 the Wachsenburg came into the possession of Duke Ernst the Pious , who originally toyed with the idea of expanding it into a castle. So in 1651 he had a 97 m deep well drilled into the mountain right next to the castle gate. After repair work, however, the establishment of the castle as a breeding and orphanage was planned from 1651 . A wooden model made for this by the builder Casper Vogell has been preserved. But this project was ultimately not implemented either. Later, the post of commandant was introduced for the supervision and administration of a "detention center for military personnel"; the last died in 1856.
Since 1860
In 1861 a castellan and landlord moved into the fortress. The Wachsenburg, which is now intended as a military museum , was largely rebuilt at the end of the 19th and especially at the beginning of the 20th century, and much was rebuilt in the style of neo-Romanesque and neo-Gothic defense architecture.
The knight's hall building, the "Pallas", was present. The "New Building" from 1664, the commandant's house, was attached to the south. To the north opposite was the “arrest house”, with a few old structural remains from the 12th century. These buildings all had to be renovated so that they could be used as exhibition rooms.
1905 was the first new building Hohenlohe Tower as a new dungeon inaugurated. It was named after Prince Ernst von Hohenlohe-Langenburg, who reigned in the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha from 1900 to 1905 and supported the project very much. The tower was 30 meters high, had a consecration hall on the ground floor, three floors above it as exhibition rooms and under the roof a gallery with 16 windows in all directions as a viewing tower. To the south of the tower, a kitchen built the connection to the commandant's house. An entrance gate to the inner courtyard was built north of the tower, with a battlement above it. To the north followed a turret called “Thörlein”. This created a closed inner courtyard. The entire west side of the inner castle complex was also redesigned. In 1907 the Duke Carl-Eduard bastion was added as a museum gun hall. In 1910 a small round tower was built for the gunpowder used in salute shooting. In 1913, mainly because of the view from a distance, a "defense tower" was built to the west of the Hohenlohe Tower: a semicircular shell tower made of limestone with half-timbering on the inside. Because of the First World War , a parapet walk from the new defense tower to the bastion and a planned gatehouse to the outer courtyard were no longer implemented.
Since the beginning of the century , the painter Eduard Fiedler from Apfelstädt has been responsible for the interior design of the castle . When he died in 1931, he left behind extensive designs for the painting of the Great Knight's Hall with motifs from the history of the castle and the region. Fiedler made a total of 471 designs, murals, portraits, postcards and drawings for the Wachsenburg. During the GDR era, eight of his wall paintings in the south room of the great hall were destroyed. Heinz Fiedler was still able to take photographs of them in 1952.
The knight's hall was reconstructed in 1934. In 1938 the bastion was expanded to accommodate guns.
Until 1918 the Wachsenburg was under the control of the dukes of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha . In 1920 it became the property of the State of Thuringia . The state took on the obligation "to permanently maintain the Wachsenburg Fortress and to promote the local history museum housed in it as much as possible".
In 1941, a permanent observation post for three Wehrmacht soldiers was set up on the Hohenloheturm to monitor the airspace.
At the beginning of 1945 one of the depots for cultural goods from the Weimar art collections , which were threatened by the air war, was set up in the castle . The National Theater Weimar also stored valuable holdings on the Wachsenburg.
On April 4, 1945, US troops "hesitantly and firing" occupied Wachsenburg, from which a white flag was waving. There was a meeting between Generals Patton and Eisenhower . Much museum property disappeared as early as 1945, and in January 1946 the Red Army transported the valuable militaria collection. Renovation work was carried out between 1964 and 1969. In 1966 the Arnstadt district , to which the Wachsenburg now belonged, set up a special hotel there, which also served as a guest house for the GDR government. The HO restaurant was open to the public.
In 1991 the state of Thuringia became the owner of the fortress. Extensive restoration work was carried out . Since 2001 the castle with hotel and restaurant has been privately owned after ten years of lease. The reopening of the New Castle Museum in 2001 was initiated by the owners . In 2003, the St. Georg Castle Chapel was ceremoniously consecrated on the ground floor of the Hohenlohe Tower. In the same year, the Ordo Militaris Teutonicus Levantis e. V. , an, according to its own account, an independent and secular order of hospitallers knight with charitable tasks and military order, similar to the Knights Templar , the Wachsenburg to his home order castle.
The Wachsenburg Collections
Three deserving Gotha citizens, Carl Ferdinand Grübel, Moritz Huppel and Theobald Wolff, founded the Wachsenburg Committee in 1896 . You had participated in the 6th Thuringian Infantry Regiment No. 95 in the Franco-German War 1870/71 and wanted to build a museum of the German Wars of Unification for the period from 1806 to 1871 on the fortress . However, this objective was soon expanded. The population has been appealed for support for the "Collection of patriotic antiquities" since 1895. Duke Alfred von Sachsen-Coburg and Gotha contributed significantly to the success of the project with the donation of a large sum of money and exhibits from his house. Soon after his inauguration in 1905, Duke Carl-Eduard von Sachsen-Coburg and Gotha took over the patronage of the fortress and its collections. The “Wachsenburg-Verein” founded in 1907 under its chairman, Captain Curt von Gillhausen-Gotha, took care of maintaining and expanding the collections.
The museum on the Wachsenburg was able to show:
- A collection of military history from the Thirty Years War to the First World War : clothing, equipment and armament of German soldiers, but also of their opponents. A focus among the militaria were flags, standards, trophies, uniforms, artillery and siege tools, especially from Gothic-Altenburg regiments of the 17th and 18th centuries.
- Large numbers of valuable old guns : in the open air and in the gun hall, Bastion Duke Carl Eduard, built in 1907 and expanded in 1938 . Especially the captain Zachariae had put together through his activities "a coherent picture of the development of the artillery from the field snake to the heavy naval artillery".
- A diorama of the Battle of Wörth in Alsace in 1870 with around 4,000 tin figures, in which soldiers from the Duchy of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha were involved.
- a "War Aid Exhibition" 1914-18
- A Herzog Alfred collection with weapons (lances, spears, arrows, bows) and other ethnographic objects from Asian, African and Pacific cultures. The Duke had brought these memorabilia with him from his extensive travels to these regions as an admiral of the British fleet.
- a "German Colonial Department" with exhibits from the colonies of the German Empire
- An extensive local history collection of peasant furniture, household items and costumes mainly from the region, but also from other parts of Germany (representation of traditional handicrafts in Thuringia, oldest exhibits from the 17th century). The collection of national costumes from Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was particularly supported by the Duchess Victoria Adelheid.
- Portraits of Ernestine dukes and their wives, an artistically designed family tree of the dukes, coats of arms of German ruling families, pictures by the Gotha history painter Prof. JH Schneider from the Gleichen-Sage and by Eduard Fiedler Wachsenburg murals as well as many historical depictions of him.
- the state car, known as the "skull" because of its shape, of the then Gotha Duke from 1808
- an exhibition about Gustav Freytag , the poet of The Ancestors , on the upper floor of the Hohenlohe Tower from 1906. He wrote the chapter Nest der Wrens (the Mühlburg) at the castle around 1870 . The Gustav Freytag room contained original furniture from his house in Siebleben .
In 1920 revolutionary soldiers picked up usable firearms from the collection. When the state of Thuringia took over the Wachsenburg in the early 1920s, it agreed to "support the local history museum housed in it as much as possible".
During the Second World War , particularly valuable parts of the collections were secured in castle cellars to protect them from air raids and artillery fire. At the beginning of April 1945, the Wachsenburg was occupied by US troops and at the beginning of July by the Red Army . There were soon significant losses in the museum's holdings as a result of taking away “souvenirs”. In January 1946, the remaining parts of the war museum were sealed on the orders of Marshal Zhukov in Berlin, and shortly afterwards the weapons and uniforms were confiscated, packed and taken away. Some of the historic guns were scrapped in Arnstadt. At the instigation of the castle landlady, Ilse Werner, a particularly beautiful bronze gun barrel was buried in the parking lot before the Americans arrived and thus saved. In 1993 it found a place in the military history exhibition on the Petersberg in Erfurt and was completed in 2013 with a replica block carriage. Some of the historical uniforms were returned by the USSR in 1966 and were transferred to the holdings of the German Historical Museum in East Berlin.
The “Wachsenburg Association”, which had managed and managed the collections independently from 1907 until the end of the war in 1945, had to be dissolved. From 1947 onwards, only the remains of the folklore collection could be shown again in a local museum on the Veste with the approval of the SMA Arnstadt : traditional costumes, household and work equipment, artefacts and the ethnographic collection. The honored administrator and collection manager since 1906, Church Councilor Franz Bonsack, had advocated the establishment of a local history museum with state authorities and the occupying power - also to preserve at least part of his life's work. He died in 1950. The following museum director, Cläre Werner - daughter of the castle innkeeper Edmund Werner - was deposed in 1962 and in 1965 the museum was closed completely. The remainder of the holdings became the property of the Arnstadt museums.
The “Wachsenburg Collections. A museum for home, empire and fatherland “had ceased to exist entirely.
In September 2001 the owners of the Wachsenburg opened the small “New Castle Museum” in the north wing and Hohenlohe tower.
Most of the holdings of the museum in the north wing were cleared around mid-2011. Although the Wachsenburg website (as of June 2012) continues to advertise the museum in the north wing, it no longer exists and is not publicly accessible. These changes were made by the current owners to concentrate on hotel and restaurant operations and to reduce the number of tourists.
Wachsenburg nature reserve
In 1996 the nature reserve was secured with 80 hectares. In the form of badlands, it includes the steep and rugged slopes of the Wachsenburg Hill and the Red Mountain. Here in the characteristic forests, the semi-arid and dry grasslands, warmth-loving bushes and arable herb meadows, there are many representatives of the diverse fauna and flora that are worthy of protection. Particularly noteworthy are: the blue-winged wasteland insect, smooth snake, Lorraine flax, Adonis rose and the sand lizard.
Beerbergmoor | Pea head | Wood of God | Big doll | Grove | High cross | Ilmenau ponds | Jonastal | Market valley and morass | Pennewitzer Ponds and Lower Wohlrosetal | Rainwegwiese | Reifberg | Schneekopfmoor at the vicious circle | Seiffartsburg | Tännreisig | Veronikaberg | Vessertal | Wachsenburg | Willinger Berg | Ziegenried
Hiking destination Wachsenburg
The Veste Wachsenburg is a popular destination, especially for day-trippers. Several regional hiking trails lead to the summit: the Graf-Gleichen-Weg, the Gustav-Freytag-Weg, named after the writer Gustav Freytag , and the Otto-Knöpfer-Weg, named after the painter Otto Knöpfer , who is at the foot of the village of Holzhausen the castle grew up and for whom the castle and its surroundings were frequent motifs.
literature
- Andrea Geldmacher: The Wachsenburg Collections. A museum for home, empire and fatherland. ( Studies on folklore in Thuringia. Volume 1 ), Waxmann, Münster 2009, ISBN 978-3-8309-2044-1 .
- Janny Dittrich and Helga Scheidt: Eduard Fiedler and the design of the Wachsenburg . Leaflet catalog for the exhibition in the Arnstadt Castle Museum from December 2008 to March 29, 2009, published by the Arnstadt Castle Museum.
- Thomas Bienert: Medieval castles in Thuringia - 430 castles, castle ruins and fortifications . 1st edition. Wartberg Verlag, Gudensberg-Gleichen 2000, ISBN 3-86134-631-1 , pp. 130-131.
- Günter Wermusch: spoils of war from the Goethe city . Die Zeit, November 30, 1990, No. 49
- Carl Polack: Wachsenburg, Mühlberg and Gleichen, the Thuringian three equals in their relationships to one another. Published by JG Müller, 1859.
Web links
- The Wachsenburg on the website of the community of Drei Gleichen
- Information about the Veste Wachsenburg, visit and area
Individual evidence
- ↑ Map services of the Federal Agency for Nature Conservation ( information )
- ↑ Georg Heinrich Pertz u. a. (Ed.): Scriptores (in Folio) 6: Chronica et annales aevi Salici. Hanover 1844, p. 256 ( Monumenta Germaniae Historica , digitized version )
- ↑ a b Ulrich Völkel: Gastliches Thüringen , Arnstadt 1993, ISBN 3-929662-00-0
- ↑ Wachsenburg. Retrieved June 3, 2020 .
- ↑ Flyer of the Mühlberg Culture Barn
- ^ Marc Rohrmüller: Architectonica . In: Ernst the Pious 1601–1675. Builder and collector. Edited by Juliana Ricarda Brandsch. Gotha 2001, p. 149.
- ↑ Burkhard Fiedler: The life's work of Eduard Fiedler from Apfelstädt . A documentation.
- ↑ Ordo Militaris Teutonicus - Current. Retrieved June 3, 2020 .
- ↑ Hartmut Schwarz: The cannon was buried. Thuringian General, January 11, 2013