Wilhelmine of Lichtenau

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Wilhelmine Enke in hunting costume , later Countess Lichtenau, Anna Dorothea Therbusch , 1776

Wilhelmine Countess von Lichtenau (since 1796), née Wilhelmine Enke (also Encke), married Ritz (born December 29, 1752 in Dessau ; † June 9,  1820 in Berlin ), was the mistress from 1769 to 1782 and then until his death 1797 the closest confidante and advisor to Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia , with whom she had six children.

She was an influential patron of Prussian early classicism . She was responsible for the establishment of several important palaces in Berlin and Potsdam and was closely associated with leading scholars and artists of the time.

Wilhelmine and Friedrich Wilhelm II.

Friedrich Wilhelm II. As Crown Prince 1773, from Therbusch

Wilhelmine was born as the daughter of the Dessau horn player Johann Elias Enke. The father was "kgl. Cammer-Musikus ”in the service of Frederick II at the Royal Opera in Berlin. Around 1762, after the family moved to Berlin, Wilhelmine met Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm . This gave the girl a solid education before a sexual relationship developed around 1769. In that year Friedrich Wilhelm was divorced from his first wife, Elisabeth Christine von Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel , and married to his second wife, Friederike Luise von Hessen-Darmstadt .

After long struggles, Friedrich II recognized Wilhelmine Encke as the prince's mistress in 1777, after he had fathered two sons with his second wife. She received a house in Charlottenburg , which she gradually expanded in the following years. The vernacular called her "the beautiful Wilhelmine". Wilhelmine Enke's relationship with the prince had six children, four of whom died as toddlers. The favorite son of Friedrich Wilhelm II, born in 1779, Count Alexander von der Mark , will be remembered by posterity after his untimely death in 1787 through his tomb created by Johann Gottfried Schadow . Only the daughter Marianne von der Mark (1780–1814) reached adulthood .

After a religious awakening experience in 1782, Friedrich Wilhelm broke off his sexual relationship with Wilhelmine Enke. She married the valet and later chamberlain Johann Friedrich Ritz (1755–1809). There were three other children from this marriage. After the death of Frederick II in 1786, Friedrich Wilhelm II raised his two surviving children with Wilhelmine to the rank of count, with the name of the House of Mark, which died out in 1609 and was inherited by the Prussian Hohenzollern family . King Friedrich Wilhelm IV later ennobled one of Wilhelmine's grandsons from his marriage to Ritz, named Jacob Wilhelm, in 1842, who founded the von Ritz-Lichtenow family, which still exists today .

The war-damaged Dutch Palace in Berlin in May 1946. It was gradually removed from 1950 to 1963.

Wilhelmine Enke, now called Madame Ritz , remained the king's closest confidante and his advisor in matters of art. In 1786 he gave her (and their two children) a palace on Unter den Linden as a befitting residence in Berlin , which was then called the Dutch Palais after the later owners . In 1787–1794, the king had Michael Philipp Boumann and Carl Gotthard Langhans rebuild it , who built an oval hall over two floors, similar to his oval hall for Bellevue Palace . A second Binnenhof, where a private theater was built, extended the building at the rear. As the Berlin residence of Madame Ritz, the palace was now one of the scenes of the scandalous goings-on around Friedrich Wilhelm. Wilhelmine made it one of the city's early literary salons . Here u. a. the archaeologist Aloys Hirt , who initiated the Altes Museum and the building academy , also the English eccentric Lord Bristol , the composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt and others. During a one-year trip to Italy in 1795/96, she met Hirt, as well as William Hamilton and his wife Emma Hamilton and the painter Jakob Philipp Hackert .

Madame Ritz, portrayed by Anton Graff in 1787

Between 1787 and 1793 the king had the marble palace built in Potsdam's New Garden , on the bank of the Holy See , under Wilhelmine's advice . She had a considerable influence on the interior design of the castle. At this time he was already in a relationship with Julie von Voss and after her death in 1789 with Sophie Juliane von Dönhoff . The king had the Palais Lichtenau built for the Ritz couple on the edge of the New Garden between 1796 and 1797 . But already in April 1796 he demanded the dissolution of Wilhelmine's marriage with Ritz, as he intended to marry off their only surviving child, Countess Marianne von der Mark , to the heir count Friedrich zu Stolberg-Stolberg (1769-1805). In order to make a noble connection possible, Ms. Ritz also had to rise to the nobility. Immediately after her return from Italy, she was therefore divorced from the treasurer Ritz, who had already been in another relationship with an actress, and on April 28, 1796, she was raised to the rank of Countess of Lichtenau , whereby the corresponding document was dated back by two years. On September 17, 1796, the Countess was officially introduced to the court. The marriage of the daughter Marianne with the Hereditary Count took place in March 1797, but the marriage failed after two years. Johann Friedrich Ritz received the recently completed Palais Lichtenau as a severance payment and in 1799 married his lover, the actress Henriette Baranius . In 1801 he sold the palace after having had a new house built in Potsdam.

The Countess spent the summer of 1797 in Bad Pyrmont . The time from her return to the death of the then seriously ill king on November 16, 1797, she spent in the cavalier house of the “Dutch establishment” in the New Garden, the “ladies' house”, in order to be as close as possible to the king.

After the death of Friedrich Wilhelm II.

Countess Lichtenau (1794) in marble , by Johann Gottfried Schadow

Friedrich Wilhelm III. immediately after the death of his father had Wilhelmine investigated, among other things, for high treason and embezzlement. Although the investigation came to nothing, the Lichtenau was taken into custody and banished to Glogau . The 27-year-old blamed her for the neglect of his mother, the bigamistic second marriages of his father and her generally dominant position at court. In 1800 her entire property was confiscated and she received a pension instead . Lichtenau was not fully rehabilitated until 1811, after she  had been partially compensated for her expropriated property in 1809 , following the intervention of Napoleon I , and was allowed to return to Berlin.

On May 3, 1802 Lichtenau married in Breslau the 26 years younger theater poet Franz Ignaz Holbein von Holbeinsberg , who also appeared as an actor under the stage name "Fontano". The Hungarian horse dealer Troer murdered his lover in the countess's apartment (Martin von Troer was beheaded in Breslau in February 1803 and his head was used by the medical doctor Wendt for physiological experiments). After four years the marriage was divorced again and Lichtenau returned to Berlin. Here she died in 1820 and was buried near her home on Unter den Linden in the crypt of Hedwig's Church. The crypt was cleared in 1943 to serve as an air raid shelter . Together with 80 other Berlin personalities, some of whom are very well known, she was reburied - now in a simple coffin - in the St. Hedwigs cemetery on Liesenstrasse . Her grave was cleared in 1961 because it was now in the death strip of the Berlin Wall .

Memorial plaque at the site of her former grave in St. Hedwig's cemetery (2020)

The former death strip is now accessible again as a green area. The location of her grave has now been made recognizable by means of a small plaque embedded in it. It lies next to the grave of the important and generous art collector Count Athanasius von Raczynski, which has also been identified again .

Act

Lichtenau developed into an influential patron and interior designer during the reign of her friend and benefactor Friedrich Wilhelm II. The interior of the palace on Pfaueninsel , the winter chambers in Charlottenburg Palace and the expansion and refurbishment of the Marble Palace in Potsdam can be traced back to her. These interiors are considered to be the most important of their time in Berlin and Potsdam and were of great influence on the design of Paretz Palace .

She also acquired important works of art for the Berlin collections, fought with Aloys Hirt to set up a public museum in Berlin and was an important client of artists such as Johann Gottfried Schadow , Carl Gotthard Langhans and Michael Philipp Boumann .

Afterlife

In 1984 her life was filmed in the four-part series “ Die Schöne Wilhelmine ” based on the novel of the same name by Ernst von Salomon with Anja Kruse in the lead role.

Fonts

swell

literature

  • Edelgard Abenstein: The King's mistress. Countess Lichtenau alias Wilhelmine Encke , Berlin 2006, ISBN 3-89479-187-X .
  • Paul Bailleu :  Lichtenau: Wilhelmine Enke,… Countess Lichtenau . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 18, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1883, pp. 534-536.
  • Hans Branig: From the later years of the Countess of Lichtenau's life. In: Yearbook for Brandenburg State History 1955. pp. 19–25.
  • Bertold Haase-Faulenorth: Countess Lichtenau. A fate between times. Bernard & Graefe, Berlin 1934.
  • Alfred Hagemann : Wilhelmine von Lichtenau (1753-1820). From the mistress to the patroness , Cologne 2007, ISBN 978-3-412-24006-6 .
  • Museum Charlottenburg-Wilmersdorf, Berlin (ed.): Countess Lichtenau. A life for love and art. Exhibition August 28, 2015 to March 13, 2016 (with texts by Ulf Jacob and Sabine Witt), Berlin 2015, ISBN 978-3-00-050774-8 .
  • Sonja Schnitzler (ed.): The mistress Wilhelmine: Mockery against the beautiful Countess Lichtenau. Eulenspiegel, Berlin 1989.
  • Waltraud Maierhofer: "Wilhelmine Encke-Ritz-Lichtenau: Writing and Reading the Life of a Prussian Royal Mistress." In: Biography 27.3, 2004, pp. 575-596 .

Web links

Commons : Wilhelmine von Lichtenau  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lichtenau in Meyers Konversationslexikon. In: retrobibliothek.de. Retrieved August 8, 2018 .
  2. ^ Information on Jacob Wilhelm von Ritz-Lichtenow at genealogy.net
  3. ^ Hermann Schmitz: Berliner Baumeister from the end of the eighteenth century , Verlag Ernst Wasmuth, Berlin 1925, p. 327, illustrations p. 144–147
  4. ^ Winfried Löschburg: Unter den Linden. Faces and stories of a famous street , book publisher Der Morgen, Berlin 1980, p. 78 f.
  5. ↑ Since the temporary conquest of the Lichtenau Fortress in 1449 , the Brandenburg margraves used the title Count of Lichtenau largely only as a claim title , since the alleged county actually belonged to the Free Imperial City of Nuremberg as the Lichtenau care office . The assignment of his own title spared the king the insecure, time-consuming and costly application for elevation to the imperial count status by the emperor in Vienna.
  6. ↑ Michael Sachs: 'Prince Bishop and Vagabond'. The story of a friendship between the Prince-Bishop of Breslau Heinrich Förster (1799–1881) and the writer and actor Karl von Holtei (1798–1880). Edited textually based on the original Holteis manuscript. In: Medical historical messages. Journal for the history of science and specialist prose research. Volume 35, 2016 (2018), pp. 223–291, here: pp. 238 f.
  7. ↑ Ernst von Salomon: The beautiful Wilhelmine. A novel from Prussia's gallant time. Rowohlt, Reinbek b. Hamburg 1965.
personal data
SURNAME Lichtenau, Wilhelmine von
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Enke, Wilhelmine; Ritz, Wilhelmine; Lichtenau, Wilhelmine Countess of
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Beloved of Friedrich Wilhelm II of Prussia
DATE OF BIRTH December 29, 1752
PLACE OF BIRTH Dessau
DATE OF DEATH June 9, 1820
Place of death Berlin