Willemer house
The Willemer house (also Willemer house and Willemer garden house ) is a classicist garden house from the early 19th century in Frankfurt am Main . It became famous through the meetings there between the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Marianne von Willemer in 1814. During the Second World War , the original building was largely destroyed in the air raids on Frankfurt am Main and then rebuilt. Today there is a publicly accessible Goethe memorial in the house, which is classified by the Free German Hochstift as “one of the two most important Goethe memorials in Frankfurt” next to the Goethe House .
location
The Willemer house is on the Mühlberg on the eastern edge of the southern Main district of Frankfurt Sachsenhausen on the street Hühnerweg . It is surrounded by a small, park-like ornamental garden with a flower ring , walking paths, bushes and several larger trees. Below there are two large ginkgo trees that stand side by side behind the garden shed. From the Hühnerweg street, which runs past the house, the Mariannenstraße branches off diagonally across from the Willemer property , the name of which is intended to indicate the history of the place.
history
In earlier centuries, the Sachsenhausen hill Mühlberg offered a distant view over the city of Frankfurt as far as the north-western low mountain range Taunus . In the 18th century, wealthy Frankfurt citizens began to buy real estate there in order to have country residences and garden houses built. The Frankfurt banker and author Johann Jakob von Willemer (1760–1838) bought the garden house in a vineyard on the Mühlberg in 1809 and had it converted into a summer residence. On October 18, 1814, von Willemer and his then 29-year-old third wife Marianne (1784–1860) met their friend Goethe in the garden house to watch the bonfires on the Taunus ridge on the occasion of the first anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig . Goethe wrote in a letter about the incident in 1815:
"[...] Then I visualized the friends and the little flames so delicately dotted over Frankfurt's panorama, all the more so when it was just a full moon, in front of whose face lovers should always feel strengthened in an invincible affection."
In the following period up to 1815, parts of Goethe's late work West-Eastern Divan are said to have been created in the Willemer-Häuschen , namely several poems from the chapter Book Suleika, as well as the three poems written anonymously by Marianne von Willemer, Highly delighted in your love , What means movement and around your damp wings , which Goethe tacitly incorporated into the work. In 1815, Goethe visited the Willemers again to celebrate his 66th birthday in the Frankfurt Gerbermühle, which Johann Jakob had leased since 1786 .
The garden house was renovated in 1902 by the city of Frankfurt and furnished with furniture by the Free German Hochstift. In air raids on the city of Frankfurt in 1943 (according to other sources in March 1944) the original Willemer house was destroyed to the ground. From 1962 to 1964, the building was rebuilt in an identical form in the same place by the Hochstift, the City of Frankfurt and the Sachsenhausen District Association and again set up as a Goethe memorial.
architecture
The garden house, designed in the architectural style of classicism, is a three-story building that looks like a tower due to its small-format floor area. The floor plan of the Willemer house has the shape of two almost regular octagons joined together . A rectangular bay window is built on the street front of the first floor , with a small balcony on it on the second floor. The larger part of the building facing the street with a bay window houses a museum room on each floor. In the smaller part of the building facing the garden there is a staircase with a spiral staircase and three windows facing the garden.
The two upper floors of the front building, the entire staircase and the obtuse-angled tent roof are covered with natural slate; the ground floor of the front building is plastered white with a low plinth made of red Main sandstone . The bay window is supported by two slender columns at the outer corners. The upper floors have large windows on the street side for the small footprint; the windows of the front building can be darkened with shutters on the ground floor and first floor . The entrance door to the house is in a small extension with a pent roof on the northwest side of the building.
Goethe memorial
All three floors of the garden house are dedicated to the memory of Goethe and his encounters with Marianne von Willemer as a museum memorial.
The two upper floors are also furnished in the classicism style and equipped with wallpaper, curtains and furniture in the style of 19th century living rooms. The furniture in the upper floors is a pair of chairs with a small table, a secretary , Marianne von Willemers dressing table and a small number of display cases . On the walls hang framed pictures with various portraits of Goethe and Willemer, with letter copies as well as with some contemporary Frankfurt landscape depictions, including depictions of the original garden shed and the tanner's mill. A special exhibit is a facsimile of the sheet of paper with the handwritten poem Gingo biloba , which Goethe dedicated to Marianne von Willemer in 1815, decorated with two Ginkgo leaves (see photo opposite).
The Willemer house has no heating and is closed to visitors during the winter months. After the furniture in the facility had been exposed to winter weather for a long time, it was restored in 2006 by the workshop of the Frankfurt Historical Museum . In the same year the garden was renovated. The garden and garden house with the memorial are open to visitors on Sundays from April (or Easter Sunday) to mid-October from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., admission is free. Cultural events are occasionally held in the house and garden during the summer months.
Transport links
The Willemer house is about 300 meters from the nearest S-Bahn stations and a stop for the Frankfurt tram . The S-Bahn station Frankfurt Lokalbahnhof is served by the lines S3 to S6, the S-Bahn station Mühlberg by the lines S1 and S2. At the nearest tram stop the Frankfurter Verkehrsgesellschaft VGF , Heistermann / Seehofstraße the lines 15, 16 and 18. Keep from there distance to be relatively steep partly leads uphill from the Offenbacher Landstrasse from the Hühnerweg along the Miihlberg. There are no public parking spaces for motorized individual traffic near the Willemer House. The garden is barrier-free ; the house is not because of its historical architecture.
literature
- Björn Wissenbach: Willemerhäuschen, Hühnerweg 74. In: Module 3/08 - Hiking trail around Sachsenhausen No. 3 . Published by the City of Frankfurt am Main, Planning, Building and Real Estate Department; City Planning Office, Frankfurt 2008, DNB 994400527 .
- State Office for Monument Preservation Hessen (Ed.): Willemer-Häuschen In: DenkXweb, online edition of cultural monuments in Hessen
Web links
- Willemer-Häuschen at par.frankfurt.de , the former website of the city of Frankfurt am Main
- Konstanze Crüwell: Willemer house in new splendor. Article in the
architecture section of FAZ-Online from May 29, 2006 (accessed on July 11, 2012) - Georg Leppert: Willemer house - on the trail of the poet.
on the website of the Frankfurter Rundschau . April 5, 2010 (accessed July 11, 2012) - The Willemer house on the website of the Friends of Frankfurt eV (accessed on July 11, 2012)
- Undated historical photo of the Willemer House on altfrankfurt.com (accessed on July 29, 2012)
References and comments
- ↑ Prof. Dr. Anne Bohnenkamp-Renken, director of the Free German Hochstift and director of the Goethe Museum in Frankfurt, quoted from Konstanze Crüwell: Willemer house in new splendor. Article in the architecture section of FAZ-Online from May 29, 2006 (accessed on July 11, 2012)
- ↑ a b City of Frankfurt am Main, Environment Agency (Ed.): GrünGürtel-Freizeitkarte. 7th edition. 2011.
- ↑ a b c Willemer-Häuschen at par.frankfurt.de , the former website of the city of Frankfurt am Main
- ↑ a b c d Konstanze Crüwell: Willemer house in new splendor. on: FAZ-Online. May 29, 2006 (accessed July 11, 2012)
- ↑ a b c d Björn Wissenbach: Willemerhäuschen. In: Hiking trail around Sachsenhausen. No. 3, p. 11.
- ↑ a b The Willemer house on the website of the Friends of Frankfurt eV association
- ↑ See also the article Gerbermühle. Section Goethe and Marianne von Willemer : Two lines from the scene in front of the gate, also called "Easter Walk" , from Goethe's Faust I should suggest that Goethe was inspired by a walk from the Willemer house to the tanner mill.
- ↑ Plaque on the garden gate of the property with visitor information , photo on Wikimedia Commons
- ^ Rhein-Main Verkehrsverbund (RMV): General route plan for Frankfurt am Main. Edition 2012.
Coordinates: 50 ° 5 '55.56 " N , 8 ° 41' 55.99" O