Charlottenburg Palace served as the summer residence of the
Prussian kings from 1701 to 1888 and can now be visited as a museum.
The palace is a monument and is located at Spandauer Damm 10-22 in
the Berlin district of Charlottenburg.
Built in several
stages from 1695 to 1791 according to plans by Johann Friedrich
Eosander, Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff and Carl Gotthard
Langhans, the palace can be assigned to the Baroque, Rococo and
Classicism styles. The park on the Spree was designed by Siméon
Godeau as a French garden from 1697 and as an English garden by
Peter Joseph Lenné from 1819. The complex, which was badly damaged
in World War II, was rebuilt true to the original thanks to the
personal efforts of the West Berlin art historian Margarete Kühn.
The monument managed by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens
Foundation is a popular attraction and the most important palace
complex in Berlin. The building ensemble also includes the castle
garden with the Belvedere, the mausoleum and the new pavilion.
Old castle and extension
After Sophie Charlotte of Hanover her
husband Elector Friedrich III. On June 30, 1695, the latter gave her the
village of Lietze/Lützow about seven kilometers from Berlin and a plot
of land as a replacement. In the same year, Sophie Charlotte
commissioned the architect Johann Arnold Nering to plan and build a
summer residence on the property. However, Nering died a few months
later and Martin Grünberg took over the execution of the expansion.
The core building was still very small, it comprised the central
part with two avant-corps. In addition, because of the Queen's penchant
for opera and musical performances, a free-standing small opera house
was built. The castle was also called Sophie Charlotte's court of the
muses. On July 11, 1699, her husband's birthday, the small palace was
inaugurated and has since been used by Sophie Charlotte as her
residence. Its name was chosen after the nearby village of Lietzenburg
(also: Lützenburg).
Architect Grünberg resigned from his office
in 1698/1699. It was probably the master builder Andreas Schlueter who
initiated further work. Two south-facing buildings delimiting the
courtyard were erected for the servants and the workshops. After
Frederick was crowned King Frederick I in Prussia and Sophie Charlotte
was crowned Queen in Prussia in 1701, Eosander von Göthe took over
further expansion. He had the palace building widened to line up with
the courtyard buildings and extended them to the palace.
Great
Orangery
After the death of Sophie Charlotte on February 1, 1705 at
the age of only 36, the king named the castle and the adjacent
settlement "Charlottenburg" in her honor. The king commissioned Eosander
with further expansion. From 1709 to 1712, the receding central section
was expanded into a risalit and the striking castle dome was built above
it. An orangery and a chapel were added to the building on the west
side. A corresponding orangery on the east side was planned but never
built. The Great Orangery served to overwinter rare plants. During the
summer months, when more than 500 orange, lemon and bitter orange trees
adorned the baroque garden, the orangery was regularly the magnificent
setting for court festivities.
The Amber Room was originally
intended for Charlottenburg Palace - a complete wall paneling made of
amber, which was later to be referred to as "the eighth wonder of the
world". It was designed by the baroque master builder Johann Friedrich
Eosander. Today's Red Damask Chamber is assumed to be the room. The work
was mentioned in 1712, but was never completed for Charlottenburg. Parts
of the amber paneling were built into a cabinet adjoining the White Hall
in the Berlin Palace. The soldier king Friedrich Wilhelm I, who had
little interest in art, exchanged the amber room with the Russian Tsar
Peter the Great in 1716 for soldiers with a guard standard.
After
the death of Friedrich I in 1713, Charlottenburg Palace led a shadowy
existence under his successor Friedrich Wilhelm I. However, it went
against his economic sense to completely neglect the palace. The
necessary maintenance measures were not denied to the building; the
rooms also had to be heated during the cold season so that the “panel
work and furniture didn’t harden”. He handed over the free-standing
opera house to the citizens to demolish as material for building a
school. Friedrich Wilhelm I knew how to use the palace for official and
representative purposes. The "Charlottenburg Treaty" was concluded here
with George I of England in 1725, which secured the Brandenburg family's
inheritance claims to Jülich-Kleve. There was also festive life in the
castle for days when Augustus the Strong paid a return visit to the king
in the summer of 1728.
New wing
Immediately after Friedrich
Wilhelm's death in 1740, the new King Friedrich II (later called "The
Great" or "Old Fritz") made Charlottenburg his residence. In these rooms
the king held his Masonic court box. He felt very drawn to this place
where his aesthetic and highly educated grandmother Sophie Charlotte had
worked. With the Charlottenburg Castle Grenadiers, he had his own guard
troop set up for the castle and initially prepared rooms on the upper
floor of the central building (old castle) for himself. The carvings of
the panelling, carried out by Friedrich Christian Glume – and lost
entirely during the Second World War – were so clumsy that they were
long mistaken for work from the 19th century. (Frederick Wilhelm IV and
his wife Elisabeth later lived in these rooms.)
At the same time,
Friedrich had commissioned Knobelsdorff to have the palace expanded in
the Rococo style to meet his needs, whereby the new wing was built
instead of the eastern orangery that had been planned but was not
realized under his father, and after Rheinsberg Palace it was the second
building in the palace Frederician Rococo. Presumably, Charlottenburg
Palace was not the place of peace and seclusion that Frederick II had
wished for, despite its free location in the countryside. In 1744 he
began in Potsdam with the conversion of the city palace into his
permanent residence and the construction of the intimate palace of
Sanssouci as a summer residence. He used the Charlottenburg Palace,
completed in 1747, for family celebrations. The court painters Augustin
and Matthäus Terwesten and Antoine Pesne decorated several rooms in the
new wing with mythological-allegorical ceiling paintings.
The palace received its current form
under Friedrich Wilhelm II with the palace theater at the end of the
western wing and the small orangery, both by Carl Gotthard Langhans.
The building of the theater played an important role in the history
of German theatre, and it became a place where German literature,
neglected under Frederick the Great, was nurtured. From 1795 there
were free theater tickets for commoners. In the new wing, Friedrich
Wilhelm II had a winter apartment set up on the south side of the
first floor and a summer apartment on the ground floor on the north
side facing the park in the style of early classicism. In addition,
another orangery (small orangery) was built on the courtyard side
opposite the large orangery. It included two apartments for the
gardeners and a greenhouse in the middle.
Destruction and
reconstruction
During the Second World War, an Allied air raid on
the night of November 23, 1943 caused severe damage to the palace.
The cupola collapsed, the central part of the main building, the
central saloon and the eastern part of the orangery as well as most
of the Frederician wing burned out. Large parts of the inventory
could be saved. The main building was quickly secured again after
the end of the war and could be used temporarily: for example, the
German Book Exhibition Berlin 1947 took place here in June/July
1947.
After the division of Berlin and in view of the planned
destruction of the Berlin Palace in East Berlin, Margarete Kühn, the
director of the now exclusively West Berlin palace administration,
worked from 1948 onwards for the reconstruction of the
Charlottenburg Palace, which was completed in 1957 with the
restoration of the dome was. The equestrian statue of the Great
Elector by Andreas Schlueter (1696) has had its place in the main
courtyard since 1952. It was previously on the Long Bridge at the
City Palace in Berlin-Mitte.
In 2007, after 11 years of
restoration work, all 20 Attica sculptures on the roof balustrades
have returned, after the renewal of the casting seams and the coat
of paint has been completed. Since 1970, the 2.5 meter high
sculptures have been erected as "modern" new creations, modeled on
the Baroque. In 1996 they were initially placed in the garden next
to the Small Orangery after a risk of falling was identified.
To the east of the Small Orangery, a new visitor center with
ticket sales and a museum shop is to be built by 2027. In addition,
the eastern wing of the main courtyard is to have a barrier-free
visitor entrance.
summer residence
After the death of Sophie Charlotte, the palace
was inhabited by Friedrich I, Friedrich II, Friedrich Wilhelm II and
subsequent Prussian kings.
The royal couple Friedrich Wilhelm
III. and Luise, who lived in the castle with her children, did not make
any major changes inside the castle. Only after returning from
Königsberg in 1810 was the queen's bedroom redesigned according to
designs by Karl Friedrich Schinkel. In 1824, after his marriage to
Auguste von Harrach, the king, widowed in the same year, had Frederick
the Great's second apartment prepared for her and had Schinkel build the
new pavilion for himself. A contemporary travel guide describes the
layout of the royal family in the palace at that time as follows: “The
king lives in the palace throughout the summer and has his rooms in the
new palace, the crown prince, the crown princess and the other princes
and princesses in the old palace. The interior of the castle shows the
castellan, who lives in the west wing.”
Under Friedrich Wilhelm
IV, rooms on the first floor of the old palace (middle building) were
redesigned in the solemn style of late classicism and neo-rococo as
apartments for him and his wife Elisabeth. After the death of Friedrich
Wilhelm IV in 1861, Queen Elisabeth used the palace as a widow's
residence.
In the year of the Three Emperors, 1888, the
terminally ill Emperor Friedrich III. the palace before moving to the
New Palace in Potsdam, where he died a few days later. From then on,
Charlottenburg no longer served as a residence, but could be visited.
Museum castle
From 1902 the former palace theater in the Langhans
building was converted into a furniture store. Towards the end of the
First World War, some rooms in the eastern part of the Eosander building
were used as a military hospital. Shortly after the war, a military
hospital for the disabled was housed in the new wing and in wooden
barracks, which were probably in the adjacent castle park. In 1926, the
Free State of Prussia regulated the transfer of the palace to the
administration of the State Palaces and Gardens in a contract with the
House of Hohenzollern.
The Museum of Prehistory and Early History
of the State Museums in the former theater building (Langhansbau) was
set up around 1960. The museum was reopened in 2003 after a thorough
renovation. On April 26, 2009, the collection in the palace theater was
closed and housed in the Neues Museum in Mitte, while the workshops
initially remain in the palace. In the future, the Hohenzollern Museum
will probably be housed there, which was located in the destroyed
Monbijou Palace in Berlin-Mitte, opposite today's Bode Museum.
There is currently a restaurant in the Small Orangery, and the
building's glass house is used for art exhibitions and concerts in the
summer. The destroyed Great Orangery was also rebuilt according to the
baroque model. The light-flooded ballroom offers an attractive setting
for cultural events, concerts and banquets, including for the federal
government, which bid farewell to US President Barack Obama with a state
banquet here in 2013. In addition, from 1978 to 2009 parts of the
Dohna-Schlobitten collection were in the castle. The KPM porcelain
collection of the State of Berlin in the Belvedere, the new pavilion and
the mausoleum can be viewed separately.
From 2004 to early 2006,
Charlottenburg Palace was temporarily used by the Federal President
while his official residence, Bellevue Palace, was being renovated. The
castle can be visited as a museum. Here you can see, among other things,
the apartment of Frederick the Great, crown regalia of Frederick I and
his wife Sophie Charlotte, the porcelain cabinet, the Golden Gallery and
numerous paintings, including an important collection of French
paintings from the 18th century, including Watteau's embarkation for
Kythera.
The 55-hectare Charlottenburg Palace Garden (popularly known as the
“Palace Park”) was laid out by Siméon Godeau in 1697 as a French baroque
garden. It included a baroque parterre on the garden side of the core
building, a west and an east bosquet on the Spree with three fishing
houses and a small harbor for the barges that sailed to Berlin twice a
day. There was also a playground with water basins, lanes for playing
boules and a pheasant garden. After a gardener cut down a large number
of lime trees without asking in 1709, he was relieved of his position at
Charlottenburg Palace.
During his reign between 1713 and 1740,
Friedrich Wilhelm drastically reduced the budget for maintaining the
palace garden. He partly covered the costs by selling herbs and rare
plants and leasing the rear meadow. He handed over part of the plant to
arable farmers for their own management. In the period from 1740 to
1786, Friedrich II took care of the restoration of the pleasure garden,
but this time in the Rococo style, which was modern at the time.
During his reign from 1786-1797, King Friedrich Wilhelm II favored the
romantic trend for English landscape gardens, which stood in stark
contrast to the geometric shapes and visual axes of the baroque garden.
With this in mind, in 1788 he appointed the gardener Johann August
Eyserbeck, son of Johann Friedrich Eyserbeck (creator of the Wörlitz
Park), as court gardener in Charlottenburg. There were many suggestions,
including three plans by Eyserbeck and various designs by Georg Steiner
and Peter Joseph Lenné. First, the king transformed the parterre in
front of the central building (old palace) into a lawn with loose grass
areas and groups of trees, which over time were repeatedly transformed
with different plantings. He also dissolved the straight shorelines of
the carp pond and the watercourses. When Eyserbeck died in 1801, Steiner
took over and continued the transformation into loose landforms. In 1819
the garden artist Lenné was added. He landscaped the western bosquet and
gave the entire complex the final artistic touch. King Friedrich Wilhelm
IV had the bosquet behind the baroque orangery restored to how he
remembered it from his childhood. However, its design did not exactly
correspond to the baroque state.
The Belvedere tea house, built
by Carl Gotthard Langhans in 1788, and the mausoleum built for Queen
Luise after 1810 are located in the palace gardens. The grave sculpture
on her sarcophagus is by Christian Daniel Rauch. Friedrich Wilhelm III
built the New Pavilion, built by Schinkel in 1824/1825 as a Neapolitan
villa. not shared with his second wife, Princess Liegnitz. Two other
ornamental buildings - the Otahitische Korbhaus (designed around 1790 by
Ferdinand August Friedrich Voß) and the Gothic Angelhaus on the Spree
(1788 by Carl Gotthard Langhans) - had to be repaired frequently because
of their lightweight construction. Renovated for the last time in
1849/1850, the basket house was demolished in 1865 and the angel house
in 1884.
After severe devastation in the Second World War, the
director of the West Berlin administration of the state palaces and
gardens, Margarete Kühn, advocated a restoration of the parterre that
approximated the baroque state, since there are only a few in Germany
but none at all in Berlin Baroque gardens were more. The areas laid out
in 1958 by the palace gardens and decorated with broderie in 1967/1968
do not correspond to the original condition. Because the latter was
considered to require too much maintenance, the ornamentation was
redesigned using various baroque pattern books and a fountain was
created in the crossroads. When the two halves of the city grew
together, the garden became the property of the newly founded Prussian
Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg (SPSG).
Despite
widespread criticism of the unhistorical conception of the 1960s, the
restoration of the design from the 1950s took place in 2001 at the
instigation of the Berlin Garden Monument Preservation. The reason given
was that the system should now also be regarded as historical evidence.
In addition to the castle nursery (address Fürstenbrunner Weg
62-70), there has been a gardener's yard on the site since 2013, run by
the mosaic workshops for the disabled gGmbH. All relevant facilities
guide interested parties through the facilities by arrangement. Every
spring there is an open day under the motto Castle – Garden – Workshop.
In addition, regular horticultural advice is on offer, and a flower
fireworks display has already taken place.
For a long time, the
palace garden has served as a local recreation area for the residents of
the adjacent, densely populated Charlottenburg old building areas.
Jogging, cycling (permitted since 2008), walking with or without dogs or
skiing in winter are popular activities. A playground in the northeast
area is designed for children. In 2004, the Prussian Palaces and Gardens
Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg considered charging an entrance fee, which
met with massive resistance. Against these intentions, the citizens'
initiative Save the Castle Park! The Castle Foundation also wanted to
ban cycling in 2007.
The near-natural castle garden is cut
through by a number of artificial watercourses, which are also crossed
by footbridges. One of these bridges was chosen by a jury of nine
celebrities to determine the thirty most beautiful bridges in Berlin on
the rbb24 channel (first broadcast in October 2019) in second place. It
is decorated with wrought iron ornaments and stands directly on the
banks of the Spree, which flows past the palace garden to the east.
A smaller replica of the central building with tower served as the
German House with restaurant and exhibition rooms at the 1904 World's
Fair in St. Louis.
The 58 meter high tower of Neustrelitz Castle,
completed in 1909, was built as a homage to the Charlottenburg Castle
Tower. Historically, the Grand Duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz and the
Kingdom of Prussia were closely linked.
Together with the facilities
opposite, the Berggruen Museum, the Bröhan Museum and the
Scharf-Gerstenberg Collection, Charlottenburg Palace is an important
museum location. The monument to Prince Albrecht of Prussia from 1901 is
located between the museums at the northern end of Schloßstraße – on the
line of sight to the palace.
The castle and castle park repeatedly
formed the backdrop for film recordings. In 1985 part of the filming of
the music video for the song Kayleigh by the British rock band Marillion
took place here. In 2004, a scene from the Jackie Chan comedy Around the
World in 80 Days, set in France, was filmed here.
Stamp issues with
images of the castle appeared, for example, in 1956 (Deutsche Bundespost
Berlin, 40 Pfennig), 1982 (Deutsche Bundespost, definitive stamp 120
Pfennig), 1987 (Deutsche Bundespost Berlin, block 750 years Berlin, 50
Pfenning) and also in 1987 as a machine stamp. In 1978 a stamp was
issued by the Deutsche Bundespost Berlin showing the Belvedere in the
palace gardens (40 pfennigs).
With the issue date of January 30,
2018, 2-euro commemorative coins designed by Bodo Broschat with the
motif of the castle on the picture side were put into circulation.
On
the dome of the castle there is a 4.50 m high gilded statue of Fortuna,
which serves as a wind vane. Originally completed by Andreas Heidt in
1711, the new creation was hammered out of copper sheet in 1956 based on
a design by Richard Scheibe.
The Borghese fencers are on the
guardhouses in front of the main courtyard. The 1.99 meter high
sculptures are modern cast zinc copies of the ancient Greek marble
originals that the sculptor Agasias of Ephesus made in the 1st century
BC. created. It was exhibited in the Villa Borghese until it was bought
by the Louvre. The exciting figures carry a short sword in their right
hand and a round shield in their left. Their pairing goes back to the
striving for symmetry of the Baroque period.
In the castle chapel
(Eosander chapel) there was an organ from 1706 to 1943 and again since
1970. The first instrument was built by Arp Schnitger (Hamburg) at the
beginning of the 18th century and inaugurated around 1706. The organ
stood on a gallery in the aisle. The organ remained largely unchanged
until the end of the 19th century. In 1888 the disposition was slightly
changed by the Dinse brothers (Berlin). These exchanged the two reed
registers of the main work (Hoboy and Vox Humana) for romantic string
parts (Gamba 8' and Aeoline 8'). In 1934, during a restoration, Karl
Kemper (Lübeck) restored the two original registers, presumably in the
old way. In 1943 the organ was dismantled and stored in the cellar
vaults of the Berlin Palace, where it was destroyed in the palace fire
in 1944. After the reconstruction of the Charlottenburg Palace, the
organ was reconstructed in the years 1969-1970 by the organ building
company Karl Schuke (Berlin).