Jagdschloss Grunewald

About

The Jagdschloss Grunewald, a hunting lodge, is the oldest preserved castle of Berlin, Germany. It is on the south waterfront of the Grunewaldsee and is part of the locality Dahlem in the borough Steglitz-Zehlendorf. The Jagdschloss was built in 1542/1543. Its owner was Joachim II Hector the prince-elector of the Margraviate of Brandenburg. The building was created in the Renaissance style and got the name Zum grünen Wald, "to the green forest", and gave the whole Grunewald its name. Around 1800 the château got the name Grunewald too. During reconstructions between 1705 and 1708 by Frederick I, the first king of Prussia, it received its Baroque design from master builder Martin Grünberg. The Jagdschloss has been administered by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg since 1932 and is used as a museum. It contains paintings by Lucas Cranach the Elder, his son Lucas Cranach the Younger, and from the Netherlands and Germany from 15th to 19th century. The Jagdschloss contains the sole remaining hall in Berlin from the time of the Renaissance. In 1977, a hunting-kit collection was established in a nearby building.

The building of Jagdschlössern under Kurfürst Joachim II. Hector

At the beginning of the 16th century Elector Joachim II Hector began building hunting lodges in the Margraviate of Brandenburg in the wooded and wild area around Alt-Berlin and Cölln. In addition to existing simple hunting lodges, mostly timber framed, hunting lodges were built in Bötzow (later Oranienburg ), in the Teltower Heide with Grunewald and in Köpenick, Renaissance hunting lodges were built in the Renaissance style, as well as castle complexes converted for this purpose in Potsdam and Grimnitz near Joachimsthal on the edge of the Schorfheide. Of these castles from the time of Joachim II, only the Grunewald hunting lodge has survived.

It was about 15 kilometer away from the electoral residence, in which a Renaissance palace was built shortly before in the years 1538 to 1540 in Cölln an der Spree, the predecessor of the Berlin Palace. A riding path connected the Residenz Cölln with the hunting area in the Teltower Heide, from 1792 Spandauer Forst, today's Grunewald. A section of the path, the street Unter den Linden, led from the city palace to the west into the electoral zoo, which was established in 1527. From there the riding path, which was laid out as a Knüppeldamm (Truncheon Dam) due to the swampy terrain, continued in a southwesterly direction, today's Budapester Straße and Kurfürstendamm.

The fortified castles, formerly built to secure the sphere of influence according to economic and strategic aspects, which served both as a defensive structure and as an administrative and residential residence, offered hardly any protection due to the further development of small arms and cannons and thus lost more and more of their importance. In addition, the territorial claim to sovereignty of the sovereigns, such as that of the Elector of Brandenburg, whose greatest internal opponent was the landed gentry, had been consolidated. With the aim of avoiding armed conflicts and clarifying claims by legal means, Emperor Maximilian I passed an imperial law at the Imperial Diet of Worms on 7 August 1495 to preserve the Ewiger Landfriede, which, however, was not observed by all nobles.

This development led to the transition from castle to palace at the turn of the 15th to 16th centuries. A separation of the different buildings according to their purpose began. In addition to fortifications erected specifically for territorial defence, such as the Spandau Citadel in the Margraviate of Brandenburg, representative palace buildings were built in the establishing European residences as the residence of the princes, in the country mansions of the nobility and castles which were specially designed for hunting.

Influenced by the Renaissance castles of Chambord and Blois of the French King Franz I., a lively building activity developed at the European princely courts. The architectural style of the Renaissance, which had its origins in Italy, was mainly applied decoratively in northern Europe, with the building retaining the traditional local house form. With large windows, balconies, bay windows, high dwarf houses, chimneys and paintings, sometimes also staircase towers, the pompous builders let decorate the roofs and facades. With the construction of magnificent castles and representative town houses in the cities, as well as municipal buildings, the wealth and understanding of art could be presented to the public.

For the construction of a hunting lodge in the forest area of the Teltower Heide, today's Grunewald, Elector Joachim II acquired from the noble family of Spi(e)l a plot of land on the south-eastern shore of Lake Spi(e)ls, which later became Lake Grunewald, northeast of the village of Dahlem. He had a moated castle built directly on the water castle, which he called Zum grünen Wald.

Only a ground plan drawn up in the middle of the 17th century, the so-called Renaissance plan, the evaluation of building files found in 1916 and excavations in the 1970s, and a reconstruction drawing of the building published by Albert Geyer in 1936 provide information about the palace grounds.

The evaluation of the Renaissance plan and the building records of the Kurmärkisch Brandenburgischen Amtskammer, then Kurmärkische Kriegs- und Domänenkammer, from the years 1669 to 1737, showed that the hunting lodge was originally built as a moated castle on an 8 m × 21 m platform and surrounded by a moat and in the northwest by the Grunewaldsee. The only access to the castle was via a wooden bridge spanning the moat. The moat surrounding the building was filled in as early as 1709, and the courtyard was given a completely new appearance after leveling. In addition, in the 19th century the Grunewaldsee lake was lowered several times in order to be able to cut peat on the Dahlemer Wiesen, so that the water level has been around 2.80 meter lower since the castle was built.

The originally rectangular building has two almost square tower buildings on the lake side, which the architect Count Rocco Guerrini added after the death of Joachim II in 1571, during the reign of his son John George, Elector of Brandenburg. Around the main building there were some U-shaped outbuildings as well as a wall with a chemin de ronde and a round tower in the middle. The buildings on the southwest side housed a gatehouse and the residence of the castellan, on the north-east side a room for storing hunting gear, a gate room, the entrance gate with an adjoining open arcade and the kitchen. The main house was flanked by elongated buildings that reached as far as the lake. They were opened along the moat by arcades and were used to house hunting dogs, horses and carriages. Although Renaissance architecture largely dispensed with defensive structures, the entire complex and the embrasures in the entrance area still reveal the fortified house. However, the moat, the wall, which was probably equipped with battlements and loopholes, and the later added corner wings, which remind one of fortified towers, were only of aesthetic importance.

Reconstruction of the Renaissance building

The building records contained entries of individual repair and reconstruction measures, from which it emerged that some of the decorative Renaissance building elements had been thrown into the moat filled in during 1709 during a reconstruction carried out between 1705 and 1708. After excavations in the 1970s, a reconstruction drawing could be made on the basis of the found components. The evaluation showed that the base area of the castle had not changed, but the outline had. The today uniformly three-storey building originally consisted of a two-storey main house with the three-storey tower-like corner wings facing the lake, an octagonal staircase tower at the front, a so-called staircase tower and another in the connection between the main house and the western corner wing. The protruding entrance building, which still exists on the courtyard-facing front, was adjoined on both sides by a single-storey ancillary building. The windows had round, lead-cased panes. A building component already used in the late Gothic period are the oriels on the bay window towards the lake side, which have also survived. They were missing in almost every building of the 16th century. In addition to their function as a loosening up facade decoration, they also emphasised the importance of the interiors behind them.

The main house and the corner wings had gable roofs covered with plain tile, probably inclined by 45–50 degrees. The octagonal curved bell canopy of the stair towers were covered with slate in "Old German covering" "altdeutscher Deckung". Numerous chimneys, dormers and high dormers gave the roof a richly decorated structure. The gables of the house roof, the dormer houses and the entrance building had a half concave, half convex curved outline, the so-called keel arch or donkey's back, a medieval arch form from the late Gothic period, which today only exists in Grunewald at the entrance building.

During the reign of Joachim II, Renaissance architecture also found its way into the Margraviate of Brandenburg. He received inspiration for the design of his buildings from his cousin, the Saxon Elector Johann Friedrich I, who had Hartenfels Castle built in Torgau in 1533 by master builder Konrad Krebs. According to his plans and the Torgau model, the Kurmärkische Residenzschloss in Cölln an der Spree was built in 1538. Caspar Theiss also came to Brandenburg with the Saxon master builder Krebs, who was commissioned with the construction management. Little is known about his origins. However, numerous Renaissance buildings in the Mark are attributed to him, and he is said to have been involved in their planning and management. In the entrance room of the hunting lodge his name can be found on a stone slab above the cellar door.

The welcome drink is served on the relief above, the Zecherrelief. According to the inscription the pictures show Caspar Theiss and the building scribe Kunz Buntschuh. There are various details about the third person in the literature. Elector Joachim II, a nobleman or an electoral official and the sculptor Hans Schenk, called Scheutzlich, are suspected.

Whether Caspar Theiss was the master builder of Grunewald Castle cannot be clarified by the stone relief, as it is not certain whether it already found its place here in the time when the castle was built. Doubts are cast by the door frame renewed in 1705, which lies under the text plate, and the slightly shifted plate, which does not hang vertically on top of each other, and the relief. There are also no documents that could give any reliable information about the master builder. Due to his degree of popularity and his leading role in numerous building projects under Joachim II, it can be assumed that Theiss also designed the Grunewald hunting lodge architecturally.

The fortified castles, formerly built to secure the sphere of influence according to economic and strategic aspects, which served both as a defensive structure and as an administrative and residential residence, offered hardly any protection due to the further development of small arms and cannons and thus lost more and more of their importance. In addition, the territorial claim to sovereignty of the sovereigns, such as that of the Elector of Brandenburg, whose greatest internal opponent was the landed gentry, had been consolidated. With the aim of avoiding armed conflicts and clarifying claims by legal means, Emperor Maximilian I passed an imperial law at the Imperial Diet of Worms on 7 August 1495 to preserve the Ewiger Landfriede, which, however, was not observed by all nobles.

This development led to the transition from castle to palace at the turn of the 15th to 16th centuries. A separation of the different buildings according to their purpose began. In addition to fortifications erected specifically for territorial defence, such as the Spandau Citadel in the Margraviate of Brandenburg, representative palace buildings were built in the establishing European residences as the residence of the princes, in the country mansions of the nobility and castles which were specially designed for hunting.

Influenced by the Renaissance castles of Chambord and Blois of the French King Franz I., a lively building activity developed at the European princely courts. The architectural style of the Renaissance, which had its origins in Italy, was mainly applied decoratively in northern Europe, with the building retaining the traditional local house form. With large windows, balconies, bay windows, high dwarf houses, chimneys and paintings, sometimes also staircase towers, the pompous builders let decorate the roofs and facades. With the construction of magnificent castles and representative town houses in the cities, as well as municipal buildings, the wealth and understanding of art could be presented to the public.