The palaces and gardens built in various styles in the 18th and 19th centuries are outstanding testimonies to the history of art, culture and architecture in Germany according to philosophynearby. The Sanssouci Palace, built by Georg Wenzelslaus von Knobelsdorff for Frederick the Great from 1745 to 1747, is considered a major work of the German Rococo. The spacious parks enchant with surprising lines of sight and panoramas. The world heritage includes the 500 hectare park and around 150 buildings, including the Pfaueninsel and Glienicke Palace, located in Berlin.
Palaces and parks of Potsdam and Berlin: facts
| Official title: | Palaces and parks of Potsdam and Berlin |
| Cultural monument: | Parkland with 150 buildings such as the “Prussian Versailles” with the Sanssouci Palace (“worry free”), the Chinese pavilion, the historic mill, the temple of antiquities, the New Palace and the Charlottenhof Palace, designed in the classical style; Babelsberg Palace and Park as well as the New Garden with the Marble Palace and Cecilienhof Palace as well as the Pfaueninsel and Glienicke Palace and Park as well as Sacrow, Heilandskirche (Sacrow), Kaiserbahnhof, Alexandrowka, Babelsberg observatory |
| Continent: | Europe |
| Country: | Germany, Brandenburg |
| Location: | Potsdam and Berlin |
| Appointment: | 1990, expanded in 1992 and 1999 |
| Meaning: | a total work of art with a complex of palaces and parks extending to Berlin |
Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin: History
| 1712-86 | Friedrich II., Called the “Old Fritz” |
| 1740 | Friedrich II ascends the Prussian throne |
| 1745-47 | Construction of the Sanssouci Palace |
| 1750-53 | Stay of the French philosopher Voltaire in Sanssouci |
| 1754-56 | Construction of the Chinese pavilion |
| 1770 | Construction of the dragon pavilion |
| 1771-74 | Construction of the “New Chambers” |
| 1795-1861 | Friedrich Wilhelm IV. |
| 1825-27 | Construction of Glienicke Palace for Prince Karl of Prussia |
| August 1945 | Signing of the Potsdam Agreement in Cecilienhof Palace |
The Prussian Arcadia
The first morning sun makes the vineyard castle of the “Philosopher on the King’s Throne” shine in golden yellow light, while the blue shadows of the night still rest over the six descending terraces and the garden quarters in the depths. A magical atmosphere that the royal builder put into French verse. The visitors who climb the vineyard in the blazing midday sun as if on an ant road do not know anything about this hour of the morning at which the spirit of the place reveals itself so vividly. The castle has the intimacy of a villa, each window of which was a door that invited the exit onto the wide terrace. From there, your gaze wanders into the center of Potsdam to the dome of the Nikolaikirche, which was designed by the master builder Karl Friedrich Schinkel as a tribute to the silhouette of Rome. The campanile of the Friedenskirche rises from the treetops of the nearby Marlygarten, which the pious descendant of Frederick the Great, King Frederick William IV, had built. Under him, the park of Sanssouci with the now rushing fountains and water features was completed for the first time. At the end of the two-kilometer-long garden axis rises the New Palais with the Communs, a huge palace district completed in 1769 and the counterpart to the intimate, small Sanssouci. From the pillar-enclosed courtyard of Sanssouci Palace, the view goes north to the mountain of ruins with the decorative buildings that cite the ruins of ancient Rome, which the builder of Sanssouci had grouped around the water reservoir. From the Norman Tower there you can see today.
What followed Sanssouci include the adjacent Charlottenhof Park and, on the banks of the Havel, the New Garden with the Marble Palace, the Pfaueninsel, the Park and Palace Sacrow, Palace and Park Glienicke and Palace and Park Babelsberg. One reason for the rich development of the Potsdam palace and park landscape was the practice of preserving the existing and looking for new places for artistic development for the following generations. On the other hand, the garden artist Peter Joseph Lenné, in his 50-year work in Potsdam, which began in 1816, tirelessly endeavored to draw the interest of kings and princes to the places that are important for the composition of the landscape and to create a harmonious whole in the sense of landscape beautification. Only the uniquely happy constellation The fact that this idea also inspired his clients and the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel and his students, including Ludwig Persius in the first place, made this vision a reality. Lenné and Hermann Fürst von Pückler-Muskau, who replaced Lenné in the design of the Babelsberg Park, brought the routing in the landscape garden to an artistic perfection.
The visual connections to the city, to the other gardens with their buildings, and to the surrounding landscape emanating from the paths create a dense, intelligent network of sequences of images that is characteristic of this park landscape. It is only the interplay of this vast diversity into a whole that makes this heritage unique.
On the occasion of the birthday of Frederick the Great in 1921, this inspired the writer Rudolf Borchardt to say: “Since the German hardly knows what he has in Potsdam, let it be said that something has been undertaken here that has no equal in any other place in the world, (…) the determined transformation of a real, gigantic landscape with rivers, lakes, forests, cities, spots, villages, roads and paths into a shaped work of art, whose immense planning a landscape different from the available and existing with the most precise The landscape of the old world was envisioned for clarity: a renaissance idea, alternating through all layers in the structure of the German spirit, ancient in the Dutch baroque and ancient in the Italianizing style of Friedrich Wilhelm IV, reaching from Arcadia to Tuscany,from Orpheus to Raphael. ”
