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Founded: 1740-1884Category: Palaces, manors and town halls in Germany
Historical period: Emerging States (Germany)
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Boitzenburg Castle was first mentioned in 1276, it was occupied by Margrave William I of Meissen in 1398 but returned to Brandenburg in 1415. From 1429 the estates were held by the Arnim noble family. Damaged in the Thirty Years' War, when it was a possession of Field Marshal Hans Georg von Arnim-Boitzenburg, the fortress was rebuilt by his descendants in a Baroque style from 1740 onwards. Refurbished according to plans designed by Friedrich August Stüler between 1838 and 1842, it received its present Neo-Renaissance appearance in 1881–1884. The adjacent landscape garden was laid out by Peter Joseph Lenné around 1840. Boitzenburg was then held by Adolf Heinrich von Arnim-Boitzenburg, who became the first Minister President of Prussia in 1848.
After World War II, the Arnim family was disseized and the castle was used as recreation home of the East German National People's Army. Today it houses a hotel. The present-day municipality was established by the merger of ten villages in 1992.
The Pilgrimage Church of Wies (Wieskirche) is an oval rococo church, designed in the late 1740s by Dominikus Zimmermann. It is located in the foothills of the Alps in the municipality of Steingaden.
The sanctuary of Wies is a pilgrimage church extraordinarily well-preserved in the beautiful setting of an Alpine valley, and is a perfect masterpiece of Rococo art and creative genius, as well as an exceptional testimony to a civilization that has disappeared.
The hamlet of Wies, in 1738, is said to have been the setting of a miracle in which tears were seen on a simple wooden figure of Christ mounted on a column that was no longer venerated by the Premonstratensian monks of the Abbey. A wooden chapel constructed in the fields housed the miraculous statue for some time. However, pilgrims from Germany, Austria, Bohemia, and even Italy became so numerous that the Abbot of the Premonstratensians of Steingaden decided to construct a splendid sanctuary.