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Founded: 1736-1786Category: Palaces, manors and town halls in Germany
Historical period: Thirty Years War & Rise of Prussia (Germany)
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Rheinsberg Palace lies about 100 kilometres northwest of Berlin. The palace on the eastern shore of the Grienericksee is a classic example of the so-called Frederician Rococo architecture style and served as a basis for Sanssouci Palace.
In the Middle Ages a moated castle stood on the site of Rheinsberg Palace. The von Bredow family had acquired the lordship of Rheinsberg through marriage in 1464 from the von Platen and had a water castle built on this spot in 1566 in Renaissance style. It was badly damaged during the Thirty Years' War.
In 1736 Crown Prince Frederick, later King Frederick the Great, moved with his wife, Princess Elisabeth Christine to the southern wing of the castle. In the years up to 1740 Frederick had the castle considerably extended and improved by the architects Johann Gottfried Kemmeter and Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, who learned his architectural craft from Kemmeter. An upper floor was added to the single-storey building and the East Wing extended by 25 metres. Frederick himself always described his years at Rheinsberg Palace as the 'happiest of his life'. His time in Rheinsberg ended in 1740 with his accession to the throne.
Four years later he gave it to his younger brother Henry, who moved there in 1752 with his wife, Princess Wilhelmina of Hesse-Kassel. The art-loving prince went on to extend and embellish the castle and its adjoining park. In 1786, Georg Friedrich von Boumann and Carl Gotthard Langhans completed the palace to its original plans.
The Rheinsberg obelisk erected in the early 1790s on the opposite bank of the lake within sight of the palace was intended to honor the memory of Frederick II's and Henry's brother Prince Augustus William of Prussia. Henry had also his tomb built in the form of a broken pyramid in the garden while he was still alive, in which he was buried after his death in 1802.
During East German times, the palace housed a diabetes clinic. Today the palace and its gardens belong to the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg. After lengthy and extensive restoration, the palace is now a museum and home to the Kurt Tucholsky Literature Museum. Since 1991, the Federal and State Rheinsberg Music Academy has been accommodated in the former Cavalier House (Kavaliershaus), and runs the palace theatre. Also since 1991 the International Opera Festival has taken place in the palace theatre, the courtyard and the open-air theatre (Heckentheater).
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.