Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [46]
From the early 17th century to the mid-18th century, feudal rulers ploughed their wealth into residences. In Baden-Württemberg, the residential retreat of Karlsruhe was dreamt up, while Italian architect Barelli started work on Munich’s Schloss Nymphenburg. In northern Germany, buildings were less ornamental, as the work of baroque architect Johann Conrad Schlaun (1695–1773) in Münster or Dresden’s treasure trove of baroque architecture demonstrates. One of the finest baroque churches, Dresden’s Frauenkirche, built in 1743, was destroyed in the 1945 firebombing of the city, and was reconstructed and finally reopened in 2005. Late baroque ushered in Potsdam’s rococo Schloss Sanssouci.
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COLLECTIVE MEMORY
Unesco’s ‘Memory of the World’ program safeguards the world’s most precious documentary heritage. German contributions include the following:
A unique collection of 145,000 pieces of music from around the world (excluding Western art and pop) in Berlin’s Ethnologisches Museum (Museum of Ethnology; ), recorded between 1893 and 1952 (listed in 1999).
Goethe’s literary estate (listed in 2001), stashed in the Goethe and Schiller Archives in Weimar’s Klassik Stiftung Weimar.
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (listed in 2001), the score of which is kept in the Alte Staatsbibliothek (Old National Library in Berlin; ).
The negative of the reconstructed version of Lang’s silent film, Metropolis (1927), pieced together from a fragmented original (listed in 2001).
The 1282-page Gutenberg Bible – Europe’s first book to be printed with moveable type – is one of four of the original 30 to survive. Learn about the digital version at www.gutenbergdigital.de (listed in 2001); the original cannot be viewed.
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Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate, based on a Greek design, is a brilliant showcase of neoclassicism. This late-18th-century period saw baroque folly and exuberance fly out the window – and strictly geometric columns, pediments and domes fly in. The colonnaded Altes Museum, Neue Wache and the Konzerthaus Berlin – all designed by leading architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel (1781–1841) – are other pure forms of neoclassicism still gracing the capital. In Bavaria, Leo von Klenze (1784–1864) chiselled his way through virtually every ancient civilisation, with eclectic creations such as the Glyptothek and Propyläen on Munich’s Königsplatz Click here.
A wave of derivative architecture based on old styles swept through late-19th-century Germany. A German peculiarity was the so-called rainbow style, which blended Byzantine with Roman features. Renaissance revivalism found expression in Schloss in Schwerin, by Georg Adolph Demmler (1804–86); while sections of Ludwig II’s fairy-tale concoction Neuschwanstein are neo-Romanesque.
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Slavonic Sorbs live in pockets of Saxony and Brandenburg, and a small Danish minority can be found around Flensburg (Schleswig-Holstein) on the Danish border.
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Germany’s iconic Reichstag building Click here, built in 1894, was designed by Paul Wallot (1841–1912) in the Wilhelmian style with neobaroque and neo-Renaissance elements; it was restored in the 1990s with a stunning glass-and-steel cupola (inspired by the original) by internationally acclaimed British architect Norman Foster. Wallot’s use of steel to create a greater span and large glass surface was subsequently adopted by the early-20th-century art-nouveau movement, which created some of the country’s most impressive industrial architecture: look no further than Berlin’s Wertheim bei Hertie department store on Kurfürstendamm.
MODERN & CONTEMPORARY
No architectural movement has had greater influence on modern design than Bauhaus, which was spearheaded by the son of a Berlin architect, Walter Gropius (1883–1969). Through his founding in 1919 of the Staatliches Bauhaus – a modern architecture, art and design institute in Weimar – Bauhaus pushed the industrial forms of art nouveau to a functional limit and sought to unite architecture,