Schloss Tegel: A Humboldt Family Estate in Berlin
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 3.9
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- Brandenburg-Prussia, Holy Roman Empire, Kingdom of Prussia, Margraviate of Brandenburg
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Manor House
On this page10 sections
History
Schloss Tegel is a historic manor house in Berlin, Germany, which originated in 1558 as a Renaissance estate and later became the Humboldt family seat. Its present building was created in the Classical style between 1820 and 1824, when Wilhelm von Humboldt commissioned the architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel to rebuild the earlier house.
From manor to hunting lodge
The estate began as a Renaissance manor. Around 1645, Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg, ordered its conversion into a hunting lodge. After a brief period in that role, the property returned to private ownership. Elector Frederick III reacquired it in 1693, and it remained an electoral, and later royal, domain until 1752.
Royal captain Victor von Holwede purchased the estate in 1760 and sold it to his brother, royal captain Friedrich Ernst von Holwede, in 1764. Following Friedrich Ernst’s death, his widow Marie-Elisabeth von Holwede married the chamberlain Alexander Georg von Humboldt in 1766. A chamberlain was a court official, and the marriage brought the estate into the Humboldt family.
The Humboldt family seat
Schloss Tegel became the home of the Humboldt family. Wilhelm von Humboldt, a Prussian statesman, educational reformer, linguist, and scholar, and his younger brother Alexander, a naturalist and explorer, spent much of their childhood at the house and on the surrounding estate.
Wilhelm inherited the estate after his mother died in 1797. Between 1820 and 1824, he commissioned Schinkel to rebuild the Schloss in the Classical style. Wilhelm von Humboldt died there in 1835. The estate later passed to his daughter Gabriele, who was married to the Prussian foreign minister Heinrich von Bülow. After her death, ownership passed through their daughter Constanze to the von Heinz family, descendants of Wilhelm von Humboldt. The family continues to own the property and live in the house.
Estate and municipal history
Hans Rüdiger von Heinz inherited Schloss Tegel after his elder brother Karl Egon, an officer, died in 1914. In 1929, the estate covered 103 hectares. During the nineteenth century, the Tegel estate formed a manorial district, a historical administrative unit organized around a landed property. It included the Schloss and its immediate surroundings, Lake Tegel, and the lake’s islands.
On 1 October 1920, the manorial district became part of Berlin’s Reinickendorf district. Together with the former rural municipality of Tegel, it formed the locality of Tegel. The Schloss now houses the private Humboldt Museum, while descendants of Wilhelm von Humboldt continue to inhabit the building. Schloss Tegel, its service buildings and enclosing wall, the gardener’s house, the family burial site, and the separate Kunth burial site are protected monuments. The park was placed under monument protection in 1983. Ulrich Vincenz von Heinz, who died on 30 May 2017, was buried in the family burial site in the park.
Remains
The surviving estate combines Schinkel’s Classical Schloss with service buildings, an enclosing wall, a gardener’s house, landscaped parkland, and family burial sites. The park extends almost to Lake Tegel, with its western side near the lake. These elements preserve the physical organization of the former landed estate around the rebuilt house.
Park and approach
Dicke Marie and Humboldt Oak
A reputedly approximately 800-year-old oak called the Dicke Marie stands in the park near Lake Tegel. The Humboldt family gave the tree its name after their cook. Near the Schloss, the monumental Humboldt Oak has a trunk circumference of 7.80 metres at breast height, measured in 2018.
Obelisk milestone
A sandstone milestone shaped as an obelisk was erected at the approach to the Schloss in the early eighteenth century. It marked a distance of two Prussian miles from the central post stone at Dönhoffplatz in Berlin-Mitte. A Prussian mile was a historical distance unit used in the Prussian state. Restored in 1992, the milestone now stands southeast of the Schloss on Adelheidallee.
Humboldt family burial site
Karl Friedrich Schinkel designed the Humboldt family burial site in 1829 for Caroline von Humboldt, Wilhelm’s wife. Rather than commissioning an ordinary gravestone, Wilhelm created a monument with a tall granite column crowned by a marble statue of Spes, the Roman personification of hope. The Danish neoclassical sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen made the statue, which Wilhelm acquired after Caroline’s death because she had admired it since her time in Rome.
The burial site contains the graves of Caroline and Wilhelm von Humboldt, Alexander von Humboldt, and later descendants of the family. Plain, uniformly designed gravestones and low, flat burial mounds form orderly rows. A simple semicircular stone bench, known as an exedra, encloses the rear of the column monument. The arrangement does not refer to the risen Christ, contrary to an interpretation attributed to the nineteenth-century German writer Theodor Fontane.
Estate buildings and secondary burial site
The protected grounds also include the estate’s service buildings, enclosing wall, gardener’s house, and the separate Kunth burial site. Gottlob Johann Christian Kunth, tutor to the Humboldt brothers and administrator of the estate, laid out the park between 1777 and 1789. Wilhelm von Humboldt redesigned it from 1802, and Schinkel contributed to its alteration in 1824. The frequently repeated attribution of the park’s design to the Prussian garden designer Peter Joseph Lenné is considered incorrect.
