Jagdschloss Grunewald: Berlin’s Renaissance Hunting Lodge and Museum
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.4
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- German, Holy Roman Empire, Kingdom of Prussia, Margraviate of Brandenburg
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page18 sections
History
Jagdschloss Grunewald is a Renaissance hunting lodge in Berlin, Germany, built by Elector Joachim II Hector of Brandenburg in 1542–1543. It stands on the southeastern shore of Grunewaldsee in Dahlem and is Berlin’s oldest surviving palace building. The lodge belonged to the wooded hunting territory known first as the Teltower Heide, later as the Spandau Forest, and eventually as the Grunewald.
Joachim II and the Renaissance hunting lodge
Joachim II acquired land on the lake shore from the noble von Spi(e)l family for a hunting residence. The site was beside the former Spi(e)ls-See, now Grunewaldsee, and the elector laid the foundation stone himself on 7 March 1542. The building was probably designed by Caspar Theiss, a master builder associated with Renaissance projects in Brandenburg, although no surviving document securely confirms his authorship.
The lodge formed part of Joachim II’s wider building program. An elector was a prince entitled to participate in choosing the Holy Roman Emperor, and Joachim used his position to establish Renaissance hunting residences at Bötzow, in the Teltower Heide, and at Köpenick. He also converted older castle complexes at Potsdam and Grimnitz. Jagdschloss Grunewald is the only hunting lodge from this group to have survived.
Located about 15 kilometers from the electoral residence at Cölln on the Spree, the lodge served as a base for multi-day hunting events. A riding route led from the residence through the electoral Tiergarten and onward along routes that partly correspond to present-day Unter den Linden, Budapester Straße, and Kurfürstendamm. The original name, Zum grünen Wald, meaning “To the Green Forest,” referred to the surrounding woodland and gave the Grunewald its name. Around 1800, the palace itself also came to be called Grunewald.
During Joachim II’s reign, the palace also became the residence of Anna Sydow for approximately two decades. She was the elector’s mistress and the wife of the head of the electoral foundry at Grimnitz. After Joachim died in 1571, his son Elector Johann Georg ordered her confinement in Spandau Fortress, where she died in 1575. A later legend claimed that she had been walled alive into a spiral staircase and haunted the palace, but this story has no basis in the recorded events of her life.
Expansion and eighteenth-century change
During Johann Georg’s reign, two nearly square corner wings were added on the lake side. The addition altered the original Renaissance composition and gave the palace a more extensive residential form. No other major changes by Joachim II’s immediate successors are known before the seventeenth century.
The building then fell into neglect for decades. The Great Elector, Friedrich Wilhelm, ordered repairs in 1669, but the palace remained little used. In 1683 he commissioned a new hunting lodge at Klein-Glienicke, reducing the practical importance of Grunewald as a residence.
Extensive modernization followed between 1705 and 1708 under Frederick I, the first king in Prussia, who had ruled from 1701. Martin Grünberg initially directed the work, and Johann Heinrich Behr took over after Grünberg’s death in 1706. The project introduced Baroque elements, a later architectural style known for more dynamic and ornamental forms. It altered the roof, remodeled the interiors, renewed floors, windows, and doors, and removed several Renaissance features.
In 1709 Behr had the moat filled, the courtyard leveled and paved, and three pleasure and fishing cottages built beside the lake. The palace’s defensive appearance therefore survived mainly as an architectural effect rather than as a functioning military system. Renaissance decorative pieces discarded during the modernization were thrown into the moat before it was filled. Excavations in the 1970s recovered architectural fragments and helped produce a reconstruction drawing of the earlier complex.
During the eighteenth century the palace was used intermittently. Friedrich Wilhelm I hunted frequently in the Grunewald but did not stay at the building for long periods. His successor, Frederick the Great, opposed hunting as a courtly pastime, and Grunewald consequently lost importance as a royal residence. In 1765 he ordered hunting equipment from the Berlin Jägerhof to be stored in an enlarged annex.
Frederick William II furnished three rooms for occasional stays. In 1788, Johann Friedrich Nagel painted the oldest known pictorial view of the palace. The painting shows the building from the northeast, with one fishing cottage beside the lake. That cottage remained until about 1903.
Nineteenth-century hunts and the end of the court residence
Interest in the hunting grounds revived in the nineteenth century. The parforce hunt, an organized mounted pursuit in which hunters followed hounds over an extended course, was restored on 8 February 1828. In the Grunewald this form was also called the Red Hunt, and regular hunts continued until the territory was abandoned for that purpose in 1907.
The annual Hubertus hunt took place on 3 November and sometimes included state guests. Tsar Alexander II attended in 1864. In 1863, under King Wilhelm I, the thousandth parforce hunt was celebrated at Grunewald. Of the 2,000 court parforce hunts held around Berlin between 1828 and 1897, 638 took place in the Grunewald.
The palace was also associated with the Kotze Affair, one of the major sex scandals of the German Empire. In January 1891, fifteen members of the aristocratic court society held an orgy at the palace, and the event later became known through the scandal.
Urban expansion, military installations, railway lines, and roads progressively reduced the hunting territory. The 1915 Permanent Forest Agreement between Greater Berlin and the Prussian Forest Administration designated large parts of the Grunewald as local recreation areas, reflecting the changing relationship between the forest and the growing city.
Modern administration and museum history
Wilhelm II ordered modernization between 1901 and 1908. The work included roof repairs and the installation of toilets and bathrooms on the upper floor. After the First World War and the end of the monarchy, the palace passed from the Hohenzollern property regime to the Prussian State under the 1926 property-settlement law. In 1927 it entered the administration of the Prussian State Palaces and Gardens.
A museum was established in the palace in 1932. The building survived the heavy bombing of Berlin during the Second World War without damage, although fighting damaged some artworks and looting caused the loss of seventeen paintings. With permission from the American headquarters, the museum reopened on 16 May 1949. It was the first Berlin art museum to reopen to the public after the war.
Works transferred from the destroyed Berlin Palace and Monbijou Palace expanded the collection after 1949. Following lengthy renovation work, the palace has displayed Berlin’s largest collection of works by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Lucas Cranach the Younger since 2011. The former hunting-equipment magazine was converted into a hunting museum, which opened on 29 January 1977. The palace remains a museum and is administered by the Prussian Palaces and Gardens Foundation Berlin-Brandenburg.
Remains
Jagdschloss Grunewald began as a moated Renaissance castle built directly beside the lake on a platform measuring approximately 8 by 21 meters. The moat surrounded the site, while Grunewaldsee bounded it on the northwest. A wooden bridge provided the sole entrance. The complex combined a rectangular main house with U-shaped ancillary buildings, a surrounding wall, a defensive walkway, and a round tower at the center.
The former fortified hunting complex
Courtyard buildings and lake-side wings
The southwest side contained the gatehouse and the castellan’s residence. On the northeast were the hunting-equipment room, gate room, entrance gate, open arcade, and kitchen. Long buildings flanked the main house and extended toward the lake. Their arcades opened toward the moat, and they housed hunting dogs, horses, and carriages.
The moat, the probably crenellated wall with loopholes, entrance embrasures, and the later corner wings made the lodge resemble a fortified house. These elements were largely aesthetic and did not create an effective military stronghold. The lake-side corner wings were built during Johann Georg’s reign by Count Rochus von Lynar. The palace is now uniformly three stories high, but the earlier arrangement consisted of a two-story main house, three-story corner wings, an octagonal stair tower at the front, and another stair tower joining the main house to the western corner wing.
Entrance building and surviving Renaissance forms
The projecting entrance building on the courtyard front survives. It originally stood between one-story ancillary buildings on either side, but those additions were demolished during the modernization of 1705–1708. The original windows contained round panes held in lead. The lake-side wings retain oriels, projecting window structures that decorated the façades and indicated the importance of the rooms behind them.
Former privies, or projecting toilet chambers connected to interior rooms, extended from the exterior walls above the moat. They were removed in 1705. Their blocked door openings, approximately 50 centimeters wide, were rediscovered during replastering in 1963. The original gables had partly concave and partly convex outlines known as keel arches, a late Gothic form. At the palace, this shape now survives among the original examples only on the entrance building.
Roofs and later alterations
The original roofs of the main house and corner wings were probably steep gabled roofs with pitches of about 45 to 50 degrees, covered with plain clay tiles. Chimneys, dormers, and tall gabled dormers produced a richly articulated roofline. The stair towers had octagonal, curved, bell-shaped roofs covered with slate in the Old German manner.
Between 1705 and 1708, the gabled roofs and their dormers were replaced by a mansard hipped roof, whose two slopes on each side have a steeper lower section and a shallower upper section. Gabled dormers were placed along the long sides, and the main house and front stair tower were raised to match the three-story corner wings. During roof repairs in the 1820s, the gabled dormers were replaced by five low, curved bat dormers integrated into the roof slopes.
Interiors and court apartments
The Great Court Room
The 1705–1708 modernization introduced simple stucco ceilings, fireplaces, tiled stoves, and renewed floors, windows, and doors. The largest ground-floor room, the Great Court Room, was divided into two rooms by a partition. The partition was removed in the 1970s, revealing a double arcade with a column. The hall could then be restored as the palace’s only room that substantially conveys its Renaissance character.
The Great Court Room has a reconstructed imitation coffered ceiling divided into fields by black-and-white painting and a restored floor of red brick slabs. Its original heating came from a large box stove, a wall-flush, rear-loaded heater fired from an adjoining room. Four cast-iron plates from this stove survive and are the only remaining pieces of the palace’s original Renaissance interior furnishings. A second, smaller box stove stood in an eastern room; both stoves were replaced by tiled stoves in 1705.
First-floor apartments
In Joachim II’s period, the elector and electress occupied private apartments on the first floor, reached through the front stair tower. The electress’s living and sleeping rooms were in the east, while the elector’s rooms were in the west. A central room probably served as a shared dining room.
The first-floor oriel rooms and privies were altered or removed in 1705, although the oriels remain four steps above the room floors. After the modernization, the first-floor rooms accommodated hunting guests and were partly furnished with bedroom furniture according to a 1710 inventory. The eastern rooms were assigned to the gamekeeper. The divided court room and the room in the western corner wing formed part of the royal apartments, and Frederick I used the latter as a bedroom.
Upper floors and stair towers
Before the building was raised, the second floor consisted largely of a large attic, while two rooms occupied the upper part of the corner wings. A room in the western tower belonged to Johann Georg’s private apartments and remains accessible by a small spiral staircase. Renaissance doors with semicircular tops survive on the first and second floors and in a room in the entrance building.
The most elaborate surviving stucco ceiling is in the western corner wing. Its oval and polygonal panels are decorated with shells and foliage. Together with the restored Great Court Room and the surviving stair-tower elements, it preserves evidence of the palace’s Renaissance interior beneath the later Baroque alterations.
Reliefs and inscriptions
A carved stag relief above the entrance refers to a legend in which two stags became locked together by their antlers and died. Beneath it, a rectangular sandstone plaque commemorates Joachim II. A damaged inscription above the cellar door contains the name Caspar Theiss.
The inscription is associated with a drinking relief, or welcoming-toast relief, traditionally interpreted as depicting Theiss and the building clerk Kunz Buntschuh. The identity of a third figure remains uncertain. Suggested identifications have included Joachim II, a nobleman, an electoral official, and the sculptor Hans Schenck, also known as Scheutzlich.
Collections and hunting museum
Paintings in the palace
The museum contains the only surviving Renaissance hall in Berlin. Its collections include around thirty works by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Lucas Cranach the Younger, German and Dutch paintings from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century, portraits of Brandenburg-Prussian rulers and their families, and paintings and furnishings connected with hunting.
The Cranach collection includes nine large central panels from a Passion cycle dated 1537–1538. The panels came from the collegiate church of the former Dominican monastery in Cölln, the historic settlement on the Spree that later formed part of Berlin. Four large-format panels represent the sovereign virtues of courage, moderation, justice, and wisdom. They were probably made between 1540 and 1545 for a room in the Stechbahn wing of the former Cölln Palace.
Other works were acquired by the Prussian royal house, largely from the collection of the English merchant Edward Solly. They include German and Dutch works from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The postwar collection history includes an early fifteenth-century three-winged altarpiece from the town church at Cadolzburg, Lucas Cranach the Elder’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes and Lucretia, Lucas Cranach the Younger’s portrait of the sixty-five-year-old Joachim II, and a probably old copy of Jan Gossaert’s Fall of Man.
Two recovered paintings are now kept elsewhere: Jan Steen’s Smoking Women is at Schloss Oranienburg, and Willem van Mieris’s Lady with Parrot is at Schloss Caputh.
Hunting equipment and trophies
The hunting museum occupies the former hunting-equipment magazine. Its reconstructed hall is 38 meters long. Displays include wheellock firearms and pistols dating from the second third of the sixteenth century to the eighteenth century, along with approximately one hundred wheellock weapons from the former Berlin arsenal.
Additional weapons came from the collection of Prince Carl of Prussia. The museum also preserves deer, fallow-deer, elk, and roebuck trophies that were formerly kept in the palace. These objects connect the surviving building with the hunting activities for which Joachim II established the lodge and for which the Grunewald remained used by the Brandenburg-Prussian court for centuries.
