Schloss Übigau: A Baroque Palace and Industrial Landmark in Dresden
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Electorate of Saxony, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page10 sections
History
Schloss Übigau is a Baroque palace in Dresden, Germany, built between 1724 and 1726 as a summer residence for Reich Count Jacob Heinrich von Flemming, a Saxon electoral minister, field marshal, and privy councillor. Flemming chose an Elbe-side site overlooking Dresden, where four local farmers had cultivated vineyards, and their land was expropriated for the project.
A Saxon court residence
Before the palace was finished, Saxon Elector and King of Poland August the Strong bought it, together with two houses in Dresden, for 100,000 thalers. He seldom stayed there, and expansion plans prepared by the master builder Zacharias Longuelune were never carried out. August did enlarge the garden and used the palace for court festivities. Empress Elisabeth, the wife of Charles VI and mother of Maria Theresa, celebrated her thirty-sixth birthday at Übigau on 28 August 1727. King Frederick William I of Prussia visited the palace in 1728.
August the Strong died in February 1733, and his son Frederick Augustus II inherited the property. He gave it to his minister, Count Aleksander Józef Sułkowski, in recognition of his long service. When Sułkowski fell from favour in February 1738, Frederick Augustus II bought the palace back. The elector’s sons later used it chiefly as a base for hunting in the Dresden Heath, a large forested area in and around the city. In 1753, Übigau became a pleasure camp during a Saxon army parade and military manoeuvres between Übigau and Wilden Mann. The last recorded court visit took place in 1770.
From court property to industrial site
After the Albertine ruling house, the Wettin dynasty’s ruling branch in Saxony, lost interest in the palace, the gardener established a restaurant there. It quickly became popular with local residents. A period of vacancy in the early nineteenth century, followed by the disruption of the Napoleonic Wars, brought decline. French troops occupied Schloss Übigau from 11 to 18 May 1813, shortly before the Battle of Dresden, and looted or destroyed its interior. The neglected palace was auctioned by the Saxon royal house in 1831.
Paul Siemen, Dresden’s council master carpenter, purchased the building and renovated it, beginning a second period of prosperity. In 1836, Johann Andreas Schubert helped establish the Actien-Maschinenbau-Verein Übigau, whose production buildings stood immediately north of the palace in the park. During this industrial phase, administrative offices occupied the ground floor, while the upper floor contained design rooms and Schubert’s residence. The company manufactured steam engines and boilers.
Schubert designed the propulsion system for the steamship Königin Maria at Übigau in 1837 and the boiler and engine for the Prinz Albert in 1838. Around the same time, he built the Saxonia, the first fully functional steam locomotive constructed in Germany. The locomotive later operated on the Leipzig-Dresden Railway. Schubert ended his contract with the company in April 1838 and returned to his professorship at Dresden’s Royal Technical Educational Institute. The enterprise then experienced financial difficulties and was liquidated in 1841 because it did not receive enough orders.
Schloss Übigau later became the administrative headquarters of several companies. Industrial businesses in the surrounding area included a steam mill, a vinegar and paint factory, a cordage factory, and a paper factory, which burned down in 1875. The von Oppen family lived in the palace from 1854 to 1886. A shipyard founded on the neighbouring southern property in 1877 was taken over by the Elbschifffahrtsgesellschaft Kette in 1880. Under engineer Ewald Bellingrath, it grew into one of Europe’s most important inland shipyards. The Kette shipyard incorporated the palace into its property in 1886 and merged into the Dresdner Maschinenfabrik und Schiffswerft Übigau in 1905.
Twentieth-century changes
The shipyard initially leased the palace to a publican, who operated the Schloßschänke Übigau from 1886 to 1921. After the First World War, the shipyard used the building for offices. The large company closed during the global economic crisis in 1930, and the palace faced demolition after industrial development had surrounded it and ownership had passed to a property speculator.
Demolition was prevented when the Central Association for Workers’ Sport 1885, a Übigau workers’ sports club and early predecessor of SC Borea Dresden, leased the building. Rooms were also made available to organizations including the Communist Party of Germany, leading to the name “Red Palace” in the early 1930s. After the Nazi seizure of power, communist associations were banned. In mid-June 1933, communist members from Übigau were assembled at the palace and transported to Hohnstein concentration camp, a Nazi camp in Saxony.
After a short period of vacancy, the building was temporarily used as the residence of the owner of a submarine-armaments factory established on the shipyard site in 1935. That enterprise was expropriated in 1948. During the German Democratic Republic, Schloss Übigau housed the administration of VEB Dampfkesselbau Übigau. VEB was the designation for a state-owned enterprise, and the palace remained the company’s headquarters until 1990. The park hosted a small neighbourhood festival several times during the 1970s, but it was closed to the public late in that decade because of vandalism.
Post-reunification ownership and preservation
After the political transition, the steam-boiler company was drastically reduced and eventually moved out, leaving the palace vacant. A Mölln investor bought it from the Treuhandanstalt in 1993, intending to create artists’ studios. The Treuhandanstalt administered the privatization of state-owned enterprises and property in the former East Germany after reunification. The purchase contract was later declared invalid because of a formal error, and a legal dispute with the former owner’s son followed. Repeated break-ins and illegal dumping occurred in the mid-1990s. After four years of unsuccessful negotiations with the Treuhandanstalt and monument-protection authorities, the investor withdrew his offer in late 1997.
Dieter Schinz, a Heidelberg cigar and property entrepreneur, acquired the palace in August 1999. He proposed cultural uses, an apartment, and offices, and intended to restore the Baroque garden faithfully. He purchased additional surrounding plots in 2000, but restoration did not begin and only limited securing work was undertaken. A proposed sale to the American purchasers Helga and Jack van Horn did not proceed after their visit in 2004.
The Schloss Übigau citizens’ initiative was founded in June 2005 to promote preservation and restoration. It remained active until the end of 2009 and organized annual palace and street festivals from 2006 to 2008. In summer 2008, the park opened to the public for the first time in decades, and a seasonal summer restaurant has operated there since then. After Dieter Schinz died in 2009, the Förderverein Schloss Übigau für Kunst und Kultur e. V. succeeded the initiative and worked with the principal heir to encourage cultural and artistic uses of the palace and grounds.
In late 2010, Ingrid Schinz commissioned students at Dresden University of Applied Sciences, working under Professor Torsten Gonschorek, to develop concepts for future public uses. Their proposals included a chocolate palace with a café, courses, and sales, as well as a Rococo centre, a dance and music school, artists’ studios, and offices. The ideas were presented to the Pieschen local advisory council in March 2012. Ownership changed again in November 2017, when the palace building became the property of Frank Bertram and Bertram Grundbesitz GmbH Co. KG.
Schloss Übigau was included in the Dresden Elbe Valley World Heritage property in 2004. Renovation plans developed from the 1990s onward have not been carried out, and the cultural monument has increasingly deteriorated. The palace is opened only on certain occasions.
Remains
River setting and surviving layout
Schloss Übigau stands directly on the Elbe in the Dresden district of Übigau, slightly south of the historic village centre known as Altübigau. The palace occupies an approximately 8,200-square-metre plot between Werftstraße and the right bank of the river, about three kilometres from Dresden’s inner old town. Its garden links the building with the Elbe through an open staircase, while the site lies at the western end of the former Dresden Elbe Valley World Heritage area.
The two-storey palace was built in Baroque forms over approximately two years. A change to the plan enlarged the central building on the garden side with two arched halls placed one above the other. The lower hall was closed, while the upper arrangement belonged to the revised design. The side wings originally intended for the building were never constructed. Industrial development in the nineteenth century destroyed the former garden ensemble and much of its sculptural decoration, leaving the palace as the principal surviving architectural feature of the site.
The palace façades
Johann Friedrich Eosander von Göthe designed the building. An architect active in the service of European courts, he also worked on Berlin Palace, and Schloss Übigau is his only realized building in Dresden. Seven of the nine upper-storey bays facing the Elbe open as loggias, open roofed galleries integrated into the building. This arrangement gives the river façade an Italian Renaissance character. The other windows have parapets and are divided by pilasters, flattened supports attached to the wall. Because of vandalism and advanced decay, all of these openings have been provisionally boarded up since the 1990s.
The garden façade has a central dormer above the upper storey. At the eaves, seated figures of Hercules and Mars flank a Saxon-Polish coat of arms. Strips of rustic plasterwork cover the ground floor. Together, these elements preserve the building’s original courtly architectural language even though the surrounding grounds have been altered by later industrial use.
Garden, staircase, and river landing
The palace originally formed part of an elaborately decorated French Baroque garden. The ensemble included two gatehouses, four pavilions, a service building, an orangery, and a fountain. Nineteenth-century industrial use of the grounds destroyed these ancillary structures and much of the extensive sculptural decoration. The creator of the sculpture is unknown.
A double-flight staircase descends from the garden to a former gondola harbour, a formal landing place for court pleasure boats rather than a commercial port. The garden stands more than five metres above the Elbe’s normal level. The landing was the third court watercraft station on the Neustadt side of the river, after those at Pillnitz Palace and the Japanese Palace. Since 1734, an avenue on the opposite, Old Town side of the Elbe, known as the Übigauer Fährweg, formed a visual axis toward the palace, although the avenue no longer survives in its full length.
Industrial surroundings
The palace overlooks the broad Elbe meadows on the opposite bank, the Pieschen bend, the Ostragehege, and the Alberthafen. Industrial buildings, some unused, adjoin the grounds to the southwest, reducing the impression of the palace as a formerly free-standing monument. The building is also associated with the neighbouring industrial complex where the Saxonia locomotive and the machinery for the steamships Königin Maria and Prinz Albert were constructed.
