Wusterhausen and Wust: Part I of the big Photographic Brandenburg Tour

[selenak]

Aka the results of a week spent in the Mark Brandenburg, post the first. I'm putting these not in the order in which I saw them, but in chronological order as they relate to the timeline of our antihero and relations.




First, of course, Wusterhausen, aka most loved by FW and most loathed by his older children and his wife palace of Prussia. Friedrich Wilhelm received this place as a present form his parents when he was still a child, and then shocked them by learning bookkeeping and administration with a vengeance, turning Wusterhausen into a self-sustaining estate. When he himself became King, he spent the summer months there with his family, roughly the time between August (at the latest) and early November.






Today, you can't visit the highest levels anymore, due to a fire in the 19th century, but the upper level of the tower would be where Wilhelmine and her sisters stayed. She, as mentioned, hated the place. A current day visitor is asked to go up to the third floor, where the public reception rooms are, and go down from there. First, you enter the officers gallery:



If you're under the impression the lord of the manor is majorly into the military, you're right on. (Though the portraits he drew of his own famous "Long Fellows" aren't shown.)

Then from there the famous "Tabakskollegium" (which is translated either as "Tobacco Parliament" or "Tobacco Collegium" , but you get the picture. This is the place where FW and friends smoked, drank, talked, brutally pranked (poor Gundling), and occasionally terrorized the kids.



And here's the painting showing the room, which these days is hanging there. That's tiny AW sitting on the table, and Ferdinand and Heinrich coming to wish their father good night. Since it's painted in 1737, Fritz thanks his lucky stars he's not there but in Rheinsberg.



The room also contains these portraits of child!Fritz and next oldest brother August Wilhelm (he's the one in bright colors):



There's a painting of Gundling, the much abused scholar-turned-fool (in that FW treated him as such), mocked even in this painting, which shows him with his books but also with a woman hitting him with a slipper, and with a monkey:





A present from August(us) the Strong; drinking hard was the one hobby he and FW shared, after all, and the useful thing with this particular present is that in times of need, you could melt the silver and reuse it.



The next room was where mixed company could be received.



There are paintings of more or less illustrious relations hanging there, including Sophia Dorothea's brother George and his wife, aka George II. of England and Queen Caroline.



On the second floor, the gallery offers more private pictures, including one FW painted of himself in 1737.



He'd taken up painting when his various illnesses forced him into bed more often than not, and this one is called "In Tormentis":



And there's a famous one of all four sons (from let to right, Fritz, Ferdinand, August Wilhelm, Heinrich):



On this level, you have the (tiny) study, which has portraits of FW's parents, Sophie Charlotte and Friedrich I., and of himself as a child:



Goddaughter of Liselotte of the Palatinate, pen pal of Leipniz, and supposedly the first female intellectual of Prussia:



Badmouthed by his grandson as a no good spendthrift, but actually the first flutist in the family as well as the first King in Prussia:



Tiny Terror FW. He much preferred this one, which shows him with a hunting dog, to the one where his mother made him pose as David:



What passed for a festive party room at Wusterhausen is also on the second floor:






And this was Queen Sophia Dorothea's room, which today features portraits of all her daughters and of her first two sons who died as babies. (Fritz was No.3 and survived.) Keep it in mind when seeing future pic spams of other palaces to appreciate just how much she was not into the austerity of this one:





Wilhelmine and the two dead baby brothers:



Close up on the Wilhelmine as a girl portrait:





SD:



On to FW's chamber:





This one has portraits of the sons I hadn't seen before:


AW and Heinrich:



Fritz, hanging above the door, marked as crown prince by the crown in the background, looking distinctly not underfed:



Ferdinand:



Madame de Roucoulles, governress to both FW and Fritz in turn:



Wusterhausen from the backside:



One more look at the place Fritz never visited again once he'd made it to throne, thus avoiding a family disaster in 1770:






On to Wust. Much as Wusterhausen today is called "Königs Wusterhausen" to differentiate it from other places bearing the name, Wust today is "Wust-Fischbeck", as there are other Wusts as well. This one was the family seat of the Katte clan, which is of course why I was there. You can read Mildred's guide here.

Limiting myself to some additional info and pictures, I give you:



This is the former Katte mansion. Today it serves a primary school, and in summer (except for Corona summers) as an international language school. Mark the cat emblem next to the door:



The church was originally a Romanic one, built between 1196 and1205. Hans von Katte, enterprising nobleman during the 30 Years War in the 17th century, gave it a complete Baroque make-over.





This is Hans von Katte:



Said makeover also meant a gorgeous Flemish ceiling with lots of painted angels. This fascinated me, because by Hans von Katte's time, this church (and Katte himself) was most definitely Protestant. And yet...








The organ was donated by Ludolf von Katte, Lehndorff's rival, more about him below. Our local historian said archly that this was the only worthy thing Ludolf ever did.



Let's go out again, which you have to in order to get to the tombs.



You can see that the apsis of the church lowers itself into the crypt.



This was significant in terms of what happened to Hans Herrmann von Katte's earthly remains. First of all, he was buried at Küstrin and in the earth for weeks, though the assumption is his father got permission for the reburial before the year 1730 was over. Secondly, his wooden coffin stood directly on the floor, not, like the other sarcophagi, on wood planks. Thirdly, his coffin stood directly under the end of the apsis. Which meant that if it rained, all the water and the humidity went downwards directly into Hans Herrmann's wooden coffin. Consequently, whereas all the other Kattes turned out to be mumified by dry air when their coffins were openened, Hans Herrmann was a rotting skeleton poste haste. And that was before 19th century grave tourism became a thing, and because the Kattes owning Wust in the early 19th century were a gambler and am madman respectively, they didn't care that tourists came and took bones, and teeth. Only when remote cousin Hans Aemilius took over was this grave looting put to an end. It's a wonder anything is left, but it is, as you can see in these photos that show everyone's dead bodies and skeletons, and also list their names:









Crypt as seen from the entrance door looking left, Hans Hermann's coffiin in the wooden one in the back:



The crypt as seen from Hans Hermann's coffin:



Hans Herrmann's coffin:



His father Hans Heinrich's coffin:



Note the Athena depiction on Hans Heinrich in front:




Hans Heinrich's wives lie to both sides of him. The coffin directly next to Hans Herrmann is that of his younger half brother, while at the very end of the row there is the coffin of the other half brother. Both half brothers died dueling each other. Now the written sources I'd read said this was over a girl, but our local historian said no, this was actually over money. Because Hans Heinrich had wanted his youngest son to inherit, who had been still a minor when Hans Heinrich died. The duel took place not too long after he'd reached his majority and thus was supposed to take over Wust, but duelling each other to the death out of financial greed did not fly with either the Prussian codex or romantic Katte fans, and thus the duel became for love for a fictional love interest.

One brother died at once, the other later of blood poisoning. This was the end of Hans Heinrich's branch of the fammily, and his brother Hans Cristoph's line took over. To be precise, cousin Ludolf, "the three times fortunate" (because he inherited Hans Heinrich's fortune, Hans Christoph's fortune and his wife Catherine du Rosey's fortune), which he and subsequent Kattes all managed to spend at top speed. I was wondering why the former Miss Du Rosey, who was Lehndorff's One Who Got Away and cousin, wasn't there, but the lady who opened the crypt for me told me she married again after Ludolf's death, a Bredow, took her "one or two children" and moved away, never to be seen near the Kattes again. Which explains why wiki was so uncertain about her death date and number of children, I suppose, because the lady thinks she had some more in her second marriage.

The infamous "Boot-Katte", who finished the ruination of the estate in the early 19th century, and Hans Aemilius, who had the thrankless job of restoring it years later:



Fontanen didn't meet Hans Aemilius, only his wife and daughter, when he came to Wust as part of his research for the Wanderungen. This, however, turned out to be Fontane's good luck, because both ladies were far more inclined to talk than Hans Aemilius would have been, and told him every family story they could remember, with the result that they ended up in German literature. On that note, I conclude this first of several pic spams as the result of my own Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg.