The Pücklers had owned the village of Branitz since 1696, and the palace was built for August Heinrich Count von Pückler in 1770 and 1771 - a competent, unremarkable Baroque residence. In 1785 the family moved its seat to Muskau and let Branitz out to tenants. It was therefore not a homecoming so much as a fallback. From 1846 architects from the Berlin Bauakademie went to work on the house, Rudolf Wilhelm Gottgetreu, Eduard Titz and Ferdinand von Arnim among them, and by 1852 Pückler and his wife Lucie had moved in. Around them he laid out an estate farm, a mews with a finely carved ceiling painted blue and gold for his favourite horses, and a park forge modelled on the Little Palace at Babelsberg that doubled as the gatehouse. Thirty buildings in all, scattered through the grounds. He was working against the clock and he knew it.

A landscape park needs mature timber, and Pückler did not have forty years to grow it. So he moved it. By 1850, using purpose-built transplanting machines, roughly four hundred full-grown trees had been dug up elsewhere and replanted at Branitz; about one in five died and had to be replaced. The rest of the ground was shaped by hand and cart. Where there had been level Lower Lusatian sand, he made hills, watercourses and lakes, and composed the plantings the way a painter composes a canvas, with foreground masses, framed openings and long constructed sightlines. The whole thing now covers 622 hectares, of which about 112 make up the inner park and pleasureground. Almost none of what you see is the original terrain, and none of it looks designed, which was the entire point.

In 1837 and 1838 Pückler travelled up the Nile as far as the Sudan and saw the Nubian pyramids at Meroë. That journey supplied him with the form he wanted for the end of his life, and it supplied him with something else he never had to account for: in the slave market in Cairo he bought a twelve-year-old Oromo girl, Bilillee, and renamed her Machbuba. She died at Muskau in 1840, at about fifteen, and is buried there. From 1856 he built two earth pyramids at Branitz. The Landpyramide was raised from the spoil dug out to make the lake, originally stepped in twelve terraces and rebuilt to that profile in 2021. The Seepyramide, the Tumulus, stands in the water of the Pyramidensee. Eight-pointed stars crown the palace, the forge and the gatehouse - read as figures of eternity, having neither beginning nor end.

Lucie had divorced him in 1826 so that he could hunt an heiress and pay for the garden at Muskau, and had then gone on living with him for the rest of her life, which is a marriage of a sort even if the register said otherwise. She died in 1854 and was buried in the local cemetery. In 1884 she was moved into the Seepyramide. Pückler himself died in the palace on 4 February 1871, aged eighty-five, and was carried out to the pyramid five days later. The arrangement is exactly what he intended: not a family vault in a church, not a monument on a hill, but a burial mound in the middle of his own invented water, visible from the house, unreachable except by design.

The Pücklers were expropriated after the Second World War and the palace became public property. It held the Cottbus city museum from 1946 to 1961 and then the district museum until 1990, functional uses that at least kept the roof on. Today it is the Fürst-Pückler-Museum: the prince's own rooms, and a substantial collection of paintings by Carl Blechen, the landscape painter born in Cottbus. Restoration of the salons began in 2013, and since 2022 visitors have again been able to walk through the oriental rooms with their coloured paper wallpapers and the objects he brought back from Egypt. The Kavaliershaus, which once housed the court staff, has been a restaurant since 1988. A foundation has run park and palace since 1995, under Brandenburg state law since 2018, and a bid for World Heritage listing is in preparation.