Qualla: Branitz Palace

Branitz Palace: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stefan Fussan, CC BY-SA 3.0. The prince is buried inside a pyramid, standing in a lake he had dug so the pyramid would have something to stand in. It is not stone. It is earth, grassed over, rising out of the water at the far end of a park on the sandy flats east of Cottbus, and it is the single most literal statement of intent in German landscape architecture. Hermann von Pückler-Muskau had already built one of the great parks of Europe, at Muskau on the Neisse, and had been forced to sell it in 1845 because he could not pay for it. He came here the following year, aged sixty, to a small Baroque box his family had leased out for two generations, on flat ground with poor soil and almost no trees. Then he began again.

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Image: Stefan Fussan | CC BY-SA 3.0

Branitz Palace: Starting Over at Sixty

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dguendel, CC BY 3.0. 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 no...

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Image: Dguendel | CC BY 3.0

Branitz Palace: Four Hundred Grown Trees

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jochen Sievert, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 ...

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Image: Jochen Sievert | CC BY-SA 4.0

Branitz Palace: Nubian Geometry in Brandenburg

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit LadyBarbara, CC BY-SA 3.0. 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...

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Image: LadyBarbara | CC BY-SA 3.0

Branitz Palace: The Lake Pyramid

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Landgraf, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 cemeter...

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Image: A.Landgraf | CC BY-SA 4.0

Branitz Palace: What the Museum Keeps

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kora27, CC BY-SA 4.0. 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 pr...

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Image: Kora27 | CC BY-SA 4.0