Qualla: Paretz

Paretz: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Biberbaer, CC BY-SA 3.0. "Just remember always that you are building for a poor farmer." That is the line that has followed the house at Paretz ever since the Crown Prince of Prussia handed the commission to the Berlin architect David Gilly in 1795 — and the strange thing is that Gilly obeyed. There is no grand stair at Paretz, no gilding, no dome. What stands at the end of the village street is a plain two-storey block with a shallow roof, flanked by four barns, two to a side, arranged to close a semicircular yard. The summer residence of Frederick William III and Queen Louise looks out at cattle sheds. Around four hundred people still live here, on the flat Havel bottomland about fifteen kilometres west of Potsdam, and the village is now a borough of the town of Ketzin.

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Image: Biberbaer | CC BY-SA 3.0

Paretz: The Boy Who Was Happy Here

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Rendor Thuces Al'Nachkar, CC BY-SA 4.0. The estate belonged to the von Bredow family until 1677, when the Brandenburg diplomat Christoph Caspar von Blumenthal bought it. Paretz is where his daughter Wilhelmina eloped in 1689 with Ernst Christian von Weiler, a married man — the sort of scandal a village remembers for th...

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Image: Rendor Thuces Al'Nachkar | CC BY-SA 4.0

Paretz: Schloss Still-im-Land

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mbzt, CC BY-SA 3.0. Louise died in 1810, and her husband left the house exactly as she had known it. Nothing changed for thirty years. Not until 1840 did Frederick William IV order new wallpaper and furniture for a handful of rooms, and whatever spell the place had cast as the Schloss Still-im-Land ...

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Image: Mbzt | CC BY-SA 3.0

Paretz: What Was Carried Out in Time

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Mehman Ibragimov, CC BY-SA 4.0. The finest things at Paretz are on its walls: hangings worked with exotic plants, birds, and views of the Potsdam landscape. They exist because somebody took them down before the Second World War reached Brandenburg and stored them in the New Palace at Potsdam. The building they ...

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Image: Mehman Ibragimov | CC BY-SA 4.0

Paretz: Holes in the Ground

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. Nineteenth-century Berlin ate bricks. The city grew faster than anywhere in Europe and it grew in fired clay, which meant that the villages of the Havelland, sitting on good clay ground, filled up with brickworks. Paretz had them too. Then the trade slackened after the First Worl...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Paretz: Two Canals and a Border

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Botaurus, Public domain. Theodor Fontane came three times, in the spring of 1861, again in 1869, and in May 1870, and he wrote Paretz into his Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg. He walked in from Uetz, barely half a mile off, through meadows that smelled of hay, past a haze of sunlit river mist that...

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Image: Botaurus | Public domain