Qualla: Rheinsberg Palace

Rheinsberg Palace: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, Public domain. Frederick the Great was not a man who used the word happy. He fought three wars, quarrelled with nearly everyone he knew, and by the end preferred the company of his dogs to his court. Yet for the rest of his life he described one place as the happiest he had ever been: a modest palace on the eastern shore of the Grienericksee, about a hundred kilometres northwest of Berlin, where he lived from 1736 to 1740 as a crown prince with very little to do. He read. He played the flute. He wrote letters to Voltaire and had the old building rebuilt into something light and symmetrical. Then his father died, he became king, and he never lived at Rheinsberg again.

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Image: Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff | Public domain

Rheinsberg Palace: Before the Rococo

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Krank-Hover, CC BY-SA 3.0. There had been a castle here since the Middle Ages, a moated one, guarding a narrow neck of water in a landscape that is more lake than land. The von Bredow family acquired the lordship of Rheinsberg by marriage in 1464 and put up a Renaissance water castle on the spot in 1566. T...

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Image: Krank-Hover | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rheinsberg Palace: The Happiest Four Years

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, Public domain. Crown Prince Frederick moved into the southern wing in 1736 with his wife, Elisabeth Christine of Brunswick-Wolfenbuttel-Bevern. He set two architects to work, Johann Gottfried Kemmeter and his pupil Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff, and between them they added an upper floor an...

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Image: Georg Wenzeslaus von Knobelsdorff | Public domain

Rheinsberg Palace: The Brother Who Stayed Fifty Years

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Pelz, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1744 Frederick handed Rheinsberg to his younger brother Henry, who moved in eight years later with his wife, Wilhelmina of Hesse-Kassel, and stayed for half a century. The king also built Henry a palace in Berlin between 1748 and 1753, the building that now houses Humboldt Uni...

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Image: Pelz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Rheinsberg Palace: A Storybook for Lovers

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. Rheinsberg's second life is literary. Theodor Fontane walked here for his Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg and gave the palace a chapter of its own. Then in 1912 Kurt Tucholsky published Rheinsberg: Ein Bilderbuch fur Verliebte, a slim and very funny book about a young coup...

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Image: A.Savin | FAL

Rheinsberg Palace: Clinic, Museum, Opera House

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Radler59 (talk), CC BY-SA 4.0. The Hohenzollerns owned Rheinsberg until 1945, when the property was expropriated. What followed was less dramatic than demolition and rather more surprising: the palace spent the East German decades as a sanatorium for diabetics, named after a Social Unity Party politician. Sinc...

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Image: Radler59 (talk) | CC BY-SA 4.0