Qualla: Schloss Tegel

Schloss Tegel: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Havelbaude, CC BY-SA 3.0. The oldest thing on the estate is a tree, and the Humboldts named it after their cook. Dicke Marie - Fat Marie - stands near the shore of the Tegeler See at the western edge of the park, an oak sometimes credited with eight hundred years. The house it belongs to has been three different buildings. It went up as a Renaissance manor in 1558, was converted into a hunting lodge for a Brandenburg elector, and then in the 1820s was taken apart and put back together by Karl Friedrich Schinkel for a man who had spent his childhood summers in the earlier version. Two centuries after that rebuilding, the same family still owns it, still lives in it, and is still burying its dead in the garden.

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Image: Havelbaude | CC BY-SA 3.0

Schloss Tegel: Dicke Marie

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit The original uploader was Bruhaha at German Wikipedia., CC BY-SA 3.0. The park came before the present house. Gottlob Johann Christian Kunth laid it out between 1777 and 1789, which tells you something about how this household worked: Kunth was the Humboldt boys' tutor, and the man who taught the children also designed the grounds they grew up in. ...

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Image: The original uploader was Bruhaha at German Wikipedia. | CC BY-SA 3.0

Schloss Tegel: Two Brothers, One Estate

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Public domain. Around 1645 Frederick William, the Great Elector of Brandenburg, turned the Renaissance manor into a hunting lodge. The Tegel estate reached the Humboldt family in 1766, by marriage, when Marie-Elisabeth von Holwede married Alexander Georg von Humboldt. Their sons grew up between...

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Image: Public domain

Schloss Tegel: Schinkel's Commission

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit scanned by NobbiP, Public domain. Between 1820 and 1824 Wilhelm had the old house rebuilt in the classical style to Schinkel's designs - not demolished and replaced, but reworked, with the earlier structure still inside the new one. It is a small building by the standards of Prussian country houses, and that is t...

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Image: scanned by NobbiP | Public domain

Schloss Tegel: The Column and the Bench

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Lienhard Schulz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Caroline von Humboldt died in 1829, and she had chosen where she wanted to lie. The monument in the park is a tall granite column carrying a figure of Spes, the Roman goddess of hope, by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen - a work Caroline had admired, which Wilhelm bought af...

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Image: Lienhard Schulz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Schloss Tegel: Still a Private House

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Graccem, CC BY-SA 3.0. Theodor Fontane walked through here for his Wanderungen durch die Mark Brandenburg and gave the schloss a chapter, which fixed it in the German imagination as a place you visit on foot, from the lake side, in the afternoon. That is more or less still how it works. The Humboldt-Mu...

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Image: Graccem | CC BY-SA 3.0