3. - Schlösser-Magazin

By 1681, Liselotte‘s brother, Prince
Elector Karl II (1680-1685), had handed
Schwetzingen over to his wife Wilhelmine
Ernestine, a Danish princess who maintained
Schwetzingen as one of her residences
after the death of her husband four years
later. After the palace‘s destruction in 1689,
restoration work was carried out which
continued up to 1715, and after Wilhelmine
Ernestine‘s death in 1706, the palace was once
more used by the regent of the Palatinate. It
was in this period that the wings flanking the
cour d‘honneur were built, the constructors
achieving the remarkable architectural feat
of smoothing out the irregularities of the
existing mediaeval fabric and bringing them
in line with Baroque aesthetic ideals. In
1720, after demonstratively giving up his
ancestral home in Heidelberg over a quarrel
with the Protestants of the town concerning
the partitioning of the Church of the Holy
Spirit, the Catholic Prince Elector Karl Philip
(1716-1742) moved the royal household to
Schwetzingen, from where he conducted,
over several years, the ambitious project of
building a new palace at Mannheim. But
even after the court had moved to Mannheim,
Schwetzingen remained the frequently used
summer and alternative residence of the
Electors Palatine, its open design, in contrast
to the tight confines of the Mannheim
property, appealing to the bucolic tastes of the
time. Its relatively modest palace building
hardly befitted an absolutist prince, but that
mattered little, for it was the gardens, not the
palace, that made Schwetzingen so highly
appreciated -- in a sense, Schwetzingen was
the garden of the Electoral Palatinate.
The real efflorescence of the palace and
gardens finally began with the succession to
power of Karl Theodor (1742-1799), a Prince
Elector of the Enlightenment, who generated
an atmosphere of sheer resplendence at
Schwetzingen that prevailed until his move
to Munich in 1778. Complete reconstruction
of the palace was cut short around 1750
owing to the high costs involved, but work
IV. Report on the Historical Importance: Dr. Kurt Andermann
subsequently continued to be invested into
making Schwetzingen a residence fit for a
Prince of the Empire: extensions were made to
the palace itself, in the form of the generously
proportioned quarter-circle pavilions (1748-
54) and the theatre (1752-62), which is still in
use today; and the grounds were transformed
into a set of gardens which, with its numerous
buildings and sculptures, gave expression to
the Prince Elector‘s broad cultural horizons,
an aspect further underlined by the addition
in 1771 of an observatory on the palace roof.
In 1750 work started on the electoral stables
still to be found today in Schwetzingen, and
the town itself gained in size and importance
through the electoral residence, with
buildings and streets constructed so as to
radiate out from the palace. Further factors
contributing to the prestige of the town and
its status as an integral part of the electoral
residence were the institution of two fairs
in 1749; Schwetzingen‘s elevation to the
status of market town in 1759; the transfer to
Schwetzingen of the Palatinate Foot Guards
and subsequent construction in 1774 of
separate barracks for them; the extension
of the recently built (1736) Catholic parish
church and redesign of its facade so as to
reflect the increased importance of the parish;
and finally, the foundation of a Franciscan
monastery in the town.
Karl Theodor‘s move to Munich in 1778,
forced by his succession to the Bavarian
throne of the Wittelsbachs, may have put an
end to regular courtly events at Schwetzingen,
but the maintenance and development of
the site continued unabated. The palace
continued to be put to various uses in the
nineteenth-century, by members of the
House of Baden, not least by Grand Duchess
Stephanie Beauharnais, the adopted daughter
of Napoleon Bonaparte. Nevertheless, the site
was left intact in all its magnificence after the
end of the old regime, and it has remained in
this state to the present day, providing us with
what is to my mind a unique example of an
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