In the large dining room you can immediately see where the last German emperor sat.
Not because his chair at the table would be different from the other plain wooden chairs.
Rather, it is a silver fork with only three prongs, one of which is sharpened like a knife that refers to Wilhelm II.
The custom-made product, supposedly an idea of his mother, Empress Friedrich, was supposed to make it easier for the son, whose arm was paralyzed, to eat.
Sandra Kegel
Responsible editor for the features section.
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The elaborate, ten million euro refurbishment and restoration of the so-called king wing in Homburg Castle, which was built at the end of the seventeenth century and has been rebuilt again and again, took a good ten years. From Wednesday on, this only remaining imperial apartment among the former eighty palaces and castles of the Hohenzollern family is accessible again. Mainly thanks to the excellent location of the sources, the living and common rooms on a good thousand square meters have been restored to their authentic state. In doing so, legends were cleared up as well as incorrect equipment. Not only are castle tours by candlelight now a thing of the past in rooms that the technology fool Wilhelm II had equipped with electric cables and porcelain light switches. Even in the classicist,The yellow-covered dining room, the restorers put authenticity before false gloss.
The effects are amazing.
Where the table set for six people stands today, a long, magnificent table was enthroned until the floor was closed in 2011.
At the time, mobile wooden structures were used for large banquets, otherwise there was only the small table, from which something almost lost and unreal emanates today.
However, it does not take much imagination to imagine that in 1917 and 1918, when Wilhelm II and Auguste Viktoria stayed in Bad Homburg more often, not many were looking for their proximity any more.
No postcards from Wilhelm II.
Kirsten Worms, director of the State Palaces and Gardens of Hesse, whose office is right next to the imperial apartment, is aware of the “bulky legacy”, especially in the form of Wilhelm II: “To put this place in its appropriate context, to research and It's our job to convey that, regardless of whether we like the protagonist or not. ”While she set up a critical accompanying program for the Wilhelmine era, she does without postcards from Wilhelm II in the museum shop.“ I don't want to see loyalty to the emperor here. "
The timeframe for the reappraisal is the years 1917 and 1918. Countless accessories were put into their original context, from restored original wallpapers to hanging the pictures, the gloomy, death-themed graphics in the bedroom, for example, to Wilhelm's seat saddles and barographs.
While restorers had actually recently discovered the dining furniture in the office of the garden department, Auguste Viktoria's Gdansk cupboard was last in the Lorsch branch, filled with office supplies.
The Empress once hid her bathtub in it.
Because unlike her husband, who had his own bathroom, she had to integrate her hygienic facilities as invisibly as possible into the living room.
Off for the sovereign mini-state
After Wilhelm II left Homburg Castle for the last time in the summer of 1918, the fifty-year Prussian chapter of the city ended. There is a reason why many of the furniture, paintings and treasures in the palace actually come from Berlin and Potsdam and not from the landgraves' property: When the Prussians annexed the country in 1866 after the German-German War, they found the former ruling house of the Hessians -Homburgs almost empty. A few months earlier, the tiny but sovereign state on the edge of the Taunus had reverted to the parent company Hessen-Darmstadt due to the death of the last childless landgrave. And there a lot had been taken to them, which is why the Prussians had to re-equip it inevitably. Bassano's large-format Noah's Ark painting is one of the treasures from the Berlin Palace picture gallery.The Hohenzollerns did not encounter much resistance when they moved into the royal seat, which they declassified to the district seat. “The bells, they cheer like thunder”, the “Taunusbote” celebrated the new ruler and later Kaiser Wilhelm I on his arrival on August 17, 1868.
His grandson, who owes the current appearance of the premises, had, among other things, set up a telephone room after 1900 with a wardrobe converted into a soundproof speaker booth. There is also "The blind field gray", a gift to the empress by the sculptor Jakob Schmitt, who lost his sight at the beginning of the First World War. The larger than life bust with the inscription "Become steel" shows a soldier with a steel helmet and empty eye sockets. It documents the literally deluded patriotism of that time - and is as ghastly to look at as it is indispensable in this place.