Stop 1
Park entrance
Welcome! Introduction to the tour
Welcome to the tour of the world of Wiepersdorf!
Wiepersdorf Castle was once the residence of Bettina and Achim von Arnim, the place where this most famous writer couple of German Romanticism worked. Today, artists and academics from all over the world receive grants to pursue their own projects in Wiepersdorf.
The tour provides ten stops for you to get to know the grounds, the buildings, and the various residents of Wiepersdorf Castle as well as their stories. At each of the stops you will find a sign with a QR code. If you scan these codes with your smartphone, you can hear stories of three to six minutes that introduce you to the object or topic in question. Everything you listen to on the tour can also be followed or read on your smartphone, tablet, or the website of the Schloss Wiepersdorf Cultural Foundation.
Additionally, each of the stops offers the opportunity to find out more in-depth knowledge about what you have heard or read with the help of expert information. You can organize your visit according to personal preferences—and the time you have available—by visiting and scanning individual stops or participate in the approximately one-hour-long tour. We cordially invite you to visit our café in the orangery. It is open in the summer months on Sundays.
Let's begin the tour! In front of you, behind the wide expanse of lawn on which a good dozen scattered chestnut trees grow, lies the elongated white castle ensemble with a red mansard roof. Some two hundred years ago—from 1814—Bettina and Achim von Arnim lived here. To be precise: it was mostly only Achim who resided at Wiepersdorf with horses and cows, while Bettina preferred the society of Berlin and took the children with her. Many stories can be told about Wiepersdorf: about a grandson of Bettina and Achim von Arnim who converted the original manor house into a castle; the end of World War Two, when the Arnim family estate became a place of work and recreation for writers in the GDR; the 1990s, when the estate emerged from the upheavals of the fall of communism and the reunification as the Künstlerhaus Schloss Wiepersdorf.
Today, the castle is a place devoted to developing artistic and scientific understanding of the present from individual perspectives. Supported by the Schloss Wiepersdorf Cultural Foundation of the state of Brandenburg, it offers a residency program to artists and academics from all over the world. Fellowship holders from the fields of literature, composition, and the fine arts—as well as science—find the best-possible conditions here for productive work and exchange with other fellows.
During the tour of the grounds, you can witness how Bettina von Arnim called Goethe’s wife a “black pudding gone berserk,” what Anna Seghers liked about Wiepersdorf, and that Felicitas Hoppe, who later won the Büchner Prize, jumped out of an airplane in neighboring Reinsdorf. There will also be talk of mushrooms, carp, and rollerblades. If you want to hear more, please come with us!
When you follow the path to the castle, you see a small church on your right—without a steeple. The fenced-in area in front of the church is the burial site of the von Arnim family. You will find the next stop where the path to the burial site branches off to the right of the main path.
