Museum Schloss Wiepersdorf

Opening hours Open from May during the summer months on Sundays 1:00–5:00 p.m.
Entrance Free admission
Guided tours Guided tours on request at info@schloss-wiepersdorf.de or 033746 – 69 90
Access Access to the Museum Schloss Wiepersdorf is almost barrier-free.

© Dirk Bleicker

The museum in Schloss Wiepersdorf illustrates over five rooms how the von Arnimsʼ manor house evolved into a residence for artists and scholars. The focus lies on the spirit of Romanticism as well as on the period from 1945 to 1989, when Schloss Wiepersdorf primarily hosted writers.

© Dirk Bleicker

Schloss Wiepersdorf is a place that has experienced diverse transformations. It is a place of ambivalences, obstinacy and invention. No one is who they are anymore. Nothing is what it was. Again and again in its history, this place has to be more and other than it is. What is not there must be imagined. What is characteristic of the accumulation of objects in Wiepersdorf is the abundance of their missing parts. Thus Schloss Wiepersdorf becomes a place that only becomes what it never is through manifold imaginings:

When, for example, Bettina and Achim von Arnim try to master the time of upheaval after 1806, in the greatest tension between their own will, the demands of a lifestyle befitting their station, financial need and entrepreneurship. When, in the 19th century, her grandson Achim von Arnim-Bärwalde transformed the manor house – in Bettina's and Achim's time a barely maintainable place of status representation – into a palace with a baroque appearance by means of the grand staircase and the French garden. When during the Second World War the Jewish communist Iwan Katz is hidden in the manor house, with whose help the castle can be saved, albeit with losses, through the post-war period. When the GDR runs an artists' house in the baroque interior and the cultural-political claim oscillates between international charisma and seclusion. Or when the next transformation after 1990 again confronts the Künstlerhaus and its staff with existential challenges.

Schloss Wiepersdorf is thus a place of constant transcriptions, in that visitors to the castle relate to their fantasies of Wiepersdorf's past.