The Interior Rooms
Beginning in 1790, Carl Gotthard Langhans was commissioned with designing the interior rooms. Marble fireplaces and antique sculpture were a prominent feature in decisions about the decorative furnishings; these had been purchased in Italy for the Marmorpalais by the architect Friedrich Wilhelm von Erdmannsdorff. This Saxon nobleman, who was already famous for planning and executing early Classicism style buildings in Dessau-Wörlitz, had been invited to work in Berlin in 1787.
On the ground floor of the main building there is a vestibule leading to a stairway extending the entire height of the building. Behind it is a large room designed as a grotto and used in the summertime as a dining room. This room is situated on the eastern side of the palace and faces the lake. Because of its shady location and the calm, cool effect of its greyish blue marble paneling its occupants enjoyed a pleasant room climate. On either side of this middle axis there were six private rooms serving as royal living quarters.
Upstairs, the rooms are grouped around the central marble stairway. The largest room, the concert hall, extended across the entire lake side of the palace. It was later used as a salon during the reign of the German Kaisers. The furnishings and decorative architecture of the rooms reflected a taste for Classicism, the only exception being the so-called Oriental cabinet on the upper floor, which Langhans designed as a Turkish tent with a divan.
The Marmorpalais is closely associated with Wilhelmine Enke (also spelled Encke), known popularly as “Beautiful Wilhelmine”. As Friedrich Wilhelm II’s royal mistress she had a great influence on the interior decoration of the palace; in 1796 she was made Countess Lichtenau. Following plans by Michael Philipp Boumann a townhouse, Lichtenau Palace, was erected for her in an early classicist style at the edge of the Neuer Garten, in what is today Behlertstrasse in Potsdam.
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Detail from a 1900 map of Potsdam showing the location of the Marmorpalais
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Hagen from the Niebelung saga, fresco detail from the colonnade
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The Marmorpalais in 1964 as a German Army museum with a Soviet MiG-17 fighter plane in the courtyard
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Wilhelmine von Lichtenau
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Lichtenau Palace
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