Amalienruh Castle

In 1151, the estate was first mentioned in a document as Mullefeld (Mull = loose, good soil). The small village, later called Memelfeld, died out during the plague after 1498 and became deserted. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, at least the main estate was again inhabited by a Baumbach family. However, at the end of the Thirty Years' War, it was destroyed again by Croatian mercenaries of the imperial troops, as were the neighboring villages. Only a few inhabitants of the surrounding area survived. The Baumbach family fled to more distant cities. After the war, one of the sons returned and found only the walls of the buildings remaining. However, he rebuilt the estate. Later, he had to wage a decades-long legal dispute with relatives who had fled during the war over their inheritance claims, which ruined him financially.

So it was quite fitting that Duchess Elisabeth Sophie fell in love with the estate and bought it in 1718. Baumbach remained as administrator and tenant of the agriculture. Elisabeth Sophie enlarged the farmhouse into a small pleasure palace, beautified the estate, furnished it as a summer residence, and named it Sophienlust. In 1785, the estate came into the possession of Duchess Charlotte Amalie, who significantly beautified the small palace and the terraced and walled garden and developed it into her widow's residence. The estate now received the name Amalienruh. The Duchess also expanded and beautified the garden, which contained around 300 orange and lemon trees, coffee plants, and many other southern plants, which naturally spent the winter in greenhouses. During the Wars of Liberation against Napoleon in 1813, Amalienruh served as a hospital after the terrible battles.

In 1889, Duke Georg II sold Amalienruh to the infantry officer Drusa von Sillich. His son was supposed to take over the estate but died in a tragic accident, so his father sold it again in 1900. The owner now became a GmbH, which, under the direction of Baroness Elisabeth von Pawel-Rammingen, operated the first rural women's school in Germany here. This school existed for 21 years and brought a new heyday to the estate. In 1935, Amalienruh was sold to Dr. Escher, a doctor who was chief physician of a clinic in Saarland. In 1946, the headmistress Elisabeth von Pawel-Rammingen, who had lived at Amalienruh until the end, passed away.

The end of the war in 1945 was relatively mild. Margarete Escher, a daughter of Dr. Escher, also survived here. The Escher family was dispossessed during the land reform of 1945, and Amalienruh became the state-owned and youth estate Thomas Münzer, a training farm with vegetable and flower nurseries, herd book cattle and pig breeding, and an orchard. In 1975, the state-owned estate was closed in connection with the expansion of the border restricted zone to five kilometers and attached to the LPG Hermannsfeld, which mainly raised young cattle here. A new period of decay began. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, Amalienruh came into the possession of the Treuhand, which abandoned it to total plunder and vandalism, especially after the last tenants moved out in 1995.

When we bought Amalienruh at an auction in Berlin from the TLG on April 3, 2003, there was no electricity, no telephone, and no functioning water pipe. Three-quarters of all windowpanes were smashed. In 2004, Amalienruh was transferred to a non-profit foundation. In 2006, the first chairman of the board and co-founder of the foundation, Claus Siegfried Harnisch, passed away.