Gönneranlage

The Gönneranlage (park) is a rose garden within the Lichtentaler Allee, between Baden-Baden’s Ludwig-Wilhelm-Straße and the Oos. Max Laeuger laid it out in geometric forms in 1909. The monumental Josefinenbrunnen by the Munich sculptor Joseph Flossmann stands at its centre. The park takes its name from Albert Gönner, a former lord mayor and honorary citizen of Baden-Baden, and it is the oldest surviving public garden in Germany in the new Baroque garden style that came after 1900.^[1]

The grounds

The garden falls into three parts and measures roughly 90 by 180 metres today.^[2] The Josefinenbrunnen sits at its centre, flanked by two figures, personifications of the drinking cure and the bathing cure. The fountain itself measures about 15 by 20 metres. Laeuger took French Baroque gardens as his model and laid the garden out in strict symmetry. Some praised the style, while others criticised the jarring contrast with the Lichtentaler Allee.^[3] Standing before the tall copper-beech hedges along the north-eastern side, a visitor grasps what Laeuger meant by garden art: a variation on building a house or a palace, with the sky for a ceiling, the hedges for walls, and the lawn and flowers for a floor. The Gönneranlage was originally planted with summer flowers and has been a rose garden since 1952. It lost its symmetry in 1969, when the town added an indoor pool beside the Bertholdbad, at that time an open-air pool only.

Some 25,000 specimens and around 400 varieties of rose can be admired in the Gönneranlage today: bedding roses, climbing roses, shrub roses, standard roses and weeping roses. Labels in the beds name the variety, the breeder and the year it was bred.

History

The site originally belonged to the Kloster vom Heiligen Grab and was farmland. The town bought it in 1886 and then argued for more than a decade over whether villas or a public park should go up there. It settled on a plain park in the English style, to plans by the Stuttgart garden director Wagner. In 1900 an oak was planted in this park to mark the 25th anniversary of lord mayor Albert Gönner’s service and named after him, and the grounds took their name from it in turn.

The park owed its new shape to the wholesale merchant Hermann Sielcken, who had grown rich in the coffee trade. In memory of his late wife, Josefine Sielcken, he donated a fountain, and Joseph Flossmann’s design won the invited competition that followed. Mayor Reinhard Fieser then had the idea of redesigning the entire park, and so the architect and garden artist Max Laeuger submitted a first design in 1907. The neighbouring residents rejected it, because it called for tall trees around the grounds that would have blocked the view of the Lichtentaler Allee. The second design, of 1908, dispensed with those trees and was the one built. Hermann Sielcken had to raise his endowment from the 25,000 marks originally foreseen to 60,000, and his donation later grew to as much as 90,000 marks. Work began in 1909 and the park was inaugurated in 1912. The Josefinenbrücke, which carries the path over the Oos to the Gönneranlage, bears Josefine Sielcken’s name as well. Between 1923 and 1925 Max Laeuger built a second geometric park in Baden-Baden, the Wasserkunstanlage Paradies.

After the Second World War there were plans to turn the Gönneranlage into an “entirely ordinary” park, but nothing came of them. It became a rose garden instead. In 1952, the year Max Laeuger died, a rose show was held in the Gönneranlage under the patronage of Konrad Adenauer.

The neighbouring indoor pool cost the Gönneranlage a piece of its land in 1969, and with it the symmetry of the layout.

The years 1989 and 1990 tested the Gönneranlage and the staff of the garden department. The Michaelstunnel was driven straight through the grounds by cut-and-cover. Careful preparation paid off: the natural stones had been numbered, went back into their original positions afterwards, and the garden was soon restored.

The first fountain concert in the Gönneranlage marked the park’s 100th anniversary in August 2009. The orchestra of the Baden-Baden Philharmonic played on a platform in the lower basin of the Josefinenbrunnen, with the audience seated between the fountain and the Josefinenbrücke.^[4]

Getting there, opening hours, admission and season

The park lies on Ludwig-Wilhelm-Straße, alongside house numbers 11 to 19, where free parking is often available. A larger paid car park sits about 120 metres north of the park, at the corner of Bertholdstraße and Ludwig-Wilhelm-Straße. The Gönneranlage opens daily from 9 a.m. until dusk, and admission is free. The rose season runs from the beginning of June to the end of September, but the park’s small-scale architecture makes it rewarding all year round and always worth a visit.

Sources

• Ulrich Coenen Von Aquae bis Baden-Baden - die Baugeschichte der Stadt und ihr Beitrag zur Entwicklung der Kurarchitektur Aachen, Mainz 2008, ISBN 3-8107-0023-1 S. 468 ff.
• Bernd Weigel Parkführer Baden-Baden. Die Gärten und Kuranlagen im Oostal. 2. Auflage, Wesel-Kommunikation, Baden-Baden 2003, ISBN 3-00-010770-3 S. 39 ff.
• Helmuth Bischoff Baden-Baden: Die romantische Bäderstadt im Tal der Oos. Kurbetrieb zwischen Casino, Park und Kloster. DuMont, Köln 1996, ISBN 3-7701-3086-3 S. 146 f.

References:

1. ↑ Coenen, p. 468
2. ↑ Dimensions determined with Google Earth; this matches the area figure of 1.6 hectares in Parkführer Baden-Baden p. 40
3. ↑ Bischoff, p. 147
4. ↑ First fountain concert on Baden-Baden.tv (no longer available, archived version)