Parforceheide
The Parforceheide between the south of Berlin and the east of Potsdam is one of the last large contiguous forest areas in the Berlin-Brandenburg metropolitan region. Although located in Brandenburg, part of the forest is owned by the state of Berlin. The basis for this was created by the permanent forest contract or century contract of 1915. An area covering around 2350 hectares has been designated as the Parforceheide landscape conservation area since 1997. One of the aims of the conservation order is to preserve "the area's function as a climatic compensation area in the south of the Berlin conurbation". The name goes back to the par force hunts for which King Frederick William I of Prussia had the Stern hunting lodge built in the forest in 1730.
Geography and geology
Location
Until the beginning of the 20th century, the northern boundary of the Parforceheide was formed by the Bäkefließ, which was largely absorbed into the Teltow Canal. The historical map from 1903 next to the table of contents still shows the Bäkefließ at the top of the picture. Since its construction between 1900 and 1906, the Teltow Canal has closed off the forest to the north, followed even further north on the other side of the canal by the forests of Dreilinden. Between the Teltow Canal and the forest to the east is the narrow Berlin strip of Albrecht's Teerofen, which extends into Brandenburg here, so that a narrow strip of forest along the canal lies on Berlin territory.To the east, the woodland is bordered by the extensive parkland of the Südwestkirchhof Stahnsdorf and the Wilmersdorfer Waldfriedhof Stahnsdorf, whose area was part of the Parforceheide until the cemeteries were established in 1909 and 1920 respectively. On the other hand, the only village in the immediate vicinity of the forest, Güterfelde, the former Gütergotz, borders the Parforceheide to the east. The Güterfelder Heide marked on some maps is assigned to the par force heath by the responsible forestry office in Nudow.
The western boundary is formed by the road that connects Berlin with the former exclave of Steinstücken, which still belongs to Berlin today.
To the west of Steinstücken are the Potsdam development areas of Drewitz, Am Stern and Kirchsteigfeld; from Stern, the western boundary runs parallel to the A 115 highway. The highway cuts through the forest, which is connected by two pedestrian bridges over the roadway; a new rest area built in 2004 on the A 115 is called Parforceheide. The southern end of the forest area is at the intersection of the Güterfelde-Philippsthal and Drewitz-Ludwigsfelde roads. Other smaller forest parcels lie outside the outlined boundary and are not specified here in more detail for the sake of clarity.
Worth mentioning is the almost 22-hectare Wüste Mark farmland, which lies in the middle of the Parforceheide and was farmed as an exclave by a Berlin farmer from Zehlendorf until 1988.
Ice age, sand and pine
The Parforceheide is geologically part of the Berlin-Brandenburg landscape of Teltow, whose name goes back to the original term "Telte" for the Bäke river. The Teltow is a typical plate north of the Brandenburg ice edge. It was formed just over 20,000 years ago during the Weichselian Ice Age. For the most part, it is occupied by flat undulating ground moraines. The special feature of the Parforceheide is that the boulder clay typical of ground moraines is largely absent and therefore older deposits, meltwater sands from the advance phase of the inland ice, are present on the surface. They are on average 15 to 20 meters thick. Brown soils developed on the sands in the post-glacial period, but these only have a low yield potential. The dry sandy soils typical of the Teltow shape the character of the Parforceheide forest, which has been given the name "Heide", which is only used in eastern Germany for forest locations far from groundwater. With its sparse stand of pine trees, the forest offered ideal conditions for King Frederick William I's need to cut the wide tracks through the wood required for par force hunting.History
Par force hunting and star
Par force hunts, which have been practiced with passion at European courts since the 16th and 17th centuries, gave the par force hunt its name. This form of hunting requires paths that are as flat and clear as possible in a forest with as little undergrowth as possible, as the riders have to follow the packs of hounds that chase the game to exhaustion. This form of hunting is now prohibited in Germany and was even banned in England, a country with a particularly cherished hunting tradition and an influential hunting lobby, in 2005. Hunting in the Parforceheide was mainly for wild boar and, to a lesser extent, fallow deer. Red deer are said to have only existed in small numbers in the forests near Berlin even then.The existing hunting grounds in Brandenburg were not suitable for this form of hunting. At the beginning of the 18th century, the "Soldier King" Frederick William I found an ideal area for par force hunting in the Parforceheide, as it has been known since that year, and had an area of around one hundred square kilometers prepared for par force hunting between 1725 and 1729. A central square was created around seven kilometers from the royal city palace, from which 16 dead-straight double tracks were cut into the forest in a star shape - with names such as Priestergestell, Breite Gestell, Turmgestell or Weg nach Kohlhasenbrück. This star still exists, but only eight radial paths or roads have been preserved. Today it belongs to the Potsdam district of Stern, which is named after it. In the past, it was also known as the Great Star - not to be confused with the Great Star of the same name on the Victory Column in Berlin.
Stern Hunting lodge
The writer Theodor Fontane hiked through the Parforceheide via the Stern to Güterfelde in 1869:However, the Stern hunting lodge, which the Prussian monarch had built in the forest in 1730, is more of a small country house than a castle. According to Fontane, the house was
A character that Fontane was anything but pleased with, as the sight of the panels with their hunting trophies in the dining room made the poet of the Mark lament a "deep and sudden decay of art", "beyond lay art, on this side barbarism". The royal bedroom reminded Fontane "of the storage facilities of an old ship's cabin" and seemed to him like an eerie cave.
We learn from Adelheid Schendel in the brochure Jagdschloss Stern published by the palace administration in 1987 that the little palace is a representative example of the "spartan, simple lifestyle" of the soldier king in contrast to his ostentatious predecessors. According to this, it is a simple Dutch house on Brandenburg soil. Whilst the hall is still of sophisticated design, "an important of the already rare examples of interior design from the period between Schlüter and Knobelsdorff", "the other rooms of the castle display the simple practicality of Dutch town houses". Adelheid Schendel also describes the bed more realistically than Fontane: "The bed in the bedroom, inserted into a wooden wall between staircase doors, is reminiscent of ship berths or bed stores in Frisian fishermen's and sailors' houses."
In the 1980s, the hunting lodge underwent a thorough renovation, but was closed again in 2005 for further renovation work. In addition to the main building, on which the Dutch Quarter in Potsdam was based, the old castellan's house, which was probably built in 1714, has been preserved. After par force hunting was discontinued under Frederick the Great and revived under Frederick Charles of Prussia, this form of hunting finally came to an end at the beginning of the 20th century.
Berlin property in Brandenburg
Berliner Luft - The permanent forest contract
Today, Stern and Jagdschloss are located directly next to the 115 freeway and are shielded from the high volume of the six-lane arterial road by visual and noise barriers. A former aisle leads through a tunnel under the highway to the east into the Parforceheide, and to the west are the new housing developments in the "Stern" district, which were built in the middle of the Parforceheide. The fact that large parts of the forest landscape have been preserved despite the immediate peripheral location to the Berlin and Potsdam metropolitan areas and despite massive, irreparable encroachments on the landscape conservation area with buildings such as the highway-like Nuthe expressway and the Potsdam freeway junction is due not least to a decision made by the Berlin city fathers in 1915 and 1920 when the Berlin metropolitan area was founded.The permanent forest contract, also known as the contract of the century, which the Greater Berlin municipal association concluded with the Royal Prussian State in 1915, stipulated that the Parforceheide must remain as a source of air for Berlin. For 50 million gold marks, the special-purpose association purchased large sections of forest, around 10,000 hectares in total, from the Prussian state in the Grunewald, Tegel, Grünau, Köpenick and Potsdam foresters and undertook not to build on or sell on the acquired forest areas, but to preserve them in the long term for the citizens as a local recreation area.
In addition to the ecological and recreational aspects, which were already important at the time, the background to the purchases was to secure the water supply for the rapidly growing population in the greater Berlin area and to curb rampant land speculation.
Restitution by the Treuhand in 1995
Parts of the Parforceheide belonged to the purchased area, which also formally became Berlin property in 1920 when the special-purpose association was transferred to the legal successor, the municipality of Greater Berlin. Legally, this part of the forest has the status of "private property of the Berlin Forests in the State of Brandenburg". After the final division of Germany and the founding of the GDR in 1949, West Berlin was cut off from the Parforceheide outside. East Berlin also lost ownership of the Parforceheide when, in 1952, all the forests outside Berlin were declared public property and came under the administration of the state of Brandenburg or the district of Potsdam.Following the reunification of the separate districts and the restitution of the surrounding forest areas by the Treuhandanstalt in 1995, part of the forest once again belongs to the city of Berlin and is managed by the Dreilinden forestry district. Of Berlin's total forest area of around 29,000 hectares, 16,000 hectares are now in Berlin and 13,000 hectares outside in Brandenburg. The Berlin part of the Parforceheide is mainly located in the area between Albrechts Teerofen, Kohlhasenbrück, Steinstücken and the Südwestkirchhof Stahnsdorf, which is also Berlin territory in Brandenburg. There are also scattered smaller Berlin areas, such as Güterfelder Haussee.
In addition to the Berlin part of the Parforceheide and the Brandenburg part, for which the Nudow forestry district is responsible, the third owner is the Federal Republic of Germany, which holds former GDR military areas in the forest region near Güterfelde as a federal forest.