Altenburg Things to Do

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Photos:
1. The female version
2. One of the male versions
3. The other male version

When I was in Altenburg in 2009 the whole town was full of posters advertising theater subscriptions for the combined theaters of Altenburg and Gera.

The posters came in pairs. On one side of the cylindrical advertising column (known in Germany as a Litfaßsäule) there is a back view of a young woman wearing jeans and nothing else, with two slips of paper marked "ABO Season 2009/2010" protruding from her back pocket.

On the other side of the column is one of the male versions, either a back view of a guy wearing jeans and an T-shirt (second photo) or the same guy from the front with the word ABO tattooed on his bicep (third photo).

This is all part of a valiant (or should I say desperate?) campaign to get more young people into the theaters. I would have been very interested in hearing some reactions to this campaign from people in the target group, adults in their twenties and thirties, but unfortunately the streets of Altenburg were deserted and there was no one to talk to.

(It turns out there are two more female versions that I didn't see on the streets. In one she is wearing a double-stranded pearl necklace with an ABO slip pinned onto it, and in the other she is again just wearing jeans and has the word ABO tattooed on her bare back.)

Flatrate is one of those English words that has very quickly become a part of the German language, so much so that most Germans couldn't spontaneously tell you any other word for it. (There is a German word Pauschalangebot which means more or less the same thing, but it doesn't sound nearly as suave.)

This poster on the Altenburg Theater says:


Be a flatrater!
THE FLATRATE
FOR THE FINANCIAL CRISIS
88.88 Euros
for about 200 performances per year
= 44 cents per performance
Save 96%
Absolute freedom of choice!
For that spontaneous theater-urge!
Great theater right close by!
Small venues in Altenburg and Gera!
If I lived in Altenburg or Gera I would surely get one of these, even though like most people I wouldn't really attend two hundred performances a year. (I need a few evenings for teaching, after all, and for writing VirtualTourist tips.)

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Photos:
1. Rathaus (City Hall)
2. Balcony of the City Hall
3. Evening at the Market Square

The Renaissance-style City Hall was built on the Market Square from 1561 to 1564, and is still used by the city administration.

The restaurant "Ratskeller" is located in the City Hall, with additional outdoor seating on the Market Square when the weather permits.

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Photos:
1. Seckendorffsches Palais
2. Auf dem Brühl

This baroque building was erected from 1721 to 1725 on behalf of the Field Marshall Friedrich Heinrich von Seckendorff (1673 - 1763).

Its most famous resident was the publisher F.A. Brockhaus, who lived here from 1810 - 1817. (Today there is still a Brockhaus publishing company, and the best-known German encyclopedia is known as The Brockhaus.)

My second photo shows the square "Auf dem Brühl" with the Seckendorffsches Palais at the corner.

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Photos:
1. Lindenau Museum
2. Plaster cast of an antique statue in Hotel Astor
3. Poster about the Lindenau Museum

The Lindenau Museum was named after the statesman, scholar and art collector Bernhard August von Lindenau (1779 - 1854), who donated his large private art collection and library to the museum shortly before his death.

The museum includes plaster casts of statues from Antiquity and the Renaissance -- but the one in my second photo was on display in the Hotel Astor, which is where I took the picture.

The museum is open Tuesdays through Fridays from 12:00 to 18:00, Saturdays, Sundays and holidays from 10:00 to 18:00. Closed Mondays. Admission is 4 Euros, or only 2 Euros if you are entitled to a reduction.

The first manufacturer of playing cards began production in Altenburg in the year 1509. Cards have been produced here ever since by a succession of workshops and companies. And, as I have already mentioned, the card game "Skat" was invented in Altenburg around 1810, so Altenburg likes to advertise itself as the "Skatstadt" or Skat City.

Today playing cards are manufactured here under the brand name ASS Altenburger, which claims to be the market leader in Germany. In 2002 the Altenburg playing card factory was acquired by the international playing card company Carta Mundi, which is based in Turnhout, Belgium.

Up in Altenburg palace there is a museum dealing with all this. Unfortunately I have never arrived early enough to go in, but the opening hours are Tuesday-Sunday from 9:30 to 17:00, last admission at 16:30.

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Photos:
1. The empty Tea House
2. Sign on the Tea House

At the highest point in the Palace Gardens there is a "Tea House", now empty and boarded up, which was built from 1706 to 1712 on orders of Duke Friedrich II. of Sachsen-Gotha-Altenburg.

At the same time, the old castle was being expanded into an imposing palace and the hilltop garden was being transformed into classical French-style park modeled on the one in Versailles. The purpose of all this was to provide the Duke with a splendid Second Residence (the first was in Gotha) befitting his rank and function as an Absolute Ruler by the Grace of God.

The Tea House was used for nearly three centuries for leisure time activities and festivities, at first only by the Dukes and their courtiers, but later as an elegant café which was open to the general public. During the forty years of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) the Tea House was often used for popular concerts and festivities, and the adjoining Orangerie was the home of the "Club of the People's Solidarity", which was a meeting place particularly for older people.

Since German reunification in the 1990s the Tea House complex has been standing empty and unused, but there is now a society with 159 members which was established in 2004 for the purpose of restoring and preserving and Tea House and Orangerie.

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Photos:
1. Schlosspark = Palace Park
2. Friedrich Schiller monument

Behind the palace, the rest of the hilltop is taken up by the attractive Palace Park (Schlosspark), where there is also a small monument to the dramatist and historian Friedrich Schiller (1759-1805).

Schiller never set foot in Altenburg, as far as I know, but he spent much of his adult life in the nearby cities of Leipzig, Jena and Weimar. The university in Jena is now named after him.

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Photos:
1. Poster advertising the festival
2. Bleachers set up in the palace courtyard

When I visited Altenburg in 2009 they were just taking down the bleachers that had been set up in the palace courtyard for an open-air spectacle depicting one of the most exciting historical events -- well, probably the only exciting historical event -- that ever occurred in Altenburg, namely the Abduction of the Princes in the year 1455.

It happened right here in this palace, which at the time was still a castle, when a knight named Kunz von Kauffungen stormed in with two other knights and thirty soldiers on the night of July 7-8, 1455, and abducted two Sachsen princes, Ernst and Albrecht, who were 14 and 12 years old at the time. Albrecht, the younger prince, succeeded in freeing himself the next day and went for help. (After that he could do no wrong; his reputation was made.)

Kunz von Kauffungen was arrested, tried, convicted and beheaded within six days of the abduction.

This historical event serves as the basis for a theatrical spectacle that is held every summer in the palace courtyard, with over four hundred people on or behind the stage. In 2009 they had fifteen performances with a total of 12,500 spectators.

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Photos:
1. The Palace Church in Altenburg
2. Construction site exhibition in Leipzig
3. Text about Altenburg

In September 1739 the great composer Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) came to Altenburg to try out the new organ that had just been built in the Palace Church by Gottfried Heinrich Trost.

By coincidence I found out more about this when I went to Leipzig, where they had a temporary "construction site exhibition" about Bach's travels pasted on construction site fences in various parts of the city center.

My second photo shows the Trost organ in the Palace Church in Altenburg, as displayed on a fence in Leipzig. My third photo shows the accompanying text, which says that Bach probably suggested adding a very deep register to the organ. Later one of Bach's pupils, Johann Ludwig Krebs, became the organist at the Palace Church.