Dessau und das Dessau-Wörlitzer Gartenreich

Almost all the important voices of the time around 1800 gushed with praise when Anhalt-Dessau was mentioned. Prince Leopold Friedrich Franz had created a model state - a drastically reduced army, lowered taxes, bourgeois reform projects, exemplary landscaping, a court reduced to a minimum, the fight against poverty and for modernised trade and commerce. A magnificent English garden and exemplary architecture were created. In short, a gigantic programme of tolerance was brought to life. Dessau is on the UNESCO World Heritage List three times: with the Garden Kingdom, the Middle Elbe Biosphere Reserve, and the Bauhaus and its buildings. Starting with the most important sights of the city in Saxony-Anhalt, this guide with its abundance of up-to-date colour photos and historical plans leads you through the Dessau-Wörlitz Garden Realm and portrays a unique cultural landscape worth seeing. It gives a vivid and culturally and historically well-founded description of the effects of realised Enlightenment visions, taking us to the places worth seeing where they were put into practice. Here, pedagogy was revolutionised at Basedow's model school "Philanthropin". This is where school sports and walking tours were introduced. It was here that Erdmannsdorff created buildings of continental classicism, and it was here that the stylistic pluralist Franz also transferred neo-Gothic. Here, with the "Allgemeine Buchhandlung der Gelehrten" (General Bookshop of Scholars), the "Chalkographische Gesellschaft" (Chalcographic Society) and a changed appreciation of actors, art promotion was practised without comparison, as was a tolerant coexistence of nations, religions and social classes. To follow all these initiations, which still have an exemplary effect today, on site in the truest sense of the word is an extremely stimulating experience. This fact-packed guide is both an invitation and a helpful companion.