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Home Towns - Potsdam, Germany Pleasure Garden Neptune's Triuphant Return

This site is part of our Potsdam, Germany site. Click the left turn sign to get back to the Potsdam start site. This Garden was once part of Potsdam's City Palace. Turn right to see the Palace's past, present and future.

This garden looks back at almost 300 years of history, during which it was built, rebuilt, demolished, buried, forgotten, accidentally unearthed and finally restored. Originally, the area was a part of Potsdam’s City Castle. In the early 18th century, the basin was connected to the river and served as a dock for the yacht of King Frederick I. Later, King Frederick II turned the dock into a basin and ordered architect Johann August Nahl to design a glorious fountain. In 1749, the sculpture group The Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite Stilling the Waves or Neptune’s Triumph for short, was finished with gold-plated sand stone sculptures.

Throughout the next 200 years, the sculptures were repaired and replaced many times but the theme remained intact as the two pictures above, taken in 1928, indicate. But that was not going to last, as can be seen in the picture below.

The fountain and the garden both suffered major damage during the bombings and battles of World War II and remained a ruin until the early 1950s. Between 1949 and 1952, a soccer stadium was built on parts of the garden, using rubble from the city Palace's ruin to build the stadium wall. The rest of the garden was demolished between 1966 and 1969 to make room for a hotel. East Germany had a troubled relationship with Potsdam's history. On one hand, it embraced the legacy of Frederick the Great and the Age of Enlightenment, on the other hand, it didn't want to have anything to do with Prussian militarism, which was one of the root causes of both World Wars. In 1959, East German authorities decided to send a strong signal that the country had completely broken with its aggressive past and ordered the complete demolition of the castle’s remains. In the following decades, Potsdam’s royal past almost slipped into oblivion and most people of the post war generation living in Potsdam, including us, never really knew about the Pleasure Garden and its fountain. In 2001, in preparation of the Federal Horticulture Show, the stadium was demolished in an effort to restore the castle's original pleasure garden. To the surprise of many, a backhoe brought up fragments of statues buried in the ground for 50 years. Careful excavation unearthed the foundation of the basin, one complete statue and pieces of two others. When word got around about the find, some more fragments, hidden by private collectors, were returned.

What are all those weird metal pipes for?

The first two restored sculptures

Metal structure, outlining the missing pieces

Initiated by Potsdam’s Rotary Club, efforts have been made to restore the complete fountain. So far, donations financed the restoring of a second figure in the group. Two modern artists, Rainer Fürstenberg and Raiko Epperlein, designed a metal structure, outlining the shapes of the original group and, hopefully, showing the progress of the restoration.

Mist Fountain

The artists included a fundraiser in their creation: for the price of one Euro, one can start the coin-operated mist fountain and for five minutes one can travel back in time and get an idea of what the place must have looked like 250 years ago.

XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXRingerkolonnade Another restored piece of the original assembly is the Wrestler's Colonnade, named for the sculptures of Greco-Roman wrestlers that once adorned this connection between the Royal Stables and the Palace. The picture to the right was taken in 1932, the picture to the left shows the degree of destruction after the war. The Colonnade has been moved from its original place to the banks of the river.

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