Meseberg - oh schönes, erhabenes Zauberschloss am Huwenowsee!

Forever and a day, M had been telling me stories about Meseberg, glorious Meseberg. ´We have to go and visit´, he would say. ´I want to show you Meseberg and the Huwenowsee (Lake Huwenow). There isn´t anything nearly as beautiful and sublime anywhere north of Berlin´… or in the northern hemisphere, for that matter. Last September - eleven years after M´s last visit - we finally made it to the baroque manor or Herrenhaus in the Mark Brandenburg (65 kilometers north of Berlin) that Marcus ´Biene´ Fedeler, M´s friend, ´discovered´ in the winter of 1992, a little over two years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At the time, Meseberg was abandoned and in bad shape. But M was enchanted. He did several oil paintings of the crumbling Schloss, he wrote an article for a national newspaper (containing a gripping journalistic portrait of Major Ludwig von Kaphengst, Meseberg´s wild and mysterious owner in the period 1774-1800), and many a times he would walk on the wooded shores of Lake Huwenow, going for swims in the summer and taking in the gorgeous views all year round. I now have become a witness to Meseberg´s beauty and am beginning to understand what it was that spoke to M´s soul when he first laid eyes on this forlorn yet magnificent place. And forlorn it is no more: since 2007 M´s Zauberschloss serves as the official Guesthouse of the Government of the Federal Republic of Germany. Did someone get inspired by M´s tales, articles and paintings?