The canopied ceremonial bed where King Frederick I of Prussia received private visitors is undergoing restoration and has returned to its original position in his state apartment at Berlin’s Schloss Charlottenburg.
Commissioned by the King in 1706, the bed is draped with yellow damask hangings with silver fringe. It was badly damaged in 1760 by plundering Russian and Austrian troops and then restored by Frederick the Great in 1763. It served as a symbol for the continuity of the Hohenzollern royal line as wedding ceremonies at Schloss Charlottenburg ended with the bride and groom being led to the bed chamber, undressed and put to bed.
Schloss Charlottenburg
The palace was partially destroyed by bombs in 1943 and the parts of the bed that remained intact were moved to storage in Potsdam in communist East Germany. They remained there for decades, separated from their West Berlin home by the Berlin Wall.
“Much of the bed remained intact, particularly the textiles,” says Susanne Evers, the textiles curator at the Foundation for Prussian Palaces and Gardens. “But the wooden back wall was completely missing. We deliberated for a long time over what to do. There are photographs, so a reconstruction is possible.”
The storage conditions immediately after the war were far from ideal, Evers says. The yellow damask baldachin hangings are bleached, dirty, fragile and, in some places, torn. The silver fringe, which consists of thousands of individual strands, represents a particular restoration challenge because the strands are corroded and knotted, and some are broken.
The Foundation for Prussian Palaces and Gardens aims to complete the restoration by 2019. The work is estimated to cost around €100,000 and is funded in part by a bequest to the Friends of Prussian Palaces and Gardens from the pharmacist and arts patron Gudrun Moegelin, who stipulated in her will that the money should be used for restoration purposes.