Leseprobe

34 Architecture and Uncompromising Quality On 13 April 1871, Adolph Salzburg, then just 32 years old, and the businessman and Siamese roy- al consul Adolphe Markwald, seventeen years his senior, submitted a joint proposal to the Royal Administrative Court in Dresden outlining plans for the construction of a villa. The plot of land on which it was to be built was located on a site that was undeveloped at the time, across from the Zo- ological Garden, designed in 1861 by the Prussian landscape architect Peter Joseph Lenné and inte- grated into the Baroque parklands of the Grosser Garten. Officially, the site belonged to the village of Strehlen, which was only incorporated into the city of Dresden some twenty years later, on 1 Jan- uary 1892. In 1871, the city of Dresden had approx- imately 177,000 inhabitants. The Franco-Prussian War was brought to a defin- itive end with the signing of the Treaty of Ver- sailles on 26 February 1871. Even while the war was still being waged, the German Empire had been founded when King Wilhelm I of Prussia was proclaimed German Kaiser on 18 January 1871 in the Palace of Versailles’ Hall of Mirrors. At that time, Adolph Salzburg was living with his wife Thekla, their two-year-old son Siegmund, and their son Ernst, who had been born just the pre- vious year, in the bel étage (or piano nobile ) of a Baroque residential building in a prime location in the centre of Dresden. It would seem that Adolph Salzburg felt he was standing at the dawn of a new era. The reasons for this were in all likelihood manifold: his profes- sional success, the sense of national elation that gripped the newly unified country after the Fran- co-PrussianWar, his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur in Dresden and the process of starting a new family with her. Also of impor- tance for him now in this regard may have been the recent emancipation in Germany of the Jews, who now enjoyed the same rights as non-Jewish citizens. Even though the emancipation of the Jew- ish population of Saxony officially occurred in 1849, it only entered the Saxon Constitution in 1868 and passed into law in the North German Confederation in 1869. Adolph Salzburg was doubtlessly eager to fully embrace his role both in civil society and in his religious community—as a businessman, the head of his family, a member of the committee of the Israelite Religious Commu- nity in Dresden, and finally, as one of the three elders of the ‘Israelite’ community of Dresden. In the 1931/32 Jewish Yearbook for Saxony , reflecting upon his community leadership, Adolph Salzburg was described as ‘extremely concerned with en- suring the well-being of the community’, and it was noted that he had paid particular attention to charitable institutions and taxes.1 Within a few years, Adolph Salzburg had estab- lished himself so successfully in Dresden that he began to make plans to build his own villa togeth- er with the businessman Adolphe Markwald, as a clear signal of his desire to settle there permanent- ly. Although Adolph Salzburg had kept his private and professional life separate since his marriage to Thekla Mendel in 1867, with the offices of the firm Salzburg & Eisenreich and the family apart- ment located some 500 metres apart in different buildings in Dresden’s Altstadt, that distance was now to be extended even farther. The family was to move out of the built-up city centre with its nar- row, Baroque warren of alleys, and into the leafy expanses on the fringes of the city. The location chosen for this new ‘villa suburbana’ was thus close enough to the city that Adolph Salzburg could still reach his workplace, just two kilometres away, in hardly any time at all—by horse-drawn carriage, and, from 1882, also by horse-drawn tram, or by foot. The route from the planned future residence on the southwest corner of the park grounds of the Grosser Garten to the Altstadt ran along the public green corridor known as the Bürgerwiese, where, at its southern edge, the A Project to Build a Villa