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The Week in Germany: Culture November 16, 2006 A Bevy of Baroque Dolls and Bizarre Sights
It was a doll's world for Countess Auguste Dorothea von Schwarzenberg-Arnstadt (1666-1751). A childless widow, she replicated the Baroque world around her into miniature proportions. From 1704 to 1751 she carefully crafted her composition "Mon Plaisir" (My Pleasure), an entire world consisting of 82 dollhouses and more than 400 dolls. "Everything which could be imagined by a pleasure palace residing countess is recreated here: work in the bakery, traveling jugglers, praying nuns, and chatting housewives. Even the painful Stations of the Cross, leading up to Jesus' crucifixion, are recounted here using porcelain dolls," a link on "Overlooked Sights" at the current front page of Das Deutschland Portal recounts in an excerpt from a book about points - and objects - of interest off the beaten track in Germany. "The numerous scenes consisting of ladies pleasantly drinking their coffee together point towards the immense amount of free time which the Countess must have had at her disposal, unlike many others of her time," it adds.
So would the handcrafted dolls, of course, which she lovingly created right down to the last detail. Soon her hobby proved so expensive, however, that she was forced to take up loans - mostly from the nearby monastery. Too broke to pay back her loans, she eventually moved into the monastery, living the life of a nun. "Though her dolls' houses represent only the more privileged perspective of Baroque life, the collection is still unique in the world," the website adds. Serendipity supernova To find out more about the dolls' houses, as well as other rare oddities and strange sights to see while traveling through Germany, check out "Übersehene Sehenswürdigkeiten. Deutsche Orte. / Overlooked Sights. German Places." by Michaela Vieser and Reto Wettach. Published in 2004, it highlights 67 unique sites the two authors discovered while tooling through Germany for six months in a VW bus. In the process, they dined at local inns, visited with local architects and asked local people "does anything exist here that only you know about?" Richly illustrated, this dual language "roadbook" holds more
than a few surprises in store for Germans and non-Germans alike.
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