Qualla: Güstrow

Güstrow: Introduction

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthias Bethke, CC BY-SA 4.0. The angel hanging in Güstrow Cathedral is not the one Ernst Barlach hung there. It is not even the second. The bronze figure suspended horizontally above the floor, eyes closed, arms folded, face unmistakably that of Käthe Kollwitz, is a third casting - poured in 1952 from a mould that had spent the war hidden in a sculptor's studio in a village in the Wendland, because the original had been taken down as degenerate art in 1937 and melted for metal in 1941. Barlach called it a memorial to the dead of the First World War. It became, without anyone intending it, a memorial to what happened next.

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Image: Matthias Bethke | CC BY-SA 4.0

Güstrow: Three Castings

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Matthias Bethke, CC BY-SA 4.0. Barlach finished the Güstrower Ehrenmal in 1927 and it hung in the cathedral for ten years. On 23 August 1937 it was removed; in 1941 the bronze went into the Metallspende des deutschen Volkes, the national metal donation, and was melted down. What saved the work was a piece of q...

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Image: Matthias Bethke | CC BY-SA 4.0

Güstrow: The Sculptor Who Came Back a Pacifist

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ch. Pagenkopf, CC BY-SA 3.0. Barlach was born in Wedel in 1870 and settled in Güstrow in 1910, and he stayed for the rest of his life. He began the war as an enthusiast - his 1914 figure The Avenger is a body flung forward into violence - volunteered as an infantryman in 1915, and was discharged after three ...

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Image: Ch. Pagenkopf | CC BY-SA 3.0

Güstrow: Lizard Place

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Theodor Fischer, Public domain. The name comes from the Polabian Guščerov and means, roughly, lizard place. A Wendish castle stood on the palace site by 1219, and the town is credited to Heinrich Borwin II, a grandson of Henry the Lion; it appears in writing in 1228, and the cathedral was founded as a collegiat...

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Image: Theodor Fischer | Public domain

Güstrow: Ulrich's Palace

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Harke, Public domain. Fire kept remaking this town - 1503, 1508, 1512 - and when the old castle burned in the 1550s Duke Ulrich chose not to rebuild a fortress. From 1558 the Italian architect Franziskus Pahr raised the west entrance wing and the western half of the south wing, and the main structure ...

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Image: Harke | Public domain

Güstrow: Workhouse to Museum

Sat, 05 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Felix König, CC BY 3.0. Grandeur is not permanence. After 1800 the palace became in turn a military hospital, a workhouse for the poor after the agrarian reforms of 1817, and finally an old people's home, its splendid interiors rebuilt or destroyed to suit each new purpose. East Germany restored it comp...

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Image: Felix König | CC BY 3.0