Theodor's father's house
Episode 4 of the journey through the cultural heritage sites
In his book “My Childhood Years”, Theodor Fontane describes the last visit to his father Louis Henri. In the summer of 1867, the two of them went for a walk on the slope above the house, ate veal breast together, joked and talked about this and that. When Theodor returned to Schiffmühle in October of the same year, his father was already buried in Neutornow.
"At that time he had already lived for ten or twelve years near Freienwalde, in a boatmen's colony on the old Oder, which was called 'Schiffmühle' and was an appendage of the village of Neu-Tornow. There were isolated houses, at great distances from each other, along the river, which slowly crept past and was overgrown with yellow and white mummels, while immediately behind the row of houses there were fairly high sand hills, high up with a spruce forest. My father's house stood exactly where a magnificent old wooden bridge continued the causeway leading from Freienwalde to the Neu-Tornow side of the river. To this day I do not know what he used to buy it, because when he bought it he was no longer a man who was able to buy houses, even if the house he bought was only a modest little house." A good one and a half kilometers from Louis Henri's final resting place at the foot of the Neutornowewr church, we reach the pharmacist's former home in Schiffmühle. The Fontane House is considered to be one of the few remaining authentic places where the Fontanes lived. Louis Henri lived in the small half-timbered house, built around 1800, with his housekeeper Louise Papke until his death. Although Theodor Fontane described her as simple-minded, his father preferred her to his wife in the last years of her life.
On the occasion of Theodor Fontane's 200th birthday, the house was reopened in 2019 with a new permanent exhibition. The interior of the house has been redesigned and now shows a contemporary presentation of the living conditions of the writer's father and his housekeeper. In the Fontane room we find information on the relationship between father and son, on Louis Henri's years in Schiffmühle as well as on Theodor's visits and their literary processing. The second main room, the Schiffmühle room, is dedicated to the island of Neuenhagen, the districts of Schiffmühle, Neutornow and Gabow and the functioning of ship mills.
There used to be one in the immediate vicinity of the house in the Alte Oder. We can see a wooden model in the house and children can play with a small ship mill on the water playground in the garden. We can see exhibits from his time as a pharmacist in the Louis Henri chamber. Another room is dedicated to the housekeeper Louise Papke. It offers insights into rural housekeeping in the 19th century. Just as father and son once did, we can climb up the slope behind the house and rest in the shade of "Poseidon's spruce grove". Up there, to his father's delight, Theodor quoted the same lines from Schiller's "The Cranes of Ibycus": "Acrocorinth already beckons the wanderer on the high mountain ridge, and he enters Poseidon's spruce grove with a pious shudder." If you want to follow in Fontane's footsteps in Neutornow, Schiffmühle and Bad Freienwalde, the little booklet "Walking with Theo F." is recommended. It contains descriptions by the poet from his visits to the region. It is available at the Fontane House and at the Bad Freienwalde Tourist Information Center.
For more information about the Oderbruch Museum and the cultural heritage in the Oderbruch, please see here.