History of the possession of the island Mainau: After the abolition of the Kommende of the Teutonic Order on the island Mainau in 1805, the Kommenden possession first fell to the Baden state; today the Kommenden archive in the General State Archives consists mainly of the holdings 5 (documents Mainau) and 93 (files Mainau). After a rapid change of ownership - 1827 from Baden to Prince Nikolaus von Esterhazy, 1827 from his son Nikolaus Freiherr von Mainau to Katharina Gräfin Langenstein - Grand Duke Friedrich I of Baden bought the island from Langenstein¿schem in 1853 with funds from the private box and made the Teutonic Order palace a secondary residence. With advancing age, the stays of the Grand Duke and his wife Luise became increasingly frequent; the park owes its design largely to Frederick's initiative. In 1907 the Grand Duke of Mainau died. After her death in 1923, the widow's residence of the Grand Duchess was transferred to her son Frederick II, and from him to his sister Victoria, Queen of Sweden. In 1930, their grandson Lennart, now Count Bernadotte, took possession of the Mainau. History and notes on tradition: The Schlossarchiv, which was handed over to the General State Archives in 1997 as a deposit of Blumeninsel Mainau GmbH, depicts the history of possession and the court holdings of the Grand Ducal couple rather fragmentarily. Only the planned stock has survived as a closed overdelivery complex. After the death of Frederick I, Grand Duchess Luise decided that neither the castle nor the park could be altered in any way, so the plans provide a good overview of the conversion of the old Kommende buildings and the layout of the park from the Grand Ducal period to the Bernadotte era. Almost all the plans came from the architects of the Grand Ducal Court Building Office (Dyckerhoff, Hemberger, Amersbach), a few from the Court Garden Centre, from commissioned companies and from the Constance District Building Inspectorate. Outside the island, only the St. Katharina estate near Litzelstetten and a park bench near Constance are documented. The plans were recorded in detail by Ms. Kreyenberg before they were handed over to the General State Archives; her index continues to serve as a finding aid for the plan inventory, while the file part of the archive consists only of fragments. There are internal and external reasons for this. The changing courtly style between Karlsruhe, Baden-Baden, Badenweiler and Mainau may have brought with it a transport of written documents, which in all residences allowed half site-related, half accidentally left behind layers of files to emerge. In many respects, the Mainau holdings correspond almost perfectly to the files that have been kept in the General State Archives since 1995 from the tradition in the New Palace in Baden-Baden: Here and there the boundaries between the files of the court authorities, the daily ceremony and the personal, princely estate can hardly be drawn exactly, here and there correspondence and telegram series, diaries and notebooks, private entries and greeting addresses, documents of the wide-ranging charity work of Grand Duchess Luise and much more can be found. (cf. GLA 69 Baden, Collection 1995 A, B, D, F I, FII, G , K). In a nutshell, the Mainau collection - insofar as it does not directly refer to the Mainau court - microscopically depicts the Baden-Baden manor; both collections relate primarily to Grand Duchess Luise, and only in the second to her husband and children. As in Baden-Baden, the Mainau collection also includes a large group of photographs documenting, among other things, the close ties to relatives of the imperial family. Unlike in Baden-Baden, however, the fragmentary character of the Mainau archive also seems to be due to unintentional interventions. In the summer of 1945, the castle served as a military hospital for former concentration camp prisoners; during this time, they are said to have burned the archives, the bookkeeping and the more recent documentation of the island and to have taken documents with them when they were released in September (Alexander and Johanna Dées de Sterio, Die Mainau, Stuttgart / Zürich 1977 p.93). It will no longer be possible to reconstruct exactly what kind of archive this was; in any case, it must have been the written records of the goods administration which were taken over by the successors of the Teutonic Order and continued through the 19th century. Only fractions of files from this area have actually survived in today's inventory. Editor's report: Because of the difficult history of tradition, the order of the remaining holdings was not easy either. A separation according to personnel and court office conveniences would have made little sense and would also have been hardly possible in view of fragments that could hardly be allocated. Thus special occasions (such as birthdays and anniversaries) and special source genres (such as notebooks or telegrams) now form the highest order criteria, then the reference to persons or events and finally, within a unit of records, the chronological order; however, most of these units of records had to be formed first, since at the time the inventory was taken over any order of parts was not recognizable; as a rule they were loose, connected sheets.In August and September 1998, in the context of the training for the Higher Archive Service, the holdings were arranged by Claudia Maria Neesen and Christof Strauß under the guidance of the undersigned and recorded and indexed with the help of the MIDOSA programme package of the Landesarchivdirektion Baden-Württemberg. Karlsruhe, June 1999Konrad Krimm Conversion: The finding aid was converted in 2015. The final editing was carried out by Sara Diedrich in April 2016. The plans and building drawings were added under the inventory designation 69 Baden, Mainau K to the inventory 69 Baden, Mainau and listed under the signatures 69 Baden, Mainau K 1 to 69 Baden, Mainau K 209.
