Palais Hessen-Rotenburg

The elegant Palais Hessen-Rotenburg once stood at the south-eastern corner where the Obere Königsstraße meets the Königsplatz in Kassel. Designed by Christoph Philipp Diede between 1767 and 1769 for Landgrave Konstantin, the three-storey building carried a rococo façade whose ornamental details were praised locally as ‘Parisian style’. A narrow five-bay wing on the Königsplatz side had originally been a separate house, joined to the main block only by a slender passage. The palace passed from its last landgrave, Victor Amadeus, to Jérôme Bonaparte after the French occupation of 1806, settling a debt of 35,000 talers. After Kurhessen’s restoration in 1813 it became a state office, then housed the overall ministry from the 1830s until Prussia took over in 1866. For decades it served as a municipal cash office before the Hessian Bank Association bought the site in 1910 and demolished the building the following year. Today the former palace site is occupied by the Commerzbank-Haus, the oldest structure on Königsplatz. Its footprint can still be traced in surviving plans, and a painted view from about 1860 shows the palace’s symmetrical front on the corner. The neighbouring Palais Reichenbach, built in 1772, once linked the Hessen-Rotenburg residence to the White Palace on Friedrichsplatz, completing a grand axis of aristocratic town houses.