The Governor’s House @museum.de

The Stifthauptmannshaus was one of the few buildings in the abbey grounds that served secular needs. For centuries, this Governor’s House served as accommodation for the abbey’s – male – administrators and later, the tenants of the Heiligengrabe estate.

What’s believed to have been the original building on this site was destroyed during the Thirty Years’ War. It went up in flames during the Battle of Wittstock in October 1636.

More than three decades passed before the abbey erected a new residential building on this site in 1670. The occupant was the then abbey governor, Hans Erdmann von Bertikow.

In 1838, Abbess Henriette von Steinwehr had the present neo-classical building erected on the foundations of that baroque house. The new building was specifically designated as the “Residence of the Collegiate Foundation’s Governor at Sankt Heiligengrabe”.

By this time, the collegiate foundation’s school had been established over in the abbey. But with the number of girls increasing, the school gradually ran out of space. So in the summer of 1926, it transferred to the Governor’s House, where several large classrooms, an art room and a physics room were available.

After the school was closed down at the end of the Second World War, Heiligengrabe’s village school was housed here. Then the deaconesses of the Friedenshort charity took over the house and renamed it "Haus Gottessegen" – Divine Blessings House. This was where they set up the training college for child welfare social work.

Shortly after the turn of the millennium, Heiligengrabe’s museum tradition was revived in this building. It hosted several exhibitions on the history of the abbey before the museum moved to its present location in the east wing. Since 2011, the Governor’s House has again been home to a school: the Gemeinschaftsschule im Kloster Stift.