The Castles of the Rhine: Recreating the Middle Ages in Modern Germany

Above Bad Godesberg, Godesburg, about 1840: The ruin of Godesburg, near Bonn (presented here by J.L. Goetz), was the first to greet early nineteenth-century tourists bound up the Rhine. Drachenfels (middle right) loomed further in the distance. By this date, improvements in engraving and publishing methods had familiarized non-traveling Europeans, too, with the Rhine ruins. The remarkable castle-rebuilding movement was already underway. (Compare this view with Fig. 41.) Courtesy of Verlag Th. Schäfer, Hannover.

The Castles of the Rhine

Recreating the Middle Ages in Modern Germany

Robert R. Taylor

This book has been published with the help of a grant in aid of publication

from the Canada Council.

We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada

through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our

publishing activities.

Copyright © 1998

WILFRID LAURIER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5

Cover design: Leslie Macredie

Cover illustration: Above Kapellen near Koblenz,

Burg Stolzenfels about 1630

(courtesy of Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Rheinland-Pfalz)

Printed in Canada

All rights reserved. No part of this work covered by the copyrights

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For

Robert John Taylor

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

PART ONE

FOUNDATIONS

1. Political and Economic Power on the Middle Rhine

2. Romanticism and Nationalism on the Middle Rhine

3. Monuments and Documents on the Middle Rhine

PART TWO

VINDICATING THE OLD REGIME

4. The Holy Alliance in Stone

5. Hohenzollern Dreams

6. King of the Rhineland

7. The Hohenzollerns at the Hunt

8. The Cartridge Prince and His Consort

PART THREE

BUTTRESSING THE STATUS QUO

9. A Justification of Aristocratic Privilege

10. The Fulfilment of Bourgeois Ambition

PART FOUR

DEFENDING THE REICH

11. Symbols of German Unity

12. Monument to German Glory

PART FIVE

SECURING THE PAST FOR THE FUTURE

13. To Entertain, Enlighten, and Exploit the Traveller

14. To Study the German Past

15. To Teach the Young and the Ignorant

PART SIX

CONCLUSION

16. Can Stones Speak?

APPENDICES

1. Glossary of Architectural Terms Used

2. Medieval Fantasies

3. Hohenzollern Castle Projects Outside the Rhineland

Notes

Select Bibliography

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Above Bad Godesberg, Godesburg, about 1840 frontispiece

1. Braubach and vicinity about 1605

2. The Rhineland in 1700

3. The Rhineland occupied by France 1813

4. Prussia’s Rhine province

5. Germany 1871-1918

6. The Hohenzollerns in the nineteenth century

7. Chronological tables

8. Castles of the Middle Rhine (northern section)

9. Castles of the Middle Rhine (southern section)

10. Burg Ehrenbreitstein in 1636

11. From Koblenz, Burg Ehrenbreitstein in 1991

12. Koblenz, Fort Alexander in 1980

13. Near Trechtingshausen, Voigtsburg (later Burg Rheinstein) about 1636

14. Voigtsburg rebuilt as Burg Rheinstein about 1840

15. Above Kapellen near Koblenz, Burg Stolzenfels about 1630

16. Schloss Stolzenfels about 1840

17. At Stolzenfels in 1980

18. Near Niederheimbach, Burg Sooneck about 1840

19. Burg Sooneck in 1980

20. Near Assmannshausen, Burg Ehrenfels in 1980

21. Above Oberlahnstein, Burg Lahneck in 1675

22. Burg Lahneck in 1980

23. Schloss Sayn and vicinity about 1850

24. At Bad Hönningen, Schloss Arenfels in 1991

25. Above Trechtingshausen, Burg Reichenstein in 1980

26. Near Niederbreisig, Schloss Rheineck about 1840

27. Above Niederheimbach, Heimburg in 1980

28. At Schönburg in 1980

29. At Rüdesheim, Boosenburg in 1991

30. Burg Gutenfels in 1980

31. Above Königswinter, Schloss Drachenburg about 1890

32. At Drachenburg in 1991

33. At Drachenburg in 1980

34. Roland’s Arch in 1840

35. Above Rhens, the Royal Throne in 1991

36. Braubach and Marksburg about 1630

37. From Braubach, Marksburg in 1980

38. Cover of the Cologne-Düsseldorf Steamship Schedule, 1897

39. Drachenfels in the 1990s

40. Burg Rheinfels in 1991

41. Godesburg, about 1896

42. Above St. Goarshausen, Burg Katzenelnbogen about 1630

43. Burg Katz in 1980

44. Oberlahnstein, Martinsburg in 1980

45. From above Kaub, the Pfalz in 1980

46. Above Nassau, Burg Nassau about 1990

47. Bacharach and Burg Stahleck about 1672

48. Burg Stahleck in 1980

49. Eltville, castle of the archbishop of Mainz in 1991

50. Burg Klopp in l991

51. Above St. Goar, Burg Rheinfels in 1980

52. Koblenz, the Old Castle (Alte Burg) in 1991

53. Above Oberlahnstein, Burg Lahneck in 1980

54. The German States, France, and Luxemburg in 1815

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their friendly assistance I am indebted to Dr. Walter Avenarius and the staff of the library and archives of the German Castle Association (Deutsche Burgenvereinigung e. V. für Burgenkunde und Denkmalpflege) at Marksburg, Braubach am Rhein. In addition, the employees of the city archive in the Old Castle (Alte Burg), Koblenz, and of the local history collection of the public library in the Dreikönigen-Haus, also at Koblenz, were very helpful on my several research visits. Elsewhere, I have been ably advised by the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library, the New-York Historical Society, the Institution of Engineers of Ireland, the Newcomen Society, Mrs. Gabriele Berneck of London, U.K., Prince Alexander zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Sayn of Bendorf-Sayn, Baron Rudolf von Preuschen of Burg Lahneck, the Bundesvermögensamt of Koblenz, the Landesamt für Denkmalpflege of Rheinland-Pfalz (Mainz), and the Rheinischer Verein für Denkmalpflege und Landschaftsschutz (Cologne). The University Library of Hannover and the Prussian State Library of Berlin each offered a special service. Particularly helpful were Annie Relic, Edie Williams, the late Sylvia Osterbind, and the Interlibrary Loan staff in the Reference Library at Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada funded my research in Germany while the Canada Council supported publication of the book. Brock University provided funds for map-making and illustrations, and course relief time for writing the manuscript. Dr. Roberta M. Styran generously provided invaluable editorial criticism when the work was in the manuscript stage.

Every effort has been made to trace the ownership of all copyright material reprinted in the text. The author and publisher regret any errors, and will be pleased to make necessary corrections in subsequent editions.

I am also indebted to Sandra Woolfrey and her staff at Wilfrid Laurier University Press for their various efforts in seeing the work through to publication. Naturally, any errors or misconceptions in the book are my own responsibility.

January 1998                                                                                                                        R.R.T.

PREFACE

The castles, looking more like the sets for a production of Tannhäuser than any stage designer would dare to provide, were perched high on scraps of crag that would have given the very eagles vertigo.¹

Bernard Levin’s enthusiastic recollections of his first encounter with the castles of the Middle Rhine are similar to my own. Television, cinema, and advertising campaigns had prepared me (and many of my North American contemporaries) to be enraptured by the romantic sight of medieval castles dominating the vineyard-covered cliffs above the great river. The knowledge that most of these legendary castles were nineteenth- and early twentieth-century reconstructions, some less than forty years old, produced surprise, even moral outrage. We might well be stirred by the sudden prospect of ruins, wrote Kenneth Clark, but once we knew them to be artificial our pleasure would evaporate.² And so the Rhine castles, rebuilt ruins, began to seem theatrical in the worst sense of the word.

As a young scholar, therefore, I rejected the Rhine castles as unworthy of study for historical or contemporary purposes. Later in my career, however, when I began to examine the phenomenon of architecture as propaganda, I returned to the rebuilt castles. I had developed this theme in two books, The Word in Stone: The Role of Architecture in the National Socialist Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974), and Hohenzollern Berlin: Construction and Reconstruction (Port Credit, ON: P.D. Meany Publishers, 1985). In both these studies I was concerned with the political uses of architecture. The propaganda machine of the National Socialist government and its supporters proclaimed that certain building styles were quintessentially German and others were to be avoided because they were un-German, even oriental or Bolshevik. The fascists claimed to believe that buildings were not only powerful symbols of the German government and Germany itself but also expressions of the very soul of the Volk [the German people].³ The Nazis also practised a traditional and universal strategy of awe⁴ which was prefigured in Germany by Prussia, whose Hohenzollern rulers sought, through imposing palaces and churches, to communicate a sense of their omnipotence. Although they never claimed that their architecture reflected the eternal values of the German people, their purpose was just as political as Hitler’s.

Studying Hohenzollern Berlin, I learned of King Frederick William IV’s fascination with the Rhine and its castles and was especially interested in his reconstruction of the ruined Burg Stolzenfels. I also read about Emperor William II’s interest in Marksburg, which ultimately became the most famous of the Rhine castles. Soon I began to consider these buildings as a reflection of the political will of the Hohenzollern monarchs. This approach, however, proved inadequate as an explanation of the German castle-mania on the Rhine in the nineteenth century.

The phenomenon of building imitation castles began to seem significant for other reasons. At the time I wrote on Nazi architecture it was fashionable to decry the imitation styles of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Since the 1970s, however, both the general public and scholars have developed a greater appreciation of Victorian or Wilhelminian styles and have become more critical of the excesses of modern architecture. The emergence of postmodernism, in fact, has led to both a return to traditional styles and a conservation of structures as diverse as Queen Anne villas and early railway stations in both Europe and North America. Thus the motives of the castle-rebuilders now seem less bizarre, and some of their reconstructions and efforts at architectural conservation appear as pioneering landmarks of a heritage movement which has now swept the Western world. Today, I would rewrite parts of the The Word in Stone. Justifiable as it may be to condemn the Nazis’ political motives, it has begun to seem less valid to reject the motives of certain Germans who supported Adolf Hitler in his denunciation of the International Style.

Now it is possible both to sympathize with German interest in historic architecture and to understand this interest as part of a wider phenomenon which I have called recreating the middle ages. Many nineteenth-century Germans idealized medieval social and political attitudes, of which castles were symbols. In rebuilding ruined castles, they hoped to revive dying values. But there was more. Some Germans, motivated similarly, built new castle-like mansions where no medieval structure ever stood. Finally (and more constructively), historians and archeologists began to preserve the remains of medieval castles for scholarly study. Thus the reconstructed Rhenish castles can be considered reflections of a political will. They—and the pseudo-castles—also document nineteenth-century taste. As well, the reconstructed or preserved castle ruins are examples of early architectural conservation. Whatever shape the castle-mania on the Rhine took, these structures are documents of the turbulent history of nineteenth-century Germany—that very turbulence being the root of a desire to restore, preserve, conserve or study the past and its relics.

Other Studies of the Rhenish Castles

This book is by no means the first study of medieval European fortresses. Many books have been written for armchair tourists and castle buffs, the earliest of which emerged in the first decades of the nineteenth century. The phenomenon has not ceased and actually may have intensified during the past quarter-century, when a plethora of titles has appeared on European castles.⁵ There are also many popular books on the charms of the Rhine, its landscapes and its wines.

Germans have long been concerned with the history and lore of the Rhine castles. Popular books on the Magic of the Middle Rhine, in particular, are legion. Magnus Backes, Werner Bornheim gen. Schilling, Heinz Biehn, Walter Hotz, and others whose names appear frequently in the following pages have been concerned to describe and chronicle the castles of certain areas and times. Recently, moreover, German historians have begun to study the phenomenon of nineteenth-century reconstructions. There are, however, no books in English or German on the overall significance of the reconstruction, restoration or preservation of the Rhenish castles in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Nevertheless I have found the approaches taken by my German counterparts useful and should acknowledge them here. Particularly interesting is the work of the late Werner Bornheim gen. Schilling,⁶ who demonstrates how interest in medieval ruins was stimulated around 1800 by romantic painters with a glorification of ruins,⁷ and shortly there after by poets and other writers who were expressing their fascination with decrepit castles and other medieval ruins. Following the rebuilding of Rheinstein in the 1820s, ruins as such seemed less interesting and there was a trend to rebuild them using the old foundations and other interesting elements. Bornheim describes how architects began to produce historically inaccurate, but romantic, restorations—usually in an imperfectly understood Gothic style. He notes the start of a new phase in the 1860s, when historians and archeologists began to study carefully the history and architecture of medieval castles, and when architects tried to build more accurate reconstructions, although disputes raged over the finer points. The sequence that Bornheim sees, therefore, is this: painters (about 1800), poets (about 1820), architects (about 1830), and scholars (about 1860), as Germans moved from dreamy admiration of wrecked castles to reconstruction of them with greater or lesser historical and architectural accuracy. Bornheim thus places the castle rebuilding phenomenon in the context of intellectual history.

Concentrating on poetry and painting, Heinz Biehn has suggested a slightly different pattern of castle rebuilding which stresses its literary and artistic inspiration.⁸ The first period of castle fascination, he writes, is one of sentimental romanticism in which artificial ruins were built. Beginning in the late eighteenth century these owed their origins to novels (especially the Gothic novel) and to the English landscape garden. On the Rhine, aristocrats attempted this with Rossel, above Assmannshausen, and Mosburg, near Wiesbaden. These efforts, of course, were modest follies, not like the ambitious products of the later drive to recreate medieval castles on the sites of earlier ones and actually to live in them—as was attempted at Rheinstein or Stolzenfels. (The latter phenomenon occurred in Biehn’s second or elegant phase.) From about 1800 to about 1825 English inspiration again was evident, as restored castles went up in the neo-Gothic style popular in the British Isles at that time. In the third phase, evident by the 1870s, inspiration was more purely German, recalling the ostensible glories of the Germany of the Holy Roman Empire. In this pathetic-romantic stage⁹ the rebuilt castles often had the quality of museums or monuments. Good examples are Katz and Schönburg, where somewhat clumsy efforts were made to create a genuine castle-like ambience. Biehn’s three phases do not parallel my approach as closely as do Bornheim’s, but they help to suggest a number of the themes which I develop.

In German-speaking Europe the nineteenth-century castle rebuilding phenomenon has inspired other studies. A symposium in 1973 at Schloss (Palace) Grafenegg, near Krems in Austria, brought together interested scholars whose papers were later published by Renate Wagner-Rieger and Walter Krause.¹⁰ In North America an exhibition of 1982 at Hammond Castle Museum in Massachusetts also led to a publication, appropriately titled Castles: An Enduring Fantasy.¹¹ Both these works analyze the modern symbolism of castles and their links with broader economic and political, as well as cultural and intellectual, trends. No historians, however, have made as detailed a study of the Rhine castles as has Ursula Rathke, who has published a remarkable book on Rheinstein, Stolzenfels, and Sooneck, examining the documentary record left by the Prussian princes who inspired their reconstruction and by their architects, engineers, and bureaucrats. If mine is a study in breadth, hers is a study in depth, which does not, however, neglect her subjects’ links with wider trends.¹² I am beholden to these scholars for inspiring my approach.

The German castle rebuilding phenomenon is not simply a valid concern for historians alone, but in addition may have practical significance for the North American conservation movement. In the past quarter century Canadians and Americans have become more aware of the importance of conserving and restoring the built environment, a term which includes a wide range of structures deemed significant, historically and/or esthetically, or vital to a communal sense of identity. Such thinking began in Germany over a century and a half ago. In fact, the fears and ambitions of nineteenth-century Germans who were concerned with their architectural heritage often seemed to prefigure those of twentieth-century North Americans. Because the heritage movement here often needs a sense of perspective and direction, lessons from the German experience might be learned, therefore, which could be applied to the work of conservationists on this side of the Atlantic in the twenty-first century.

Before we can review this phenomenon, however, several other diverse factors must be clarified, factors which include the geographical setting of nineteenth-century German castle rebuilding (the scenic background to Lewin’s Wagnerian set designs), the historical reality of medieval castles, heritage movements here and in Germany, and some technical terminology.

INTRODUCTION

The Rhine, wrote a German scholar, is the most poetic and the most political river of Europe,¹ an apt description, for when studying the great German river, one can escape neither poetry nor politics. The need to assert and defend political power created the original Rhenish castles, designed, as they were, to defend the territories of the many feudalities along the river’s banks. Its crossings and its communities were the subjects of both civil wars and foreign aggression. Its castles were often the sites of battles and sieges, and figure frequently in political histories of medieval Germany. For this reason alone, the castles deserve the studies which have been made of them. Much later, however, when these fortresses had fallen into ruin and lost all apparent political or military value, nineteenth-century poets were enraptured by the landscape and mythology of both the Rhine and its wrecked citadels. By 1930, so overladen with legends, myths, and other associations was the river landscape that Kurt Tucholsky denigrated it as "the kitschumrauschte" Rhine, an almost untranslatable play on words meaning (approximately) drunk with cultural garbage.² Without being unfair to this perceptive critic, we should nevertheless note that the valley of the Middle Rhine (between Mainz and Bonn) was—and is—a remarkable stretch of European geography.

The Landscape of the Middle Rhine

Nineteenth-century poets, artists, and later the first tourists revelled in the river’s twists through a narrow gorge with steep wooded or vine-covered slopes, the beautiful views which appeared as one’s ship rounded each bend, and the castle ruins which crowned many of the craggy heights, rising above the water out of dark druidic forests.³ Truly nature had created an impressive topography here. When the Rhine leaves the Alps it meanders north and is, in effect, blocked by a mountain range running east-west across its path. The river cuts its way through this obstacle, creating cliffs some of which are over 300 metres (about 1,000 feet) high. On the west bank are the Hunsrück hills, bordered at their northern limit by the Mosel River which flows into the Rhine at Koblenz. North of the Mosel, still on the west bank, is the volcanic Eiffel range. A similar pattern is seen on the east bank where the Taunus Mountains rise, their northern edge defined by the Lahn River, north of which run the Westerwald hills. It is as if two gorges—that of the Rhine and that of the Mosel-Lahn—intersect with each other at Koblenz.⁴

On the Middle Rhine, as elsewhere, the earth itself has influenced the look of man’s creations. In 1820 Dorothy Wordsworth (1771-1855) noted, with only slight exaggeration, that the town of St. Goar on the west bank had purple slate roofs.⁵ The shiny blue-black tiles are fashioned out of the exposed cliffs’ quartzite rock which had also been used for parts of the castles. Their shimmering dark tones struck the romantic poets and artists as appropriately melancholy in a ruin. To others this purple-black hue made the castles’ ruined walls seem to rise organically out of the rock on which they are based. Still others have found violent drama in the shiny hue. As after a recent fire, writes one observer, the ruins of Fürstenburg looked as if they had just been burned down.⁶ North of the Mosel-Rhine junction black basalt is more common, and here too the impression is dramatic. The basalt is black, wrote Victor Hugo (1802-85) in 1842; everywhere the dust of mica and quartz; everywhere purple crags.⁷

Hugo and Wordsworth were only a few of the thousands of their contemporaries who made trips up or down the river in the nineteenth century. The Rhine journey, in fact, became a staple in the cultural enlightenment of both Europeans and North Americans. Tourists marvelled at the dramatic and uplifting legends of knightly heroes pitted against doomed villains in lofty-spired fortresses. Yet the actual history of the Rhine castles was less attractive and life in a medieval castle was far from inspiring.

Fig. 1. Braubach and vicinity about 1605: The artist Wilhelm Dilich has exaggerated the height of the castles and hilltops as well as their proximity to each other, but has correctly reflected his patron’s sensible concern to record the fortresses and towns of his principality. On the right bank, Braubach and Philippsburg with Marksburg above; beyond is Burg Lahneck above Oberlahnstein with Martinsburg. On the left bank, Rhens (site of the Royal Throne) and Burg Stolzenfels above Kapellen. Courtesy of Bachem Verlag, Cologne.

The Castles in Their Prime

It is strange—very strange!

How opinions will change!

How antiquity blazons and hallows

Both the man and the crime

That a less lapse of time

Would commend to the hulks or the gallows.⁸

So observed Thomas Hood (1799-1845), referring to the Rhenish robber barons in his account of an 1840 Rhine tour. The reading public of his time enjoyed an image of the Rhenish castles based on romantic and nationalistic fantasy, not historical reality. The German rebuilders of the 1800s thought of the castles as national cultural monuments, redolent with romantic associations—as subjects for paintings, melancholy poems, or patriotic hymns. Even in the mid-twentieth century, writers have found the Rhenish castles picturesque and mellow or integral parts of the landscape. The original builders, however, constructed them for strictly utilitarian reasons. Purpose-built military structures, the castles were often destroyed in war, only to be rebuilt for other entirely practical ends. When social, political, and military conditions led to the abandonment of most castles, Germans had no plans to make them stone witnesses of medieval, knightly, or national glory for German posterity.⁹ When castles were demolished, no tears were shed over the loss of national cultural monuments.

Nineteenth-century reconstruction came as an epilogue to the long violent chronicle of the castles’ history. After about 55 B.C. the Romans built fortified towns and outposts on the Middle Rhine, their northeastern frontier. Although several medieval castles such as Burg Klopp were built on the ruined foundations of Roman fortresses, none of the latter survived as notable ruins into the nineteenth century. Nor was it possible to find many traces of Charlemagne’s palaces at Aachen and Ingelheim (built around 800) which had virtually disappeared by 1800. Nationalists were more attracted to the Holy Roman Empire of the later Middle Ages, which seemed to have been an ideal society and polity, and of which there were many visible traces.

The vast expanse of this Reich from Luxemburg and Alsace to Hungary and Brandenburg had seen the construction of more castles than anywhere else in medieval Europe.¹⁰ The invasions of the Hungarians, Slavs, and Normans caused emperors such as Henry the Fowler (ruled 919-36) to build many new castles, mostly wooden, and later emperors continued the effort. The eleventh-century Investiture Conflict between the imperial supporters and the papal side saw the construction of more mighty castles. The golden age of German castle building, however, occurred under the Hohenstaufen dynasty (1138-1254), particularly during the reign of Frederick Barbarossa (1152-90), who made Swabia (south of the Middle Rhine) the heart of his empire which he tried to centralize and strengthen. Later, Frederick II (1220-50) over-reached himself with his Italian concerns and the Holy Roman Empire went into its long decline. With turmoil in Germany and with Frederick often away in Italy, the lower and middle ranks of the feudal nobility lived in a state of continual crisis which prompted some of them to construct their own powerful strongholds. Rhenish castles such as Sterrenberg were often commanded by castellans who themselves became powerful, their fortresses occasionally as imposing as those of the emperor. Common people, seeking protection, turned to any high-ranking and strong landlord who could provide it. Thus the legendary robber barons established themselves in their own fortresses, such as Rheinfels.

In an effort to reestablish the imperial power Emperor Rudolf of Habsburg (ruled 1273-91) ordered the demolition in 1287 of at least ninety of these strongholds in Thuringia alone. In the Rhineland, however, after the thirteenth century the archbishops of Mainz, Trier and Cologne prevailed over the secular princes and housed themselves and their retainers in mighty stone fortresses. Only a small number of Rhenish secular rulers occasionally rivalled the prince-bishops, notably the Lords of Katzenelnbogen and the House of Hesse.

German towns and cities were drawn into these conflicts. Castles were occasionally built by feudal lords within the walls of towns under their control, or else above the towns and linked to them by extended walls, such as those between Burg Stahleck and Bacharach. The Rhineland in particular was plagued with hostilities between cities and aristocrats, particularly after the League of Rhenish Cities was founded by Mainz and Worms in 1254.

As military strongholds for powerful nobles the Rhenish castles were designed to defend the aristocrat, his family, and retainers and as bases for offensive excursions. They might also provide a haven for the owner’s tenants or serfs in times of war or natural disaster. From the castle the lord administered his estates and dispensed justice. Part of the castle might serve as prison for local miscreants. The noble could also levy tolls on merchants’ships passing below on the Rhine. Towers served as lookouts to detect approaching enemies and as landmarks, alerting the traveller that he was entering a certain landlord’s domain. A castle, therefore, served a purpose something like that of a twentieth-century aircraft carrier. Although (unlike a castle) these expensive vessels have little direct economic or adminstrative function, they are built for the sake of defence and are expendable in battle. So too were the castles of the Middle Rhine, which were frequently destroyed in the many wars which ravaged the valley, and later rebuilt when new hostilities developed. Aspects of their appearance changed, reflecting developing concepts of warfare and, to a lesser degree, fashions in architectural style. Only in the nineteenth century, however, did the loss of castles begin to seem like a cultural catastrophe or a national outrage.

The rebuilding of fortified structures at strategic locations had a long history. As early as the tenth century the invading Hungarians had destroyed many of the early, often wooden, fortresses of the Middle Rhine which were later replaced by the stone structures with which most readers are familiar. For example the original Burg Hammerstein fell to the Hungarians and gradually disintegrated until Emperor Henry IV rebuilt it in the late eleventh century. In the thirteenth century Emperor Rudolf of Habsburg destroyed Sooneck and Reichenstein as nests of robber barons. Both were rebuilt soon after this, only to fall into ruin again.

Most of the castles reconstructed in the nineteenth century resembled the originals only in a few details. By 1900, controversy raged over the correct way to rebuild ruined castles. We must therefore briefly describe here the main architectural features of the original Middle Rhine Burgen.¹¹ The appearance of the earliest castles of about 900 is still a subject for debate, but scholars know much more about the look of the castles of the high Middle Ages, thanks to Wilhelm Dilich (1571-1650), a military engineer, architect, and cartographer, whose pictures of Hessian castles tell us much about their appearance. We are also in debt to Matthaeus Merian (1593-1650), a Swiss engraver whose Topographia Germaniae, in several volumes, includes views and plans of Rhenish towns and castles.

Many different castle types prevailed in Germany, some of them with distinctly non-German features. At their most powerful, the German emperors had Mediterranean and Eastern European contacts, not to mention French and English connections, and Crusaders had returned impressed by the fortresses of Spain and the Near East. To later nationalists the Rhenish castles became symbols of German culture. Nevertheless, although at least four types of Middle Rhine castles can be said to have existed, scholars have found it difficult to delineate a typical German castle.

Although the exact appearance of the earliest medieval castles is debatable, we know that their wooden palisades gave way near the end of the eleventh century to the more familiar stone walls. Furthermore, the layout of the castles changed over time. Up to the mid-twelfth century, the ground plans were mostly round or oval. Then the octagonal, rectangular, or square plan developed. In the high Middle Ages, the rectangular plan was favoured.¹² Most of the nineteenth-century restorations adhered to the ground plan as revealed by the ruin, although some added new side-buildings and most drastically altered the layout of the upper floors.

All the castles had strong walls. The high main wall with its wall-walks and arrow slits was known as the ring-wall which encompassed the entire complex. In front of this was the Zwinger wall beyond which were ditches or ramparts. An important part of the ring-wall was the strong shield-wall (Schildmauer) facing the side from which attack was expected. Most of the walls were crenellated and had arrow loops from which the defenders could fire on the enemy. The main entrance through the ring-wall, often at the base of a tower, usually had a drawbridge and portcullis.

At their core most castles had two main structural features, usually distinct entities: the Bergfried (tower or keep) and the Palas (main living quarters and great hall). The German castles were therefore different from most English castles, which developed a more unified plan, often with a large tower standing alone in a courtyard. Only to this extent did the Rhenish castles have a more distinctly German style. Sometimes built into the ring-wall, the keep was the castle’s tallest and strongest feature and stood usually on the highest point of land. Usually four-cornered, it could be round or even five-cornered as at Stolzenfels. On the Rhine this watchtower, the castle’s most important defensive structure, was often built with a corner facing the hillside, from which direction attack might be expected and where the foundations were strongest. Including dungeons and guardrooms, the Bergfried was the last refuge of the defenders if overwhelmed. Whether the castle’s owner was a knight, robber baron, archbishop or Emperor, the keep was a symbol of his power.

Occasionally the keep was comfortably appointed and became living quarters, as at Eltville. Although in the fourteenth century (under French influence) the Bergfried and the Palas were sometimes combined, the Palas was usually distinguishable from the keep. Often rectangular in plan and two storeys high, it was constructed over a cellar. On the upper level was a large room, or great hall, used for festivities and meetings and often elaborately decorated, but rarely inhabited. Sleeping quarters were often adjacent to or above the great hall. Near at hand were the cistern or well and the kitchens. Most castles had chapels, sometimes outside the walls, occasionally over a gateway, as at Godesburg, or in an important tower, as in Marksburg. Some were free-standing; some were built into the Palas. In the courtyard were barns, stables, and sometimes another well. In the rebuilt nineteenth century castles, the owners of which preferred to emphasize social hierarchy, maintenance buildings and servants quarters usually stood outside the walls. Whereas in a genuine castle a small garden supplied fruit, vegetables, or herbs, such a feature when found in a nineteenth-century castle was mainly decorative.

Local forests provided construction material and firewood, but they could also conceal danger. As Dilich and Merian show, the woods around the castles were cut down to give better visibility from the towers. Thus the romantic nineteenth-century picture of castles surrounded with lush greenery—as indeed the ruins were by 1800—does not accord with their original appearance. From the perspective of a medieval river traveller the Burgen stood out starkly against the sky. The walls linking the castles to the towns at their feet were clearly visible, as was the case with Marksburg and Braubach, or Schönburg and Oberwesel.

The nineteenth century developed a fanciful image of the medieval castle, looming dark grey or black out of a thick, wild forest, high above the glittering river. This romantic image had little to do with the appearance of the almost starkly bright castles when originally built.¹³ Medieval castle builders tried to render their strongholds brightly visible in the distance by plastering the walls and painting them with colours as vivid as the age could create. On his Rhine journey, the fifteenth-century humanist Piccolomini reported that so many buildings and castles tower above the cliffs there, that they seem to cover whole hills and peaks like snow fallen from heaven.¹⁴ Castles’ outer walls were often cream, white, or yellow with the timbering a bolder reddish brown as at Rheinfels. Few wall sections were left as bare stone but were covered with plaster. (Parts of such original covering may still be seen at Lahneck.) The tourist today may be confused to see that Stolzenfels boasts a bright yellow plaster while Sooneck and Rheinstein not far away and rebuilt almost at the same time as Stolzenfels are of plain unplastered stone. As a matter of fact, Stolzenfels’ yellow plaster is more historically accurate than the bare walls of Rheinstein or Sooneck, which when first built were also probably plastered and painted.

Life in a Medieval Castle

Until about 1850 few Europeans had an accurate picture of medieval castle life. Whereas most nineteenth-century castle owners on the Middle Rhine purchased them for cash and owned them outright, the original medieval castles existed in a complex system of ownership. A lesser lord could hold a castle in feudal tenure from a more powerful one. If a noble family became impoverished, they could mortgage their castle to a more prosperous one. Other castles might have a lien upon them to another lord or prince. Some, known as Ganerbenburgen (coparcenary or joint-heir castles) could house several related aristocratic families. The law of primogeniture which prevailed in France and England did not pertain to Germany. Although the estate with its castle went to the eldest son, each noble’s son inherited his father’s title and rank. Thus younger sons, too, were obliged to maintain the clan’s prestige. They could not pursue bourgeois trades, so if they did not enter the church, they had to live by military service which involved building a stronghold.

Of castle life, Ulrich von Hutten (1488-1523), German humanist and imperial knight, wrote that

We are suffocatingly cramped inside, penned in together with cattle and horses, and the dark rooms are stuffed full of heavy guns, pitch, sulphur, and other weapons and war material. The gunpowder stinks everywhere and the scent of the dogs and their dirt is scarcely very charming either, in my opinion.

If there was a bad harvest, he continued, there is dreadful misery and poverty. Then there is nothing but worry, confusion, fear, friction, and irritation hour after hour.¹⁵

Such castles were not without interior embellishments. Marksburg’s great hall, for example, was embellished with mural paintings and the interior of the small chapel was brilliantly painted. However, the well-to-do princely, aristocratic, and bourgeois rebuilders of the 1800s could not tolerate the life of medieval nobles who had often endured a standard of living not much higher than that of their peasants. The dark and uncomfortable rooms of an original Palas had small, narrow windows covered with thin plates of horn and/or closed with wooden shutters. (The stained glass windows at Stolzenfels are a nineteenth-century luxury.) Oil lamps and pine torches provided dim lighting and gave off smoke while the hearths, too, produced smoke, but little heat. Furnishings were spare and the small dim rooms were often heaped with armaments and weapons. Given the dreariness of Palas life, the owners often preferred to spend their waking hours outdoors; hence the popularity of hunts and tournaments. Indoors the presence of scores, even hundreds, of retainers made all human activities public events. These conditions would, of course, be repugnant to the more sensitive mores of the nineteenth-century elite.

In theory, the knight had many obligations to the people living within sight of his keep, not to mention those he owed to his superior, even the Emperor. Serving another prince, however, was dangerous, no matter how just that ruler was, for the latter’s enemies could attack one at any time. Hence one had to maintain a large armed force, which partly explains the Burg’s crowded living conditions. Ideally the knight himself was brave, loyal, and noble of spirit, ritterlich, having virtues which the German word for knightly or chivalric still connotes. Yet the peasant or merchant had no guarantee that any particular heir to a castle would have these qualities, and the annals are full of tales of landlords who oppressed their serfs, rebelled against all authority, or oppressed townsmen. Nevertheless, many of the later poets and artists, as well as the rebuilders and their supporters, preferred to gloss over the harsher aspects of medieval castle life, and to dwell upon those elements which suited their romantic view of the German nobility of the Holy Roman Empire.

The new owners of the rebuilt Burgen and pseudo-castles had grown accustomed to cleaner, quieter, more private lives. Even before the introduction of electricity and modern plumbing later in the nineteenth century, they expected much more comfort in their living quarters. Thus, in their new castles they recreated the comforts they knew in their city palaces and mansions. Rarely did they attempt to make their new-old properties into profitable estates with cattle or cultivated fields. Moreover, whereas the medieval castles were bustling communities where sometimes as many as 2,000 people lived and worked, the restored ones were often designed as retreats from formal social intercourse and as havens from responsibility. Only rarely were they economic or administrative centres of estates. With the exception of Ehrenbreitstein, neither did they have a military function.

The Decline of Castles

By 1815 all but two of the Middle Rhine castles were in ruins, many with only stunted walls rising out of piles of stones overgrown with moss and bushes. Why did once-powerful fortresses become heaps of useless stone? As technology changed the towering, moated, ring-walled keeps lost their military function, while their owners,