Freienfels Castle

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Freienfels Castle 2008 - park side
Freienfels Castle in Freienfels

Freienfels Castle is a castle complex on the Wiesent in the Hollfeld district of Freienfels, which was built by the Knights of Aufseß and first mentioned in 1342. The name indicates the special position: The castle stood on free land, on a free rock and was only subordinate to the emperor and the empire. A large park also belonged to the castle, but it is becoming increasingly overgrown.

history

Beginnings

The original Freienfels Castle was built around the year 1300. According to tradition, it was built by the knight Otto von Aufseß (1296–1338) in the early 14th century. Another source says that the sale in 1867 ended an almost uninterrupted family estate that was almost 587 years old, which means that it was founded in 1280. The castle held a special position among the knightly seats of the Wiesent valley , because it stood on free land and was imperial immediately . The castle was first mentioned in a document in 1342.

History of the medieval castle

During the Peasants' War (spring 1525), the rebellious peasants destroyed the castle and burned it down. Then she rebuilt the knight Pankraz von Aufseß. During the Thirty Years War , in 1628, Jakob Siegmund von Schaumburg and the Hollfelder Vogt Eppenau stormed the castle under the pretext of the Lehenheimfall . Four years later, the Redwitz Preceptor Heberer took the castle and handed it over to a Swedish commissioner. Until the end of the Thirty Years War it was occupied alternately by Swedes and Bambergers. After decades of family strife between the von Aufseß family, the Bamberg Monastery took possession of the Freienfels Castle and Manor in 1672. In 1681 the sons of Hans Wilhelm von Aufseß sold the Wüstenstein castle to the margrave, released Freienfels for it and were enfeoffed with this castle by the Bamberg bishop.

Construction of today's castle

Carl Siegmund, Freiherr von Aufseß and Canon of Bamberg and Würzburg bought the castle in 1690. He tore down the heavily dilapidated complex in order to build the current baroque castle on the foundations of the medieval castle between 1693 and 1701. The rooms with stucco work by the Bamberg court plasterer Franz Jacob Vogel are particularly worth seeing. In the former castle chapel, now a Catholic parish church, stucco work with the Aufseß coat of arms and grave monuments decorated with coats of arms are worth seeing.

History of the castle from 1867 to the present

In 1867 the von Aufseß family sold the property , which was around 120 days in size, to the Counts of Giech , without the castle, which they sold to Gustav Rewald from Halle for 1500 guilders in the same year with three days of work "Oedung und dem Kreuzerwinkel-Acker" . This sale was followed by eleven further changes of ownership by 1966.

After Rewald's death, his widow sold the castle in 1871 to Gustav Toepke from Magdeburg for 26,000 guilders, who three years later to Oskar Leonhard Hesse from Loschwitz for 135,000 marks. Wendler, Provost of the Cathedral of Leipzig , bought the palace in 1876 for 120,000 marks and finally in 1887 the wife of Ernestine of Hermann Freiherr von Aufseß bought it as a Christmas present for 25,000 marks.

After her death in 1911, Eckardt Freiherr von und zu Aufseß took over the property in Freienfels following an inheritance dispute; In 1912 he had the northern park wall demolished and sold the mill with the associated water rights . This took the most valuable part of the castle away. On October 31, 1918, it was sold to Arno Scheunert from Munich, who on July 8, 1920, sold it to Count Joseph Ferdinand von Spreti and his wife Paula.

On April 21, 1921, von Spreti sold the property to the factory owner and secret councilor Edmund Meinel von Tannenberg from Tannenbergsthal in the Saxon Vogtland . He had the castle restored between 1921 and 1926 and furnished it with "historic" furniture. In 1930 Meinel von Tannenberg, a member of the Saxon state parliament and supporter of Gustav Stresemann , had a Stresemann memorial erected in the park of the palace. It carried a plate with the face of Stresemann and the following inscription:

“THE EMPIRE - FOREIGN - MINISTER // AND PAVEMENT // GERMAN FREEDOM // DR. GUSTAV STRESEMANN // * 1878 BERLIN - † 1929 // TO A GRATEFUL MEMORY. // May 10, 1930 MEINEL - TANNENBERG "

The memorial was probably removed after the next sale in 1941. For a price of 350,000 marks, the seriously ill owner sold the castle this year to the asset management of Deutsche Arbeitsfront GmbH Berlin. The price was never paid, however, as the sales contract provided for the amount to be paid using Reich treasure bills after the war had ended victoriously. The owner set up a training center for young politicians in the Wehrmacht , a so-called Gau school.

After the end of the war in 1945, American military personnel settled in the castle. An incomplete list of losses dated May 27, 1947 contains the marginal note: " Buddha figure in the library was used as a target by American soldiers".

A little later, the state of Bavaria became the owner of many of the state estates located in its area through legal succession, including Schloss Freienfels on March 2, 1949. The community of heirs Meinel-Tannenberg hoped that the castle would be rewritten, since payment according to the 1941 contract had not been made, but the Bavarian State asset management won the six-year legal dispute. The Free State sold the castle in 1966 to the Roß family as the new owners. Even before the castle was sold, the state took the picture Tower of Babel by the Dutch painter Paul Bril from 1595, which Meinel-Tannenberg had acquired and which is now on the Marienberg fortress in Würzburg .

Since 2013, Schloss Freienfels has been owned by the Badenheuer-Weiss family, whose members are descendants of the Aufseß family. At the end of the extensive renovation work, it is planned to set up an art museum for Christian art with a collection from the Paramentikmeister Grete Badenheuer. Castle tours have been possible on Saturdays since 2016.

  • Castle courtyard

  • salon

  • Castle chapel

  • Chapel, interior

literature

  • Kai Kellermann: Stately gardens in Franconian Switzerland - a search for traces . Verlag Palm & Enke, Erlangen and Jena 2008, ISBN 978-3-7896-0683-0 , pp. 52-63.
  • Norbert Haas: Schloss Freienfels and its fates from 1918–1966 (on the 65th anniversary of Edmund Meinel von Tannenberg's death), Bamberg 2006.
  • Hellmut Kunstmann : The castles of north-western and northern Franconian Switzerland . Reprint of the 1972 edition. Degener & Co commission publishing house, Neustadt an der Aisch 2000, ISBN 3-7686-9265-5 , pp. 139–166.
  • Edmund Meinel von Tannenberg: Strange fates of the rock castle Freienfels on the Wiesent . 1926 (new edition with an addition and an addendum on construction activity until 1926)
  • August Sieghardt: Schloss Freienfels - in Franconian Switzerland, an old mansion in a new shape ; Pictures by Wilhelm Meinel; Design and overall production of the Graphische Kunstanstalt Zerreiss & Co, Nuremberg.
  • Georg Wenzel: German business leader . Life courses of German business personalities. A reference book on 13,000 business figures of our time. Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg / Berlin / Leipzig 1929, DNB 948663294 (according to DBA).
  • Pantheon, Volume 26 (1968), page 208ff: Rolf Kultzen: A Tower of Babel by Paul Bril as the latest loan from the Alte Pinakothek . (The picture is registered in the Bavarian Administration for Palaces Gardens and Lakes under I.1038)

Archival documents

  • Bamberg City Archives D2033, No. 400 006

Web links

Commons : Schloss Freienfels  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Coordinates: 49 ° 57 ′ 37 ″  N , 11 ° 15 ′ 17 ″  E