Neidstein Castle

Neidstein Castle
Neidstein Castle
Creation time :	1513
Castle type :	Country castle
Conservation status:	Inhabited
Standing position :	Barons, Hofmark
Place:	Etzelwang- Neidstein
Geographical location	49 ° 32 '3 "  N , 11 ° 36' 17"  E Coordinates: 49 ° 32 '3 "  N , 11 ° 36' 17"  E
Height:	527.5  m above sea level NN

The Neidenstein Castle is a 16th century castle in the municipality of Etzelwang in Amberg-Sulzbach in the Bavarian Upper Palatinate .

Castle or later Neidstein Castle was the seat of a court in the Sulzbach district judge in the Duchy of Sulzbach . In 1790, it included farms in the places Albersdorf, Erkelsdorf , Ernhüll, Etzelwang, Fichtenhof (Neukirchen municipality), Lehendorf, Neidstein, Penzenhof, Schnellersdorf and Tabernackel.

Geographical location

Neidstein Castle is located in the Franconian Switzerland-Veldenstein Forest Nature Park on a spur of the Schlossberg (also called Schergenbuck ; 527.5  m above sea  level ), which rises south of the Etzelwang district of Tabernackel . With its 165 hectares of forest and meadows, it is now part of the 17.78 hectare Schergenbuck nature reserve with Neidstein Castle (NSG no. 82519), which was founded in 1973 .

Above the castle on the mountain top there is a ruined castle, of which only small remains exist: the former Neidstein castle .

history

Neidstein Castle in a pencil drawing from 1832

History up to the 20th century

1119 a Neipert Nitstein is mentioned as a ministerial of the Counts of Sulzbach . In 1240 and 1243 Rupertus de Nietstein appears as Reichsministeriale. After the Lords of Neidstein died out at the end of the 13th century, the castle fell into the hands of other noble families, in 1326 to Ludwig the Bavarian . The Wittelsbachers pledged them to aristocratic families. On February 10, 1466, Duke Ludwig pledged the castle to Hans von Brandt (Prantner). The redemption for 1500 guilders never took place, Neidstein remained a fiefdom of those von Brand (t), who owned the castle without interruption until its sale in 2006. The burning branches in Etzelwang's municipal coat of arms are a reminder of them.

The new castle - an elongated wing with an east gate and a round tower in the west - was built by Jobst von Brand (t) and completed in 1513.

The castle owes its current appearance, especially the stepped gable , to a redesign between 1855 and 1860. The reliefs with themes from the Old Testament on one wall of the castle were made by Georg Schweiger (17th century) from Amberg . The following lines of verse are added to the smiling portrait of the artist:

My art is often fought on
Hold me to God, who can help
And work happily in my house
Diss laughs in the window outside.
GS 1601

Younger story

Until his death in July 1973, the palace was occupied by Philipp Theodor Freiherr von Brand, who was chief of protocol at the Bavarian State Chancellery in the post-war period and who published several publications on the palace. His brother, the scientist Theodor von Brand , who fled to the USA from the Nazis in 1933, inherited the castle and visited it regularly until he died in 1978. His son Theodor Philipp Rudolf Freiherr von Brand, American federal judge, died in March 2004.

According to a press release, his children sold the castle, which had been family-owned since 1466, for two million euros on July 19, 2006 to Hollywood actor and Oscar winner Nicolas Cage .

The castle has 28 rooms on 900 square meters of living space, the furnishings of which were not taken over by Cage. Some of the inventory items went to the heirs in Virginia, the rest was auctioned at the Neumeister auction house, including a Brussels tapestry from the mid-16th century, a gift from the Wittelsbach family to the von Brand family, for which 30,000 euros were achieved. A sale of the Gothic sculptures, which are also part of the inventory, has not yet been announced.

The whereabouts of the valuable palace library remained open immediately after the sale until it was announced in October 2006 in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that a first lot of aesthetic books would be for sale in Munich at Hartung & Hartung in auctions from November 7th to 9th, 2006. Shortly after the auction was over, some of these books appeared in the online offers of second-hand bookshops, some of which were asking for three times the price achieved at the auction. What is certain is that the Neidstein Library is lost as a whole.

Critics of castle auctions repeatedly point out that historical interior fittings, which together with the monument represent an ensemble of monument value that is worth protecting, are lost to research in this way.

The castle archive, which dates back to the 16th century, was housed in the castle until it was sold . In 1796, when the French passed through, large parts of it are said to have been spread before the horses. Since the beginning of July 2006 it has been on deposit in the Amberg State Archives.

In March 2009, Cage sold the castle to the Amberg lawyer Konrad Wilfurth, who renovated the castle for use as a conference venue. In August 2015, the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology announced that it would use the castle for events on various research topics from November 2015.

literature

• Otto Schmidt: A sermon in stone · The relief panels of Georg Schweiger in Neidstein Castle . In: Der Eisengau 25, o. V., o. O. 2005, pp. 81–115
• Mathias Conrad: Neidstein Castle . In: ibid., O. V., o. O., pp. 158–162
• NN: Castles of the Upper Palatinate , undated, Regensburg 1974
• Philipp Theodor von Brand: Castle and Palace Neidstein and their inhabitants from 1050 to the present (Weidner Heimatkundliche Arbeit 15), n.v., Weiden 1971
• Philipp Theodor Freiherr von Brand: 900 years of Upper Palatinate history at Neidstein Castle and Castle , in: Oberpfälzer Heimat 9, o. V., o. O. 1964, pp. 49-72 (only this document was available)
• Johann Gruber: "I lifted jobs from Prant" - for the 500th anniversary of Neidstein Castle. and Dieter Dörner: Neidstein Castle today. Both in: Der Eisengau Vol. 40, 2013.

Web links

Commons : Schloss Neidstein (Etzelwang)  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• The website of Neidstein Castle
• Pictures (FAZ-Net)
• Aerial photos of the castle
• Castle view

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b c d} map services ( memento of the original dated December 19, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. of the BfN 
2. ^ FAZ of July 21, 2006
3. ↑ with map (registered 1973)
4. ↑ burgeninventar.de (archive version) ( Memento from April 12, 2009 in the Internet Archive )
5. ^ Georg Dehio: Handbook of German Art Monuments, Volume V: Regensburg and the Upper Palatinate. Deutscher Kunstverlag 1991, p. 326
6. ^ Max Piendl in the Historical Atlas of Bavaria on the history of Hofmark Neidstein pp. 66–68, also on the following
7. ^ Franz Prince zu Sayn-Wittgenstein: Castles in Bavaria . Munich, 3rd edition 1984, pp. 199 f. with fig. 193 (view from above)
8. ↑ Sayn-Wittgenstein, p. 200
9. ^ Sulzbach-Rosenberger Zeitung 1978, scanned excerpt from the Alemannia Judaica website, accessed on April 19, 2017
10. ↑ Died 2004. Paid article in Daily Press, Virginia, March 17, 2004
11. ↑ zeitung.org
12. ↑ zeitung.org
13. ↑ On August 19, 2006, p. 45, the FAZ announced the auction under the title Sale . The inventory was auctioned at the start of the autumn season on September 20 and 21, 2006 (300 lots on September 20, 900 under the Varia on the following day)
14. ^ Katja Riedel: Nicolas Cage and the castle inventory. Sale deluxe . At: Süddeutsche.de, May 17, 2010 (accessed October 7, 2012)
15. ↑ October 28, 2006, p. 48
16. ↑ Brand 1964, p. 63
17. ↑ Holdings of the Amberg State Archives , accessed on April 19, 2017.
18. ↑ spiegel.de
19. ^ Schloss Neidstein as the venue for the Fraunhofer press release from the Fraunhofer Institute for Environmental, Safety and Energy Technology dated August 31, 2015, accessed on September 3, 2015