Laundry castle

Laundry castle
Laundromat from Maitis
Alternative name (s):	Washer Castle Wascherschlössle
Creation time :	1220 to 1250
Castle type :	Hilltop castle
Conservation status:	Receive
Place:	Wäschenbeuren -Wäscherhof
Geographical location	48 ° 46 '1.5 "  N , 9 ° 42' 21"  E Coordinates: 48 ° 46 '1.5 "  N , 9 ° 42' 21"  E
Height:	436  m above sea level NN

The scrubber Castle , also Wäscherschloss or scrubber Schlössle called, is located in the laundry Beurener district Wäscherhof in the district of Göppingen in Baden-Wuerttemberg and was built between 1220 and 1250th The Höhenburg stands about 436 meters high above the Beutental and has a clear view of Hohenstaufen .

history

Laundry lock from the northwest

Laundry lock from the south

The progenitor of the famous noble family of the Staufer is considered to be Friedrich von Büren , named in a genealogical table by Wibald von Stablo , who lived in the 11th century and possibly came from the Riesgau around Nördlingen . By marrying Hildegard von Egisheim, he acquired large estates in Alsace . Their son, Duke Friedrich I of Swabia, built the eponymous castle on the Hohenstaufen. The assumption that the epithet von Büren refers to the later Wäschenbeuren and the Wascherburg is wrong, as it was only built in the 13th century towards the end of the Staufer period.

Excavation finds at Burgstall Burren about 600 meters further west of the Washer Castle showed in 1957 that there was a residential tower there as early as the 11th century , which was renewed and expanded in the 13th century, when the Washer Castle already existed. However, the facility on the Burren is also out of the question as the headquarters of the Staufer.

At the beginning of the 13th century, castles were built around Hohenstaufen for the Staufer servants, such as Hohenrechberg Castle . One of these was probably the laundry castle, which should originally have belonged to the Schüpf taverns . These are said to have left the castle to the Lords of Staufen (not to be confused with the ruling family of the Staufers), who were their servants.

Watercolor by Pieter Francis Peters (1819–1903), 1855

In 1271 the laundry castle was first recorded in a document. In it a dispute between the Lorch Monastery and a knight named "Konrad the Washer" is settled. Konrad renounced territorial claims in the Welzheimer Wald and got the "Hofgut in Buron" confirmed. The nickname of the knight is probably derived from the Waschbach in the Welzheimer forest and was the namesake for the laundry castle.

After the decline of the Staufer, the imperial court teller, Walter von Limpurg, pledged his tower in Staufen and its farmstead, known as the Burgsess, with all its possessions and people on the other side of the Rems river to his son-in-law Ulrich von Rechberg . It is assumed that the laundry castle also belonged to these properties. The facility was damaged during the Württemberg city war in 1377. After that, the defense tower was extended to the palace with its current length. The construction seam is still clearly visible in the facade of the ground floor on the courtyard side. In 1380 a Rechberger called himself Konrad zu Weschenburg in a document , with which the current name appeared for the first time.

In 1465 Veit von Rechberg zu Staufeneck gave the castle with the manor Wäschenbeuren to Archduke Siegmund of Austria in exchange for other areas , but was immediately given back as a fief . It was not until 1599, after the Rechberg line had died out, that the laundry castle fell back to the Innsbruck fiefdom. With the transition to Austria, the castle became the official seat of a bailiff for the western Austrian office of Wäschenbeuren. From 1484 it was expanded to represent this. The first half-timbered floor of the renovation at that time has been preserved; the second floor and the roof, on the other hand, come from a renovation in 1699. After the residential building of the castle had been rebuilt like a castle at that time , the complex was renamed to Schloss Wascherburg .

Laundry lock, drawing by Margret Hofheinz-Döring, 1977

In 1588 the office building in Wäschenbeuren was built, with which the laundry castle lost its role as the official seat. In 1601 the rule was divided between two Reich officials, the Reichspfennigmeister Zacharias Geizkofler and the Reichshofrat Bartholomäus Bezz. In 1805, after Austria's defeat by Napoleon , the Wäschenbeuren estate came to Württemberg , but the castle itself remained in the possession of Austria, which finally sold it to the Württemberg state administration in 1857 for 155,000 guilders. Today the property is owned by the state of Baden-Württemberg through legal succession and the state's palace administration is responsible for it. In 1976, reconstruction and repair work was carried out on the castle. The laundry castle has been an outstanding sight on the Staufer road since 1977 .

The castle served as a museum until 2008, in which musical instruments, furnishings and tools from the past centuries were shown. It is not barrier-free. Originally, the castle was to be reopened as a museum and event location in spring 2010. Because the interior is still being renovated in order to comply with fire protection regulations, the opening was postponed to spring 2011. Until then, events only took place outside the castle. In the course of the renovation, u. a. the stairwell separated from the floors by glass fronts, a rescue hose installed on the upper floor and a café set up on the ground floor. The state of Baden-Württemberg estimated the cost of the renovation work, which began in September 2010, to be 500,000 euros.

In 2011, the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg named the complex “Castle of the Year”. The celebrations took place on May 28, 2011 in the laundry castle. The month before, on April 14, 2011, the newly designed museum was inaugurated.

Floor plan of the first floor laundry lock

Staufer column (2014)

Building description

Entrance to the castle

The oldest, originally preserved part of the laundry castle is the trapezoidal surrounding wall, which was built up with humpback blocks in the 13th century . The east side with the entrance gate was rebuilt after the collapse in 1915. The western part is occupied by the three-story palas, which also shows the courtyard on the ground floor with a humpback square wall. On the outside, a mighty shield wall protects it up to the top floor. In the first half-timbered floor, which was used for residential purposes, a plank room was uncovered during the restoration in 1977. This floor shows the typical Swabian half-timbered structure with leaves from the 15th century. The floor above and the roof date from the 17th century.

During excavation work in the course of the renovation of the laundry castle in 2011, a defensive wall made of sandstone was discovered, the foundation of which was 70 cm deep. The surrounding wall of the castle courtyard was built on it, slightly set back. A map from 1900 already showed this section of the wall, but it was forgotten in the following years. The moat and this proven second wall gave the laundry castle a defensive character. In addition to the defensive wall, various everyday objects from the 13th to 19th centuries were excavated.

On September 28, 2014, a Staufer stele was inaugurated on the plateau in front of the castle entrance , which commemorates the role of the laundry castle in the Staufer era and is the twenty-sixth of its kind.

Name legend

Emperor Barbarossa is said to have stopped here on the way from the grave of his ancestors in the Lorch Monastery to Hohenstaufen Castle and fell in love with a washerwoman. He then gave her Büren Castle as a gift. The local coat of arms of Wäschenbeuren is derived from this legend. In reality, however, the name goes back to Konrad the washer. See → history .

literature

• Isolde Dautel: Laundry Castle, State Palaces and Gardens of Baden-Württemberg. Staatsanzeiger-Verlag, Stuttgart 2002, ISBN 3-929981-42-4 .
• Günter Schmitt : Castle Guide Swabian Alb, Volume 1 - Northeast Alb: Hiking and discovering between Aalen and Aichelberg . Biberacher Verlagsdruckerei, Biberach an der Riß 1988, ISBN 3-924489-39-4 , pp. 73-87.
• Alexander Antonow: Castles of southwest Germany in the 13th and 14th centuries - with special consideration of the shield wall . Konkordia Verlag, Bühl / Baden 1977, ISBN 3-7826-0040-1 , pp. 275-277.
• Paul Kaisser: Washer castle and laundry yard near Wäschenbeuren . Salach 1953.

Web links

Commons : Laundry Castle  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Official website of Burg Wascherschloss
• Site of the castle
• Laundry castle on burgenwelt.de

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Günter Schmitt: Castle Guide Swabian Alb. Volume 1 Northeast Alb . Biberach 1988, pp. 73-87. Here: p. 79.
2. ↑ Peter Koblank: Tabula consanguinitatis by Wibald von Stablo. on stauferstelen.net. Retrieved January 16, 2015.
3. ^ Hartwig Zürn: Excavations on the "Burren" near Wäschenbeuren (Kr. Göppingen) . In: Württembergischer Geschichts- und Altertumsverein (Hrsg.): Find reports from Schwaben , New Series 15, Stuttgart 1959, pp. 110–115 .
4. ↑ Günter Schmitt: Castle Guide Swabian Alb. Volume 1 Northeast Alb . Biberach 1988, pp. 89-94. Here: p. 91.
5. ↑ Hans-Martin Maurer: The Hohenstaufen. History of the ancestral seat of an imperial family . Stuttgart / Aalen 1977, p. 18.
6. ^ Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg: Württembergisches Urkundenbuch Online, Volume VII., No. 2190, pp. 126–127 (PDF; 246 kB).
7. ^ Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg: Württembergisches Urkundenbuch Online, Volume VII., No. 2419, pp. 307–308 (PDF; 246 kB).
8. ↑ Straße der Staufer on stauferstelen.de. Retrieved July 11, 2016.
9. ↑ "Barbara Gottwik is the new chatelaine" , Gmünder Daily Mail of 14 August 2009; Retrieved August 18, 2009.
10. ^ "Green light for laundry lock", Gmünder Tagespost from May 26, 2010; Retrieved January 15, 2011.
11. ^ " Castle is Castle of the Year 2011 ", Gmünder Tagespost from October 18, 2010; Retrieved January 15, 2011.
12. ↑ The new museum in the restored Laundry Castle was inaugurated across all districts. Rems-Zeitung of April 15, 2011, accessed on August 9, 2013.
13. ↑ Margit Haas: “ Old wall discovered. The renovation of the laundry lock reveals the fortified character of the castle ”in Gmünder Tagespost of February 3rd, 2011.
14. ^ Laundry castle 2014 on stauferstelen.net. Retrieved September 29, 2014.