Confessions of a Castleholic

What do Peter the Great, Friedrich the Great, several British Kings, German poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and U.S. founding father Benjamin Franklin have in common? They all went to the tiny town of Bad Pyrmont to take the cure at some point in their lives. Especially during the 16th and 17th centuries, the spa town in today's Lower Saxony gained its reputation as a fashionable place for royal vacations. And so it won't come as a major surprise to you, that there is also a  Schloss  in Bad Pyrmont - the Bad standing for spa, not, well, bad. That castle, known as  Schloss Pyrmont , was the main destination of my latest castle adventure that also led me to some nine other castles which we will have a closer look at over the coming weeks and months. (So far,  you can already check out  Schloss von Hammerstein .) It was between the years 1525 and 1536 that Count Friedrich VI of Spiegelberg built the first fortification in Pyrmont. The fortified castle...

View image | gettyimages.com Today is July 20, one of the most famous dates in German history. 71 years ago, a group of conspirators around Claus Schenk Graf (Count) von Stauffenberg tried unsuccessfully to assassinate Adolf Hitler. Many of those surrounding Stauffenberg were also of noble descent and mainly based on their actions, there has long been the underlying assumption that much of the German nobility was against the Nazis, which they weren't. Well, first off: There wasn't the German nobility. Looking back, there are two main indicators for a noble family - or, as you'll see later, members of a noble family - to either be supporters of the National Socialist German Workers' Party (NSDAP) or to be against them. On the one hand, the wealth of the family seems to have played a role; on the other hand, their faith. The staunchly Catholic well-off royal and noble families from western and especially southern Germany often weren't closely associ...

These days Bad Arolsen - the 'Bad' meaning that it is a spa town, not, well, bad - is a small town somewhere in the northern part of the German state of Hesse. Once upon a time, between 1655 and 1918, however, it was the residence of the Counts and later Princes of Waldeck (and Pyrmont) and as such features a number of castles including the Residenzschloss Arolsen . The Residenzschloss owes its existence to Prince Friedrich Anton Ulrich of Waldeck and Pyrmont (1676-1728). Around the time of his elevation to the rank of a prince in 1712, he decided to expand his domestic situation to better reflect his new status. Thus, he had a previous Renaissance castle on the same site torn down and starting in 1710, a Baroque palace - modelled after the Château de Versailles - was built. Considering that the Principality of Waldeck and Pyrmont wasn't the biggest of German states, his plans were kind of oversized from the beginning and due to his family's financial situation,...

Due to me being kind of MIA lately and not being able to a) visit castles or exhibitions to write about and b) not being able to dig up the time and leisure to write about all the other places I did indeed visit during the past year, I thought I'd introduce a new feature to the blog called Documentaries & Co to keep us somehow going. At hopefully not too large intervals, I will post documentaries or otherwise interesting videos I enjoyed watching. Not all of them will be about castles per se but will all deal with the subject of royal- and nobility in some way. First up is a 90-minute documentary entitled " Hessens größte Adelsfamilien " - literally meaning Hesse 's biggest noble families though actually meaning most important families - featuring a lot of families ranging from untitled nobility with a simple von or zu in their name to some of the formerly reigning houses. I know that the documentary is in German and this blog's language is in Engli...