Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg

Haut-Koenigsbourg stands on a sandstone spur at 757 metres in the Vosges, above the Alsace plain, and on a clear day it can be seen from as far away as Colmar. The rock was first recorded under Charlemagne. By 1147 the Hohenstaufen dukes of Swabia had a castle here, built without permission on land that belonged to the abbey of Saint-Denis, and by the 1190s it was called Königsburg, the "King's Castle". In the fifteenth century the lords of the castle sheltered robber knights, and an alliance of Colmar, Strasbourg and Basel burned it in 1462. The Counts of Thierstein then rebuilt it with artillery towers and a massive shield wall. In 1633, during the Thirty Years' War, Swedish troops took it after a 52-day siege and set it on fire. The ruin was then left to the forest for more than two and a half centuries.

What makes the castle unusual is its second life. The ruin was listed as a French historic monument in 1862. After the Franco-Prussian War Alsace became part of the German Empire, and in 1899 the town of Sélestat gave the ruin to Emperor Wilhelm II. He wanted a showpiece of German medieval culture in the newly annexed province, a western counterpart to the restored Marienburg in Prussia. The Berlin architect and castle scholar Bodo Ebhardt rebuilt it between 1900 and 1908. His aim was to show the castle as it might have looked around 1500, before its destruction. He worked from the surviving walls, archives and comparisons with castles of the same period. Where evidence ran out he had to invent, and the keep, for example, is now believed to be about 14 metres too tall. The Kaiser often came to watch the work, arriving at a railway station rebuilt for him at nearby Saint-Hippolyte, and he opened the castle with a costumed procession in May 1908.

After the First World War the castle passed to France. For decades French critics dismissed it as a German stage set. Historians now value it both as a careful reconstruction and as a record of how Wilhelm II's Germany wanted to see its past. Visitors walk from the lower courtyard up through the residential buildings to the keep, and out to the Thierstein artillery bastion and shield wall on the west side. The high-roofed dining hall and the heraldry linking the Hohenzollerns to the medieval emperors show Wilhelm's own touch, and the ramparts look out over the Upper Rhine plain. Jean Renoir filmed parts of La Grande Illusion here in 1937. The castle is one of the most visited sites in Alsace and has belonged to the Alsace regional authorities since 2007.

Getting there

The castle is in the commune of Orschwiller, about 8 km west of Sélestat, 26 km north of Colmar and 55 km south of Strasbourg. The nearest airport is Strasbourg (SXB), about 38 km away.