Drachenburg Castle

On the Drachenfels ridge above the Rhine, halfway up the slope between the ruined medieval fortress at the summit and the river town of Königswinter below, stands a castle that was built in two years and never lived in. Schloss Drachenburg is one of the great confections of 19th-century German Historicism, a neo-Gothic fantasy of towers, turrets, stained glass and painted mythology, conceived in 1882 by a self-made millionaire who wanted a visible statement of arrival and then, having built it, appears to have lost interest. It took a century, several catastrophic changes of ownership, and a major restoration project to bring the castle to the immaculate state in which visitors see it today.

Stephan Sarter was born in 1833, the son of a Cologne merchant, and made an enormous fortune as a stockbroker in Paris during the boom years of the Second Empire and the early Third Republic. He returned to Germany with his wealth, purchased the Drachenfels hillside, commissioned the architects Ludwig von Jacobi and Bernhard Tüshaus, and gave them an almost unlimited budget along with a single clear instruction: build fast. The result, completed in just two years, is a structure of around 80 rooms, three towers, a baronial great hall, stables, outbuildings and formal terraces descending the hillside. Sarter was finally ennobled in 1889, receiving the 'von' he had effectively built Drachenburg to deserve. He died in 1902, having used the castle for occasional visits but never as his primary residence — a fact that gives the whole project a faintly melancholic undertone, however spectacular the result.

The interior decoration of Drachenburg is the most elaborate of any 19th-century private castle in the Rhine region. The great hall contains an ambitious series of paintings illustrating German mythology and the Nibelungenlied, the medieval German epic that occupied roughly the same cultural position for Richard Wagner that the Arthurian legends occupied for Tennyson. The stained glass windows, designed by the Munich studio of Franz Xaver Zettler, rank among the finest examples of historicist stained glass anywhere in Germany. The woodcarving, decorative tiling and painted ceilings throughout the castle reflect the combined effort of dozens of craftsmen working simultaneously under Sarter's open-ended budget — a display of newly minted 19th-century industrial wealth marshalled entirely into the service of medieval fantasy.

Drachenburg sits on the Drachenfels, the Dragon's Rock, the single most famous point in the Mittelrhein landscape: a ridge rising 321 metres above the river, topped by the ruins of a 12th-century castle and traditionally identified as the site of the legendary dragon-slaying recounted in the Nibelungenlied. Lord Byron wrote about the Drachenfels in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, and the hill has drawn tourists since the late 18th century. A rack railway, the Drachenfels Railway, opened in 1883 — the oldest of its kind in Germany — and still connects Königswinter to the summit, with a stop directly at Schloss Drachenburg. The combination of the ruined medieval fortress at the top, the neo-Gothic palace halfway up the slope, and the sweeping Rhine panorama visible from both levels makes this one of the most complete castle-landscape experiences anywhere in Germany.

After Sarter's death in 1902, Drachenburg passed through a sequence of owners who progressively stripped, damaged and neglected the building. During the Nazi period it served as a NAPOLA, a political training school for the regime's future elite; after 1945 it functioned as a school for the children of German emigrants. By the 1970s the castle had fallen into advanced decay, stripped of most of its portable contents and structurally compromised in several areas. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia purchased the property in 1989 and undertook a restoration that continued until 2010, at a cost exceeding €17 million. The clean, detailed interior visitors encounter today, largely re-furnished in period style, is the direct result of that two-decade project — a reminder of how close one of Germany's most distinctive 19th-century buildings came to being lost entirely.