To be privately owned
CastleEschweiler - Kinzweiler
Kinzweiler Castle
Kinzweiler Castle is a moated castle in the Kinzweiler district of Eschweiler, on the eastern side of Wardener Straße, opposite the junction with Kirchstraße.
The manor was one of the largest and most significant in the Aachen/Düren region. Today, only the manor house remains, which is privately owned and can therefore only be viewed from the outside.
The von Palant family is considered to be the builder of the Kinzweiler castle complex. They acquired the Kinzweiler lordship, including two existing mottes there, in 1420 from the heirs of the Knights of Kinzweiler. Historians assume that in the subsequent period, the family abandoned the outdated mottes as a residence and instead used Kinzweiler Castle, newly built by Dietrich von Palant at the beginning of the 16th century.
The complex remained in the family's possession until 1639 and then passed to Count Philipp Dietrich von Waldeck, a great-grandson of Floris von Palant, before Duke Ernst Friedrich I von Sachsen-Hildburghausen acquired it in 1707. His descendants sold the castle in 1747 to the Elector and Jülich Duke Karl Theodor von der Pfalz. The Duke had the entire complex redesigned and expanded in the Baroque style around the middle of the 18th century, incorporating parts of the old Gothic building fabric into the renovation.
In 1782, the Counts of Hatzfeld acquired the property and subsequently leased it, before selling it in 1845 to the ducal family of Arenberg. Further changes of ownership followed: in 1928, the Eschweiler Bergwerks-Verein acquired the castle and sold it in 1956 to the legal predecessor of today's Rheinbraun AG. In 1970, the latter had the two elongated, rectangular outer bailey demolished. Stables, barns, and tool sheds, the castle's own forge, a wheelwright's workshop, a brewery, and – until 1884 – also an oil mill had been located there. When the castle was threatened by the nearby lignite opencast mine, five families jointly acquired the remaining manor house in 1981 and had it converted for residential purposes.
Architectural Description+
The manor house of Kinzweiler Castle is a three-winged, ivy-clad brick building, surrounded on three sides by a moat. Until the beginning of lignite mining, this was fed by the Merzbach stream flowing past to the west. Although the southern wing of the house is significantly shorter than the northern one, making the castle appear at first glance like a two-winged complex, the building wings enclose a typical Baroque courtyard of honor, which is accessible via a two-flight staircase. The oldest parts of the building are the cellar, partly made of quarry stone, which is only slightly below ground level, as well as some Gothic transom windows on the courtyard side of the south wing. The remaining segmental arch windows of the building and the hip roof date from the mid-18th century.
During the interior renovation with accompanying gutting after 1981, a third floor was added to the formerly two-story building by inserting new intermediate ceilings, and the old building fabric was almost completely destroyed. Only two Baroque stucco halls and an oak-paneled Empire room from the Napoleonic era have been preserved.
Curiosities+
According to a tradition recorded around 1900 by the Düren saga collector Heinrich Hoffmann, the farmhands who slept in the manor house's barn were plagued by a werewolf-like creature, which, according to the description, bore a strong resemblance to the "Aufhocker" known from German sagas. The monster sat on the chest of the sleeping man, who was paralyzed, unable to scream, and almost suffocated from shortness of breath and fear.
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Location: 50.8458, 6.2308