Hohenfels Castle

Hohenfels Castle on the Ernsthöhe in Coburg, above Callenberger Straße, has stood here since 1840. It was planned at the same time as the ducal Saxon court theater by Carl Balthasar Harres and was the residence for 50 years of the opera singer Natalie Frassini, ennobled as Baroness von Grünhof.

Duke Ernst Alexander of Württemberg (1807–1868), a nephew of Duke Ernst I of Coburg and brother of Duchess Marie, commissioned the architect Balthasar Harres – a student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel – in 1837 to build a castle-like country estate for himself and his future wife on the green hill of the former animal park. After Harres' departure in 1838, Vincenz Fischer-Birnbaum completed the building in the Classical style in 1840. The castle and park were named Ernsthöhe after their builder.

Ernst Alexander of Württemberg later fell in love with the then-famous opera singer Natalie Frassini, whom he had met at the Kassel Court Theater. Duke Ernst Alexander persuaded the Hessian Landgrave Ferdinand to elevate Natalie, whose real name was Eschborn and who derived her stage name from her discoverer and trainer Gioacchino Rossini, to the nobility as Baroness von Grünhof (after a family estate near Mitau in present-day Latvia) to reduce the difference in status to a tolerable level. The wedding followed in Hamburg on August 18, 1860.

Duke Ernst II of Coburg had met Frassini in London during one of her performances. He, who was very enthusiastic about opera and its attractive representatives (see Ketschendorf Castle), persuaded her to accept a guest contract at the Coburg Court Theater. Here she portrayed Gilda in Rigoletto with great success and was so taken with the quiet residential city on the Itz that she asked her future husband to move their shared residence to Coburg. After the death of Ernst of Württemberg in 1868, who was buried in the ducal mausoleum in the Coburg cemetery on Glockenberg, she lived as a widow on the Ernsthöhe until 1890. She moved to Berlin and left the property to her daughter Alexandra. She sold it in 1893 to the factory and estate owner Julius Heinzel from Łódź, who was later ennobled as Baron Heinzel von Hohenfels, thus transforming the Ernsthöhe into Hohenfels Castle. Heinzel built a stud farm not far from the castle, which produced the winners at the Hoppegarten trotting track in Berlin in 1906 and 1907.

In 1918, Heinzel sold the entire estate to the Berlin electrical entrepreneur Sigmund Bergmann († 1927), who had the house adapted to his needs by the Berlin architect Otto Rehnig.

On November 1, 1932, the castle, stud farm, and park became municipal property. From September 1933, the outbuildings were repurposed as a women's labor camp. From May 1934 to 1944, the castle housed the first Reichsschule of the NS-Frauenschaft. A Reich Labor Service camp for female youths was annexed in 1939. From 1945 to 1954, the estate stood empty.