Hohenstein Castle

Hohenstein Castle, first mentioned as a castle in 1306, is located on a wooded sandstone ridge in the Hohenstein district of the municipality of Ahorn, six kilometers southwest of Coburg in Bavarian Upper Franconia (Germany).

Hohenstein Castle

The present Hohenstein Castle was first documented in 1306 as Castrum Hohenstein in dem Grabfelde, meaning it was mentioned as a castle. Countess Jutta von Henneberg was registered as the owner. In the following 150 years, the hilltop castle changed hands several times until Duke Wilhelm of Saxony, who enfeoffed the castle guard of Hohen Steyn to the brothers Hans and Thomas von Lichtenstein. In 1466, the Bamberg vassals Kunz von Aufseß and Kunz von Streitberg, whose ancestral castles were located in Franconian Switzerland, devastated the castle. Both knights and their also involved brother Kunz Ochs were soon after sentenced by the Coburg city court to compensate for the damage caused and to pay 4000 guilders for breach of the public peace to the Coburg lordship. In 1525, rebellious peasants from the hordes of Thomas Müntzer invaded, burning the medieval castle to its foundations. A part of the square tower of the southern outer bailey remained as a ruin next to the castle chapel.

Hohenstein Palace

The uninhabitable castle remains, still held in fief by the Lichtensteins, were only rebuilt in 1573 by Michael von Lichtenstein as a palace in the Renaissance style, as an inscription on the so-called Lichtenstein building testifies. The tall gatehouse also originated during this period. The round tower, against which the gatehouse nestles, is six years older and offers views from its crenellated crown of the surrounding castles of Banz and Callenberg, the Basilica of Vierzehnheiligen, Veste Heldburg, and the Altenburg near Bamberg.

Shortly before the end of the Thirty Years' War, the palace was plundered in 1648 by "Swedish peoples" and five years later sold to Christof von Thüna, bailiff of Schauenstein (Brandenburg). Thüna bequeathed the estate to his five daughters in equal parts. The youngest heiress married Johann Helmhard Auer von Herrenkirchen, who bought out his sisters-in-law and thus managed to keep the palace in the family for three generations. In 1741, the chamberlain Adam von Schauroth from Ansbach acquired the estate for 65,000 Franconian guilders and 200 ducats of "Gönnegeld" for ongoing use and sold it 18 years later to the Brunswick Lieutenant General Philipp Ernst Freiherr von Imhof (spelled Imhoff on some memorial stones). The new owner had the palace rebuilt according to his own ideas and the palace garden initially laid out in the Rococo style, which his descendants expanded into a romantic park. After the First World War, the von Imhoff family lost their property due to the Imperial Constitution of 1921; it became allodial, i.e., imperial property. During the Third Reich, from 1941, the palace was initially used by the Reichspost as a postal recreation home and after the Second World War leased by the Deutsche Bundespost to Caritas, which established a retirement home. In 1976, the Post sold the estate to the Munich entrepreneur Oskar Hacker, who had the palace restored between 1987 and 1993 to open it as a guesthouse with a wine bar and restaurant. In 1996, Hacker leased his palace to the hotel operating company Kötterl & Wandt, which continues to run it as a castle hotel with upscale gastronomy.