Obergimpern Castle

Obergimpern Castle is a stately home that emerged from the administrator's building of an older castle in Obergimpern, a district of Bad Rappenau in the Heilbronn district in northern Baden-Württemberg. The castle received its current form through several construction measures by the Counts of Yrsch, whose descendants still own the property today.

Since the 13th or 14th century, Obergimpern had a moated castle, built as a lowland castle in the Krebsbach valley, serving as the seat of the early local lords. The castle was probably only a fortified wooden house with a rampart and moat. The associated farmyard was located on a hill to the southeast. Under what circumstances and when the moated castle was abandoned is unknown. Already under the rule of the Lords of Helmstatt, whose Obergimpern side line died out in 1685, the castle was probably abandoned. Instead, the main building of the farmyard served as a stately home or tenant's residence. When, after the extinction of the Helmstatt family, the fiefdom in Obergimpern was granted by the Electoral Palatinate to the Barons of Yrsch, the property was already referred to as a castle in 1709, although at that time it probably only had the dimensions of a farmhouse and was not inhabited by the lords, who mostly lived in Bavaria and South Tyrol, but merely became the seat of their bailiff.

In a document from 1740, the main building is described as a two-story, well-built house; the appurtenances included barns, stables with vaulted cellars, and various lands. Baron Johann Carl von Yrsch (1695–1766) lived in Mannheim, but from that year on, he had a farm built on the nearby Eulenberg near Obergimpern. When his property was divided among his sons in 1762, Bernhard (1727–1778) received the Eulenberg farm, while the village of Obergimpern with the bailiff's residence went to Johann Nepomuk von Yrsch (1736–1811). After the neighboring church was rebuilt in 1764, he initiated a significant enlargement of the castle in 1765/66 by having its structure extended and covered with a half-hipped roof. When the residence of the Electoral Palatinate was moved to Munich, Johann Nepomuk was also called there in 1779, so that the newly expanded castle subsequently fell into disrepair again.

In 1862, Sigmund August Carl von Yrsch-Pienzenau (1808–1899), the grandson of the former builder of the castle, came to Obergimpern. Sigmund August Carl took the castle as his retirement home after his pension from military service and had it renovated in the 1860s in the Neoclassical style, whereby the castle was raised and received a very flat hipped roof over a mezzanine. Design drawings for this renovation still envisioned a good deal of ornamentation such as battlements and turrets, which, however, were not executed.

Through the marriage of the Yrsch heiress Luitgard (1922–1993) to Götz von Bülow (1911–2003), the castle came into the possession of the von Bülow family, who still own the building. The building was modernized in the 1960s, with the mezzanine being removed again to achieve a greater slope of the roof surfaces. The associated castle estate was leased for most of the time, and the castle often served only as a summer residence for the owner family. It has only been permanently inhabited and maintained since 1991.