The Plassenburg — the White Lady of the Hohenzollerns

OVERVIEW

The Plassenburg is a former state fortress and residence above Kulmbach in Upper Franconia, first recorded in 1135 when Count Berthold II of Andechs called himself 'comes de Plassenberch'. From 1557 Caspar Vischer rebuilt it as a Renaissance fortified palace. It now houses the German Tin Figure Museum, the Friedrich the Great army museum, the Museum Hohenzollern in Franken and the Obermain regional museum.

HISTORY

From March 1493, when Margravine Barbara of Brandenburg was interned there, the castle served as the Hohenzollerns' family prison: in 1515 Margrave Kasimir locked his own father, Friedrich II, in a tower room for twelve years. It held out seven months in the Second Margrave War before surrendering on 21 June 1554; from 21 October the besiegers blew up and burned it. Rebuilt, it later served as a military hospital, from 1817 a penal workhouse, from 1862 to 1909 a prison for some 650 inmates from all over Bavaria, an internment camp for 'enemy aliens' in 1914, and under the Nazis Fritz Todt's Reich school of German technology.

REPORTED ACTIVITY

The widespread legend of the White Lady (Weiße Frau) originates here. Kunigunde, widow of Count Otto of Orlamünde, loved Albrecht the Handsome, son of the Burgrave of Nuremberg, who let it be known he would marry her 'if four eyes were not in the way' — meaning his parents. She took it to mean her two children, aged two and three, and killed them with a needle through the head. Rejected, she won the Pope's forgiveness on condition she found a convent, shuffled on her knees from the Plassenburg toward Berneck, and died abbess of Himmelkron. The chroniclers tell it consistently, but it cannot be historical as far as Kunigunde goes: she demonstrably died childless. The White Lady first appeared at the Plassenburg, and from then on announced coming deaths and misfortunes to the Hohenzollerns — reportedly in 1486, 1540, 1554 and 1677. When Margrave Georg Friedrich I took possession of the rebuilt castle after 1554, the legend says, she rattled chains, frightened the ladies of the court and strangled his cook and quartermaster. Other candidates for her identity include the widow Bertha of Rosenberg, overlaid by the pagan Perchta. The same ghost was later reported in the Berlin Palace from 1 January 1598, eight days before the death of Elector John George.

VISITING

The Plassenburg is open as a museum complex above Kulmbach.