Plön Castle: The Ducal Residence and Academy in Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.5
- Popularity
- Medium
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern, Modern
- Civilizations
- German, Holy Roman Empire, Kingdom of Prussia
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Palace
On this page23 sections
History
Plön Castle is a former ducal residence on the Bischofsberg beside Plön in Germany, built between 1633 and 1636 in a transitional style combining late Renaissance and early Baroque architecture. It was created for the Dukes of Schleswig-Holstein-Plön and is one of the largest castles in Schleswig-Holstein, as well as the only substantially preserved castle in the state situated on a hill.
Medieval origins on the Bischofsberg
The earliest fortification associated with Plön was the Wendish stronghold of Plune, established in the tenth century on Olsborg Island in Lake Plön. Destroyed in the twelfth century, it was rebuilt under Count Adolf II of Schauenburg and Holstein and used as a base during the colonization of the formerly Slavic region. In 1173 the castle was transferred to the Bischofsberg, where the present residence stands.
Plön developed into a market town during the twelfth century and received town rights in the 1230s. From 1290 to 1390, the hill castle served as the seat of the Schauenburg line of Holstein-Plön. After that line died out, the castle passed to Duke Gerhard VI of Schleswig and, several generations later, to the Danish royal house. During this period, Plön and its castle had no major role in the wider political history of the country.
From destruction to a ducal residence
Lübeck troops burned the castle during the Count’s Feud, a conflict between Lübeck and Denmark, in 1534. A larger building was later erected on the partly Romanesque castle site. In 1564, King Frederick II of Denmark transferred part of his Schleswig and Holstein holdings to his brother John the Younger. John founded the partitioned duchy of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg, and Plön and its castle became part of his possessions. Under John, an early mercantilist ruler who promoted economic development, the town and castle experienced an upswing.
After John’s death in 1622, the duchy was divided among his six male heirs. The Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein-Plön was one of the territories created by this division. Its first duke, Joachim Ernest, decided to build a representative residence for himself and his family on the occasion of his marriage to Dorothea Augusta, a princess of Gottorf. Her dowry partly financed the project. In 1632, Joachim Ernest ordered the old castle to be demolished, and the new Renaissance residence was completed in only three years during the Thirty Years’ War, the major European conflict fought from 1618 to 1648.
The Plön dukes and their court
The new castle served as the residence of the ducal family, although it was less politically important than Gottorf Castle. The Plön dukes also owned residences and summer houses at Traventhal, Ahrensbök, Rethwisch, and Reinfeld, so the castle was not occupied continuously. It nevertheless became a cultural centre of the duchy. Joachim Ernest founded a library that later grew to about 10,000 volumes, and he collected optical instruments and measuring devices in keeping with his interest in physics and optics.
Joachim Ernest was succeeded by his son Hans Adolf, who was often away while serving as a military commander in imperial service. His wife and mother largely represented him in the duchy. Joachim Frederick later lived at the castle, but after his death in debt and without a male heir in 1722, the residence stood empty for seven years. Some of its furnishings passed to his creditors.
The castle’s cultural heyday began in 1729 under Frederick Charles, the last Duke of Plön. He maintained a Baroque court and had the interiors furnished in the Rococo style, a lighter and more ornamental development of the Baroque during the eighteenth century. He also expanded the residence complex around the Schlossplatz, adding the Marstall, the Reithaus, and the garden palace now called the Princes’ House.
Return to the Danish crown and royal use
Plön Castle remained the ducal residence until Frederick Charles died without a male heir in 1761. The duchy then reverted to the Danish royal house. Frederick Charles’s widow, Christiane Armgardis, occupied the castle as a widow’s residence until 1779. The building later became the seat of the Amtmann, a local administrative official. From 1777 to 1823, it housed Peter Frederick William, the mentally incapacitated son of Frederick Augustus I of Oldenburg, who lived there under the guardianship of King Christian VII of Denmark. A grammar school was established in the castle in 1833.
From 1840, the castle served as the official summer residence of King Christian VIII of Denmark. It was renovated, some furnishings were replaced in the Classical style, and the exterior received the white plaster finish that remains visible today.
Prussian possession and the cadet school
After the Second Schleswig War in 1864, the castle came into Prussian possession. Its interior was converted for use as a military cadet school. From the late nineteenth century, the sons of Emperor Wilhelm II were educated at Plön. The Princes’ House was enlarged for this purpose, an educational farm was established on Princes’ Island, and a railway station known as Princes’ Station was built in front of the castle. At the suggestion of Empress Augusta Victoria, the chapel received new mural paintings.
The original furnishings were removed in 1868, and most were transferred to Kiel Castle. Most of those objects were destroyed in an air raid on Kiel in 1942. After the Treaty of Versailles, the 1919 peace treaty that restricted Germany after the First World War and prohibited German military cadet schools, the castle became a state educational institution in 1920.
Nazi institution and the events of 1945
From 1933, the castle housed a National Political Institute, or Napola, a selective boarding-school system created by the Nazi regime to educate pupils according to National Socialist ideals. The school opened on 1 May 1933 as the first institution of its kind and was initially named after SA leader Ernst Röhm. After Röhm was murdered in 1934, it was renamed NPEA Plön. The school closed on 23 April 1945.
In 1945, Grand Admiral Karl Dönitz maintained a temporary command post in Plön. On 2 May, the castle served for one day as the administrative headquarters of part of the Dönitz government before that government moved to Flensburg-Mürwik. British occupation forces in Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg, organized as VIII Corps under General Evelyn Barker, subsequently established their headquarters in the castle. The building survived both world wars without war damage.
Boarding school and modern conservation
With British military approval, the State Boarding School Schloss Plön for boys and girls was established in 1946 and used the entire castle grounds. Boys lived in the castle and girls in the Princes’ House, while the boathouse and other ancillary buildings served administrative purposes. Teaching took place at the nearby boarding-school grammar school. The boarding school closed in 2001, after decades of residential use had contributed to the deterioration of the historic building.
Surveys in 1986 and 1988 identified a major investment requirement. Because the state could not finance a historically appropriate restoration alongside the uneconomic boarding-school operation, it considered a sale necessary. After the outbuildings began to be sold in 1995, the castle was sold in 2002 for 3.6 million euros to the charitable Fielmann Akademie Schloss Plön.
The castle was restored and converted over four years in accordance with heritage-preservation requirements. The work was completed in 2006 and created a modern training centre while retaining and restoring historically important rooms. Since January 2002, the Fielmann Akademie Schloss Plön has used most of the castle as a training and qualification centre for opticians and hearing-aid specialists. Master classes began during the reconstruction, and since the winter semester of 2005–06 the academy has offered a Bachelor of Science degree in optometry in cooperation with the Fachhochschule Lübeck, a German university of applied sciences. The academy also trains optical-industry apprentices and provides seminars for specialists and executives.
Restored historic rooms are used for guided tours, selected public and semi-public events, and classical concerts. This limited public access followed a period when the castle had been largely inaccessible during its use as a boarding school. Plön Castle is the only substantially preserved castle complex resulting from the building activity of the Plön dukes. Their other residences, hunting lodges, and summer castles at Ahrensbök, Reinfeld, Rethwisch, and Traventhal were gradually demolished from the late eighteenth century after losing the interest of the Danish royal house.
Remains
Main residence and courtyard
Plön Castle was conceived exclusively as a representative residence rather than a fortress. Its elevated position was chosen for visual and representational reasons, and the complex has no defensive walls, ramparts, or bastions. The three-storey building stands on a fieldstone plinth and is constructed of brick, the characteristic building material of Schleswig-Holstein at the time. It has three wings arranged around a courtyard of honour in a horseshoe-shaped plan that opens south toward the Great Plön Lake. The larger central north wing is joined by shorter east and west wings.
The building’s restrained façades combine late Renaissance and early Baroque characteristics. Their main decoration is a continuous crown of gables around the outer and courtyard façades. Two lantern-like roof turrets crown the main building, while a clock turret above the central courtyard gable was demolished in 1789. The façades were originally coated with a brownish-red brick slurry rather than left exposed, and the roof was covered with red tiles. The white plaster and grey slate roofs visible today were added in the mid-nineteenth century.
The courtyard terrace overlooks the Plön lake landscape and forms the focal element of the ensemble. The façades were designed mainly for distant visual effect, and the castle is visible from the surrounding countryside and from Lake Plön. Stair towers were added to the outer walls of the east and west wings during the nineteenth-century cadet-school period. Their Neo-Renaissance forms belong to that later phase.
Internal arrangement and representative rooms
The ground floor originally contained administrative rooms, the castle kitchen, servants’ quarters, and four prison cells beneath the west wing. The first floor was assigned to the ducal children, while the second floor housed the duke and duchess and contained the principal representational rooms. Additional servants’ rooms occupied the roof space. A central ceremonial hall and two symmetrically arranged stairwells reflect the emergence of Baroque spatial planning. The chapel occupies the ground floor of the east wing and extends down to the basement.
Most of the castle now contains academy classrooms, study rooms, conference rooms, and optical laboratories. The complex has 123 guest rooms, most of them in the west wing, along with a staff restaurant and two accessible lifts installed beside the historic stairwells. Little of the original furnishing survives after centuries of changing use. Some eighteenth-century furniture and panelling transferred around 1930 to the Schleswig-Holstein State Museum are now assembled as the Plön Hall in Gottorf Castle.
The Gallery and Garden Hall
Two portals at the junctions with the west and east wings, together with the central main portal, open into the Gallery, a long corridor connecting the side wings. An arcade links it with the adjacent Garden Hall. The Gallery contains furniture from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
The Garden Hall occupies the site of an earlier garden room whose large French doors opened onto a garden parterre. After the residence lost its courtly function, the room was divided for other uses and served as washing and shower facilities during the boarding-school period. The present room follows the earlier garden salon’s dimensions but retains none of its original decoration. It now serves as an academy reception room and contains furniture and tapestries from Günther Fielmann’s private collection, together with portraits of the Plön dukes formerly belonging to the castle.
The Knights’ Hall
The Knights’ Hall was originally the Baroque ceremonial hall in the central wing. Measuring 12 by 26 metres, it is the castle’s largest room and occupies the full depth of the upper floor between the stairwells. Its wooden barrel vault rises into the attic. Seven lower windows and three upper windows in the gable rows illuminate each side of the central building.
The present name dates from the period of Danish royal ownership. No knighthood existed at Plön, and the name refers to comparable halls in Danish castles. Its furnishings approximate the period of Christian VIII and include restrained Classical decoration, musicians’ galleries, chandeliers based on older models, furniture from the Fielmann collection, and modern seating for events.
Ducal state rooms
The ducal state rooms occupy the second floor of the east wing. Their parade rooms are arranged as an enfilade, a sequence aligned so that the doorways form a continuous view. Used for receptions and audiences rather than ordinary residence, they date from Frederick Charles’s reign, retain some original fabric, and are largely Rococo in style. After restoration and refurnishing, they became the principal focus of castle tours.
The Ducal Antechamber, the first room in the suite, served as a waiting salon. It contains the castle’s only surviving seventeenth-century stucco ceiling. Overdoor paintings show the Plön residence in the eighteenth century, and both the paintings and the large mirror belong to the original furnishings. A large faience stove made by a Kiel workshop stands there as a permanent loan from Hamburg’s Museum of Arts and Crafts. Its niche was designed by Bartolomeo Bossi, who also carried out the stucco work of the garden house.
The small Audience Room behind the antechamber received lower-ranking visitors according to the hierarchy of French court ceremonial. During restoration, the original colours of the panelling were uncovered and re-gilded. The silk wallpaper was newly made from an eighteenth-century model. Its furnishings include objects from the Fielmann collection, including a large mirrored writing cabinet from an Altona workshop.
The Ducal Bedroom forms the end of the parade suite and served as a second audience room for socially higher-ranking guests. Its principal feature is an elaborate alcove containing the bed. The Rococo-decorated niche survived almost undamaged, although the room became a music room during the boarding-school period and a grand piano occupied the bed’s position. The ornamental bed now in the room is not original, but corresponds in style and construction to a former canopy bed.
Ducal Library
The Ducal Library stands slightly apart from the Baroque suite and once housed Frederick Charles’s book collection. The books were kept in wall cupboards behind the surviving panelling before being auctioned after 1763. Latin maxims above the doors express the room’s instructional purpose.
Chapel and ducal crypt
The chapel has occupied the east wing since the castle was built. It is a two-aisled space divided by a central pillar into two bays. A suspended ceiling installed during the educational-institution period concealed its original form. The upper level was used as a meeting room for pupils, while the chapel itself became a bicycle cellar during the boarding-school period.
During the castle renovation, the chapel was restored to the appearance it acquired in the nineteenth century. This includes historicist paintings commissioned by Empress Augusta Victoria in 1897. The chapel is not currently used for worship and has neither altar nor organ, but it forms part of guided tours and is occasionally used for concerts.
Behind the chapel lies the castle crypt, which retains thirteen sarcophagi of the Plön dukes. The most elaborate is the Rococo sarcophagus of Duke Frederick Charles, made in a Copenhagen workshop in 1766.
Schlossplatz and service buildings
West of the castle hill, the former economic yard was destroyed by a major fire in 1745. The cleared area made it possible to construct a riding ground. The Marstall, large riding hall, and related buildings then formed the Schlossplatz. An underground car park now occupies the area beneath the former nineteenth-century cadet exercise ground.
Marstall
The elongated Marstall was built from 1745 to 1750 by Johann Gottfried Rosenberg. This late Baroque, unplastered brick building accommodated 56 horses, and its sculptural decoration refers to its equestrian function. It later served as the boarding-school gymnasium and now contains classrooms, the secretariat, and the library of the master school.
Reithaus
The Reithaus, also called the Clock House because of the clock in its gable, was probably designed by Rosenberg and built in 1746. Its broad form and high central risalit, a section projecting slightly from the main wall, were intended for tournaments and other equestrian events. It was converted into apartments in 1892 and now houses the information centre of the Holstein Switzerland Nature Park and exhibitions on Schleswig-Holstein’s natural environment.
Infirmary and Kommandeursvilla
The former infirmary beside the Marstall was built of brick in 1896–97 in the Wilhelmine style. It served as the cadet school’s hospital and is now divided into privately used apartments. South of the castle approach, the Kommandeursvilla was built in 1895–97 as the cadet-school commander’s residence. Its historicist Neo-Renaissance design refers to the castle’s nineteenth-century stair towers. After renovation, it was converted into apartments.
Pförtnerhaus and swimming hall
The Pförtnerhaus is a small villa built in 1895 on the terrace in front of the east wing. It served as the gatekeeper’s residence and controlled the main entrance to the cadet academy. Its upper floor contained detention rooms. After later use as a gallery, the building was converted into a café and bar.
The Jugendstil swimming hall directly below the castle was built in 1908 as a swimming and sports facility for the sons of Emperor Wilhelm II. It retained that function during the boarding-school period, closed in 1994, and was subsequently renovated. The former bathing hall and adjoining rooms now serve Plön as a cultural forum for changing exhibitions and include a restaurant.
Gardens and the Princes’ House
The present park developed from several earlier gardens. The first lay directly below the castle hill, while the south-facing slope was planted as a vineyard after construction began, following the model of the hillside gardens of the Villa d’Este at Tivoli. This vineyard garden survived until 1729. A Baroque garden was later laid out behind the riding ground because the castle’s elevated, partly urban position did not allow a garden centred directly on the residence.
Created for Frederick Charles by Georg Dietrich Tschierske between 1730 and 1748, the Baroque garden was organized around a central pavilion, the later Princes’ House. Ornamental parterres led into a distant bosquet zone, a designed grove or wooded garden compartment. The western woodland served as a hunting ground, reached through the seven-pointed hunting star. Its layout remains, although later tree growth makes it difficult to discern. After the end of the duchy, the garden became overgrown and was partly converted to productive use. In the nineteenth century, Christian Schaumburg redesigned it as an English-style landscape garden. The large lime avenues survived and still frame the largely lost Baroque garden, whose basic outlines remain visible from the air. A sports track was installed in the rear third of the park in 1930.
Princes’ House
The Princes’ House is a small Rococo pleasure palace with a curved garden façade and interior decoration by Bartolomeo Bossi. Built from 1747 to 1751 by J. G. Rosenberg for Frederick Charles and modelled on the Falkenlust hunting lodge, it is among the few Rococo buildings in Holstein.
In the late nineteenth century, the building was extended by three window axes on each side, formed as shallow projecting sections. It acquired its present name after becoming a school for the sons of Emperor Wilhelm II. During the First World War it housed a military hospital, and during the boarding-school period it accommodated female pupils. The building is used for concerts and ceremonies and is open during scheduled guided tours.
