Schloss Marbach: A Former Castle and Conference Centre in Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.6
- Popularity
- Very Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Modern
- Civilizations
- German
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Castle
On this page8 sections
History
Schloss Marbach is a former hillside castle and present-day conference and seminar centre in Germany, above the Untersee on the Höri peninsula. The site was first recorded in 1291 in the chronicle of Reichenau Abbey, a major medieval Benedictine monastery on an island in Lake Constance. Abbot Albrecht von Ramstein referred to it as “our castle called Marbach.” Its later history was shaped by warfare, aristocratic ownership, repeated fires, and extensive rebuilding.
Medieval castle and conflicts
In 1365, the Bernese barons of Brandis used Marbach as a base for attacks on shipping on the Rhine. Trade to and from Constance collapsed, and the town’s chief magistrate was held captive at the castle. Constance merchants captured Marbach in 1369, after which its nine defenders were beheaded in Constance.
Mangold von Brandis, who was both abbot of Reichenau Abbey and bishop of Constance, ordered the castle rebuilt in 1384. Nikolaus Sattler of Ravensburg purchased it in 1387 and acquired the nearby Kehlhof, a manor estate centre for managing agricultural land and its revenues, the following year. This brought Marbach and Wangen under the same ownership for the first time.
Sattler sold Marbach in 1409 to Baron Jakob I von Ulm, a member of Constance’s urban aristocracy. During the conflict between the city’s patricians and guilds in 1430, Jakob II von Ulm supported the patricians and fortified himself at Marbach. Insurgent citizens from Constance stormed and devastated the castle. After years of neglect, it burned in 1461.
Ulm ownership and repeated destruction
The divided Ulm family estate was sold to the Augsburg patrician Peutinger family in 1558. Count Ulrich Fugger, lord of Kirchberg and Weissenhorn, acquired the Marbach properties on credit in 1581. Imperial commissioners arranged his debts in 1587 and returned the estate to the Peutinger heirs, after which Count Jakob Fugger, provost of Constance Cathedral, bought it back.
Baron Kaspar von Ulm recovered the family’s former property in 1598. His son Ludwig, who held an influential position at the imperial court, obtained an imperial order requiring Marbach to be sold back to the Ulm family. Members of the von Ulm family retained the seat of lordship for more than 300 years, acquiring it through inheritance, selling it among themselves, or taking responsibility for its upkeep.
Fire damaged Marbach again in 1570, and the castle burned for a third time during the Thirty Years’ War, the European conflict of 1618 to 1648 that brought extensive military destruction, especially within the Holy Roman Empire.
Nineteenth-century rebuilding
The French Count de Grimaudet purchased the estate in 1829 and extensively renovated and embellished it. This work created the foundations and exterior walls of the present building, and the former castle thereafter became known as Schloss Marbach. Grimaudet died there in 1839 and was buried in Wangen.
During the following decades, the property passed through numerous owners. These included the merchant Gallus Reglin of Überlingen, the glass manufacturer Leopold Faller of Lenzkirch, the pharmacist Johann Kasper Schmied of Freiburg, Karl Heinrich Friedrich Kohler of Geneva, Arnold Krücke of Jena, and Dr. Wieckenbach, a Royal Prussian staff physician from Stralsund. By 1863, the building had been stripped of its furnishings and had fallen into disrepair. A series of sales and a foreclosure followed before Wieckenbach acquired it in 1885.
August Smith bought the castle in 1888 and established a well-attended clinic. Oskar Hornung acquired it ten years later and expanded the building to four storeys. When land purchases failed to produce the expected increase in value, the clinic became a joint-stock company, a business owned by shareholders. After the First World War, it treated war wounded.
Twentieth-century changes
In 1919, the Mannheim agricultural-machinery manufacturer Karl Lanz acquired Marbach as a birthday present for his wife, Gisella. He commissioned the Fairy-Tale Fountain, whose surviving figures represent the Lanz children. A fire destroyed Schloss Marbach down to its exterior walls in 1924, but the building was reconstructed with a more spacious internal arrangement.
In 1941, Karl Lanz’s widow sold the property to the Reich treasury, the German state’s fiscal and property administration, for 600,000 Reichsmark. The Luftwaffe, Nazi Germany’s air force, used it as a rest and recreation home for officers. The French army occupied Marbach after the war in 1945, using the building for soldiers’ rest and recreation and the park as a campsite. The French state returned the property to the German Federal Property Administration in 1978. The building and its park were subsequently used jointly by the boarding school across the road and the Protestant Schloss Gaienhofen boarding school.
Jacobs Suchard, a Zurich-based coffee and chocolate company, purchased the property in 1987 after it had stood empty for three years. Extensive renovation began in 1988, and Marbach opened in June 1989 as the company’s internal communications centre. The Johann Jacobs Foundation in Zurich took ownership in 1990 and opened the conference and seminar centre to institutions, associations, and companies. The foundation acquired the Bella Vista manor house and the former boarding-school grounds in 1997. Barry Callebaut became tenant of the entire complex in 2004, while the centre continued to accept outside conference clients.
Remains
Schloss Marbach stands on the Höri peninsula beside the Untersee, an arm of Lake Constance, in the municipality of Öhningen. The main building occupies a bank rising relatively steeply about 40 metres above the shore, while the property extends down toward the lake. The Swiss shore lies opposite, and the position commands a broad section of the lake and river.
Main building
The present structure is principally a new building from the early nineteenth century. Its foundations and exterior walls belong to Count de Grimaudet’s rebuilding, begun in 1829. Oskar Hornung’s expansion had already increased the building to four storeys before the 1924 fire reduced it to its exterior walls. Reconstruction gave the interior a more generous division of spaces. Late twentieth-century renovation added residential towers, an atrium, an indoor swimming hall, and further ancillary buildings.
Park and conference complex
The grounds cover more than 10 hectares and retain remains of the Fairy-Tale Fountain, including figures representing the children of the Lanz family. The later complex also includes the Bella Vista manor house across the road, three guesthouses, the Forum, two tennis courts, and a four-hole golf course with a driving range and putting green. The facilities comprise 61 guest rooms, a restaurant, bars, an indoor swimming pool, and conference rooms for between 8 and 120 participants.
