Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg

The Château du Haut-Koenigsbourg (French: [ʃɑto dy o kœniksbuʁ]; German: Hohkönigsburg), sometimes also Haut-Kœnigsbourg, is a medieval castle located in the commune of Orschwiller in the Bas-Rhin département of Alsace, France.

[1][2] Located in the Vosges mountains just west of Sélestat, situated in a strategic area on a rocky spur overlooking the Upper Rhine Plain, it was used by successive powers from the Middle Ages until the Thirty Years' War when it was abandoned.

However, a Burg Staufen (Castrum Estufin) is documented in 1147, when the monks complained to King Louis VII of France about its unlawful construction by the Hohenstaufen Duke Frederick II of Swabia.

As the Hohensteins allowed some robber barons to use the castle as a hideout, and their behaviour began to exasperate the neighbouring rulers, in 1454 it was occupied by Elector Palatine Frederick I and in 1462 was set ablaze by the unified forces of the cities of Colmar, Strasbourg and Basel.

In 1479, the Habsburg emperor Frederick III granted the castle ruins in fief to the Counts of Thierstein, who rebuilt them with a defensive system suited to the new artillery of the time.

The management of the restoration of the fortifications was entrusted to the architect Bodo Ebhardt, a proven expert on the reconstruction of medieval castles.

Wilhelm II, who regularly visited the construction site via a specially built train station in nearby Saint-Hippolyte, also encouraged certain modifications that emphasised a Romantic nostalgia for Germanic civilization.

For example, the main dining hall has a higher roof than it did at the time and links between the Hohenzollern family and the Habsburg rulers of the Holy Roman Empire are emphasized.

However, in recent years many historians have established that, although it is not a completely accurate reconstruction, it is at least interesting for what it shows about Wilhelm II's romantic nationalist ideas of the past and the architect's work.