Hello and welcome here to Schloss Drachenburg, Drachenburg Castle on this very beautiful spot close to Bonn at the Drachenfels Mountain. At the shore of the River Rhine. And yeah, we're here at Schloss Drachenburg, My name is Walburga Schulte Wien I work here at the Drachenburg Castle and I would like to show you a little bit more about this beautiful castle and
this premise since we start here at this, at one of my favorites places, especially outside, which is the beautiful Venus terrace. And it's a part of this beautiful landscape park here at this castle. And it's not a medieval castle, actually. It's a building from the late 19th century that has been built between 1882 and
1884 For Baron Stephan von Sarter. And he was actually an innkeeper son coming from Bonn. So he was not a nobleman by birth, he was grown up in Cologne and learned there at a private bank, did an
apprenticeship and later he went to Paris and became a stock exchange publisher. He edited a stock exchange newspaper and several brochures about big
transactions of his time, And we think he also bought and sell stocks, and therefore he became very wealthy. And it was, of course, his aim then to get a noble title and then later to buy this nice spot here close to his hometown, Bonn. And then he started building this beautiful building, which has been finished after less than three years. But he did not actually live so much here. His place was Paris, where he lived. He later became also a French citizen. And when he died in 1902, he was a bachelor, had no family, no children. Its nephews and nieces here in the Rhineland in Germany inherited the castle and one of his nephews was a lawyer in Bonn, he wanted to open the castle for public. And so he did that. And fortunately, we have a lot of pictures of that time Which helped us later for... The renovation of this castle. The castle has a very changing history because the nephew only had it in his
possession about eight or ten years. Afterwards there were some also other private owners which use it as a private
holiday space or opened it also for public, as a site. In the beginning of the 1930s, we had different schools following each other. At first it was a boarding school, a Catholic boarding school for boys. Then, within the late 1930s, we have the National Socialism regime in Germany, and this Catholic school had to close its doors. And a few years later, a Nazi Party school, an of Hitler school came here to the castle. So within the last days of the Second World War, the allied forces attack the
castle and they destroyed some parts of the western facade. After some renovation works and the late forties beginning of the fifties, there
was a school again, a
a Railway worker school, which which railway workers Learned something about the theory of things they had to do within classes that lasts a few weeks, actually. But in the 1960s, the school went away, and so we had a long period of about 10 years of vacancy and a lot of parts were destroyed. A lot of vandals came in here and destroyed things. Fortunately, at the beginning of the 1970s, we have another private owner, which is called Mr. Paul Spinat. Spinat is the German word for the vegetables spinach, so we can call him spinach, Mr. Spinach as you like. And he bought the castle from the owner, which was the state of North
Rhine-Westphalia at that time. And he did some restoration works, but his aim was not exactly to bring back the castle back into the times of the 19th
century of the late 19th century. He wanted to create a kind of fantasy, what he liked of that time, and so he had some restoring, some constructions. That has mainly been put away now. But we will see within our tour that some parts are real estate of his time. So he sold the castle again back to the state of North Rhine-Westphalia in
1989-1990. And then it was given from the state to the North Rhine-Westphalia Foundation and really huge restoration campaign started, which lasts until about 2010. So it was about 16 or 17 years of restoration, comparing to only three, two or three years of building. That's a very long and huge time, but the goal was to bring it back into the 19th century. Outside the park has been also restored the building, the architecture and inside. I told you this is a building of the late 19th century and the time which is called in art history is called historicism. You have a lot of dedications to former epochs of architectural epochs, Especially a lot of medieval parts. You have, like the crenellated walls around All the big north tower. You see, it looks a bit like a medieval castle, but you have also passed, that reminds you maybe of churches, medieval churches,
especially gothic times, the arched point windows. We have a lot of tracery windows, so that's very typical for buildings of that late 19th century and we'll also see later inside. So I think we could go now inside and have a look inside the rooms. And I'll tell you something more about the functions of the rooms, of the
levels, how a house like this actually worked in the time. Although we must say that Sarter maybe did not use it so much because he did not spend so much time in here, he spent nearly his whole life in Paris. Ok. So please follow me. Ok, so we are here now inside of the castle, the first room you pass when you walk inside through the main staircase is the
so-called reception room, and this whole level you see here is dedicated to events. So it's a public level called representation level and you have this wonderful enfilade, which shows it's so open you can change from one to another lounge room and here in this reception room. The owner should stand, welcome his guests, drink the first glass of champagne, have the first talks and then the guests could stroll around here through the different lounge rooms if you want to separate parts of this whole level. You could do that by using these sliding doors we have. We can find somewhere and in former times, we had also curtains that could be let down to separate
paths and rooms from each other. If you have a look around in this reception room, then please have a look at the
beautiful ceiling. With these woodworks here very nicely made and what is very important for the whole castle for the declaration of the whole
castle is actually a glass painting. A glass painting. Stained glass windows. And we have here five very, very nice pictures five women showing allegories of the five human senses. We have the sight. We have the hearing. We have touching, smelling and tasting the last one. Let's go on a bit further. Which is the dining room, which you can see, it's a very, very dark room with dark wood works, dark
paintings on the wall also, People of that time especially, was especially typical for Germany, for German
decoration of that time. They found it very cosy, actually to have, to be in these dark buildings, But you had to have essential lightning at that time, also to bring some light into these dark rooms. Yeah, you can see this is a small dining room, and when you have a look at the walls, there are a lot of pictures, a lot of wall paintings with a technique of m
arouflage. That's canvas paintings that has been stuck onto the wall with glues. And they show several scenes of a medieval hunting. So which fits very well to a dining room, actually. But you can see because of I told you of the changing history of the castle and
of the vandals being here in the times of the vacancy especially in the 1960s. And so we had a lot of destroyement and also on the walls and on the wall
paintings. And the last private owner, Mr Spinach, who had a lot of young painters working
for him. They put new canvas on the walls and repainted and reconstructed the wall
paintings. And you can see here behind me, there's a kind of step structure you can see on the wall. This is the hunting of a deer. You can see the deer in the river. And this part has been cut out and newly painted by one of these young students. And you can compare it with the with paintings of the original time of the late
19th century. You can see it also by the style, by the painting, because originally there were famous history painters from the Munich Art
Academy working here for Drachenburg Castle, so please follow me again. We walk on the enfilade and the next loungeroom is, Yeah, it's a kind of room that was dedicated To gentlemen for smoking. And it has been decorated with pictures on a very famous German epic. Medieval epic, which is called the Nibelungs Song. And this is really hero story of Siegfried. And he came from the lower Rhine and went up to the Upper Rhine, and he should have come here at the Drachenfels Mountain, where legends say in former times, dragons lived here. And so the legend said that he killed a dragon living here, and he took a bath in the blood of the dragon. And so his skin became invulnerable. But unfortunately, onto his shoulder fell as small leaf. And that was the only spot where the blood of the dragon did not come, and he was vulnerable at that spot. And his enemy, Hagen von Tronje who knew this spot, later killed him at that
part. And this is shown here this story of Siegfried and Hagen. And Kriemhild and all the protagonists of this story within these paintings. And on the window, you can see the killed Dragon. Siegried should have killed here on Drachenfels Mountain. And you can also see very dark room, we have the stained glass window here, so not much light is coming up here, So you need electrical lights or in former times, it was gas light. So the next room is actually the biggest one. It's called art gallery. And with all these tracery windows, it looks a bit like a chapel or a small church. But it was a room for walking around. And the art, which is shown in this art gallery you can find on the windows. A lot of portraits were shown. Now parts of them has been already reconstructed, repainted, and we hope within the next four or five years we have, we were able to finish
all of them because fortunately, one of the firms who worked here in the 19th century, a Munich art firm still exists and they have wonderful sketches in their
archives with a lot of works here for Drachenburg Castle. And so we have to find some new, more funds, Some new, more donatus, which help us to recreate and to reconstruct these
windows. I told you a lot of portraits were here from people from all over the world or, let's say, Europe, from the Middle Ages, up to the 19th centuries, from all paths of arts, but also
of society, of history. We had a lot of famous men and women from painters, ... We have poets, we have musicians, but also engineers, discoverers, queens and
emperors. So a lot of really famous people thinking of walking around here with guests and having nice topics, of course,
to talk about at the end of this art gallery. This really huge hall, we have a last lounge room, a small one tavern room. And the castle here is located in the northern part of the Middle Rhine
Vineyards, and so this room is dedicated to the enjoyment of wine. And the pictures you see on the walls and on the ceilings represent that they show parts of the living of the antique wine god Bacchus. And here now we have this beautiful stained glass windows in this tavern room, and they represent or combine throughout the topic of wine, the two regions or the two countries. The life of Mr. Sator was dedicated to so his home base, the Rhine lands, representing these children with Rhine wine and the German Sekt, which is the
German sparkling wine left and right hand side. And then we have a dedication to the Big Wine Nation France, Where he lived. He lived in France with the champagne and the Bordeaux wine. So a really nice and wonderful combination of these two parts. And especially thinking of the history of the 19th century. Nowadays, fortunately, we have a good friendship between Germany and France, But within the 19th century it was just a short year about 10 years after the
German French war. So that was very special that in this person, he loved both Germany and in France, and that's really nice. I think. So we're walking down again. I would love to show you some more lounge rooms and then we walk up to the upper
level, which is actually the private level with two private apartments I would show you. So we walk on left hand side now to this hunting and billiard room just for enjoyment,to meet in the morning, maybe for the hunters and in the evening, come back, play billiards, for example, sit in front of this fireplace, smoking, drinking and enjoy yourself, actually. The second room beside here is the Library. Actually, it's not a scientific library where you have book cupboards, the walls
covered with cupboards. There's only one representative one. It's more or less maybe a kind of public office where people can meet, maybe also talking about contracts or having some business discussions. Maybe this room was dedicated for. But of course, a house like this, a villa or a castle needs to have a library that was very important for Sartor that people think,
Oh, he has a library, he's well educated. That was very important for him. So we continue and you see this marble floor Shows us the way back to the main staircase. And you can see here exactly in the close neighborship to this main staircase, a small wooden one, which was the side staircase for the staff. That was very important. Maids and butlers and staff, they used different ways to get through the castle. Then the owner or the noble guests, that was very important. The main staircase they just used for cleaning very early in the morning. They did not walk up and down. They had their own staircases. This one in the northern part,I will show you later. Spiral staircase. On the other hand, on the other part of the of the building
and the southern building and the southern part, and they go down to the souterrain, which was, of course, the level for the
staff with the kitchen, storage rooms, washing rooms and so on. But we walk up this marble staircase. To the second floor. Walking inside these beautiful historical Pictures. Which shows several occasions of Rhenish history, especially middle aged
history. We have this beautiful picture with the foundation stone of the Cologne
Cathedral and the Cologne Cathedral has been built in the Middle Ages with the stones from
the quarry of the Drachenfels mountain. So we're here now in the second floor, which is dedicated to two private
apartments. One is the owner apartment in the north and in the south, we have a guest honor suite. We will start with the owner's apartment. And the first room I want to visit, this is a private...office, actually, Sartor did not stay and spend so much time here as we know, we do not know
exactly, but we guess that, but maybe he had other plans. Maybe at first he was thinking of using this as a kind of holiday stay
throughout the summer. And I told you he was a publisher of a stock exchange newspaper, and he wrote several brochures about stocks, big transactions, and he was also able to work here while maybe having his holiday here during the summer. The next one is beautiful small dressing room, so not only ladies also gentlemen used to have a dressing room and we have this kind of hidden door. Very typical also for that time, for the staff, for the maids to come in and do the works they have to do and do not disturb the owner builder in his bedroom, which comes next. I think I told you something that because of the very early use of this castle as a site with the second owner builder, We had a lot of photographs. He sold a lot of postcard collections to his guests. So we have a lot of early pictures how the castle looked like. But these pictures were mainly from the lounge rooms, from the public rooms. Not so many pictures, original pictures, we have from these private rooms. So this one, this bedroom, we do not have an early picture of but we had early inventories which says us what kind of pieces of furniture were in here. And we found some very nice interior design magazines of that time of the late
19th century, which helped us to create this style, to recreate the style of a male bedroom of
this time. The next room we'll see is a small living room, it's called breakfast room, but it was for the use of the whole day, actually, and this room is quite interesting. Have a look at the walls. You see this wallpaper with gold and dark red. It looks a bit like a leather tapestry. And it has been reconstructed after small stripes of the original wallpaper we found behind these covering of
the doors and originally there were a bit like three dimensional, so they really looked
like leather, but they have always been made of paper and now have a look at the ceiling. It looks a bit like a wooden ceiling with wooden inlays, but it's made of stucco, so it's a stucco ceiling painted like wood with stencil painting decorations that looked like inlays. And this is maybe typical for this building that you have a difference in the
materials. If you compare the lounge rooms with all the woodworks with stencil paintings on
the wall handmade stencil paintings, the marouflage paintings, of course, with much more budget that Mr. Sartor spent in the public rooms than in these private rooms, they were only for him, for his close relatives and friends. But the representation has to be in the lounge rooms and so you can see it where we leaving now, this apartment walking to the only
public lounge room in this floor, which is the music hall, and you can see it higher ceilings and you have the woodworks at the walls you
have here stencil paintings and it looks totally different. Nowadays, it's used for civil weddings, as you might see because of the chairs
and so with modern furniture. And here's a little monument, a little dedication to the last private owner I
told you, Mr. Spinach, who bought the castle in the beginning of the nineteen seventies, and he has built up this balcony with a beautiful organ. And this organ you see here is not a real organ, it's a fake organ. But he was acting, playing this organ. He had a cassette recorder up there hidden with loudspeakers where the music came out and with great talent of an actor. He played this fake organ and its audience was sitting here down, and then he stopped playing, bent down to get his applause. And sometimes it really happened that in the background, the music starts again because he has forgotten to switch off the cassette recorder. So now out of this lounge room, we have now. On the southern part of this floor, the Guest Honor Suite Which is an apartment dedicated to guests. It consists of a living room and two bedrooms. Have a look around this living room, it looks totally familiar now. I think to us because we have these dark wood, we have dark colors, dark red and brownish. So very typical for that time. And now leaving this room, going up to this And the sun is also coming in here, so it's even brighter. With a white lacquered furnitures with with this cloth, with the bright colors
on the walls look totally different. Very bright. Very feminine, actually. Maybe this is the kind of a bit darker German style, and now we have here the light of Paris coming up that the Sartor maybe want to bring here to the Siebengebirge. And yeah, it looks like a feminine bedroom. We actually do not know so much about the private life. I told you. You was a bachelor. I was not married. The second owner, which was the nephew of Mr. Sartor, who wrote a biography about his uncle. And within this biography, he told us about a French noble woman his uncle should have an affair with. We do not know if this lady really existed. We also had an historian doing some research work in Paris, but he only found out things about his economic life, but not about his private life. But we have a very early photograph of this room, and so we know also from descriptions of the 19th century that the room really exactly nearly exactly looked like this. So maybe it was dedicated to a woman of his mind. We do not exactly know what it really looks like a female room and the very solitaire room actually in this castle. I told you when I show you the side staircase of the stuff that we have a second
one here in the southern part, which could be seen behind this door. This spiral staircase, also for the maids, goes down and up all the floors. Through this castle. And our last and second bedroom of this apartment, it has to be found here, which is a kind of room, Maybe thinking of this Paris noble lady staying here. She was not travelling alone. She had a young female travel companion that could also be a young, noble lady. And of course, there need to be a second, nearly nice room. And that was this room. And so we tried to decorate it as a young girl's room, actually. Thank you for joining me here throughout the castle, and I hope you enjoyed the tour with me and I would really be happy to see you here in person. Thank you.
