North Tower - Schloss Drachenburg

Nordic Summer Houses
The second owner of Schloss Drachenburg and nephew of its builder, Jacob Hubert Biesenbach
Jnr, developed the estate as a tourist attraction. In addition to tours of the castle, he also
offered lodgings to summer visitors. From 1907/1908, he remodelled the cliffside meadows
of the castle park by planting fi r and spruce trees, creating a deer park and building a series
of Nordic-style summer houses on the southern slope. Further buildings were added on the
western slope at the border to the forest park. Of the 18 block houses then planned, we can
identify twelve of these thanks to the buildings and foundations still intact. Biesenbach‘s
wife named the twelve after fi gures from the world of Germanic mythology and the Song of
the Nibelungs: Brunhilde, Siegfried, Chriemhilde, Walküre, Tristan, Parsival, Isolde, Volker,
Wotan, Siegmund, Sieglinde and Gieselherr.
In the 1920s, the block houses were placed at the disposal of the local Women‘s Association
of the German Red Cross for use as a women‘s convalescence home. When St Michael‘s Boys
Boarding School occupied the premises in the 1930s, the pupils lived in the block houses.
Connecting structures between the blocks served as dormitories. Some time later, the houses
were let out privately. Over the years, however, most of them fell into decay. Today, only the
buildings of Walküre, Tristan and Parsival have survived (as a new construction from the 1930s)
to the east; and Isolde to the south.
Postcard, circa 1908/1910
10