Schloss Berlepsch - Witzenhausen, HE-DE
N 51° 23.760 E 009° 49.944
32U E 557910 N 5694191
Berlepsch Castle, Berleipse, Berlepse, Berleiffen, is a three-wing castle complex with an inner courtyard and park about 400 meters northeast of the Witzenhausen district of Hübenthal in Hesse.
Waymark Code: WM13DYB
Location: Hessen, Germany
Date Posted: 11/19/2020
Views: 2
The castle is only a few hundred meters from the state border with Lower Saxony and southwest of the Friedland district of Mollenfelde in the district of Göttingen and the Neu-Eichenberg district of Hermannrode in the Werra-Meißner district.
After their ancestral castle Barlissen was destroyed in the 14th century, the Berlepsch family settled on the Werra, where they already owned goods. At first she lived in the Landgrave Hessian castle Bischoffhausen. It was located above Bischhausen (now part of the Witzenhausen urban area on the left side of the Werra) on the Badenstein (356 m. Above sea level). A little further north, near Hübenthal, Arnold von Berlepsch had the nuwe Hus Berleybischhin built between 1368 and 1369 on the site of today's Berlepsch Castle. Since 1369, a defensive wall with a portal has closed off the north side of the three-wing complex.
Arnold von Berlepsch received the villages of Hübenthal and Albshausen, both now part of Witzenhausen, from the Hessian landgrave Heinrich II in 1369. Furthermore, he received Hermannrode (now part of Neu-Eichenberg) and Grebenhain to fiefdom, and the family received the hereditary court office of the treasurer of the Hessian landgraves for the oldest male member. After the death of Arnold's son Hans von Berlepsch, who remained childless, the castle man Thilo von Berlepsch from Ziegenberg took possession of the castle in 1392 against the will of Landgrave Hermann II. In 1400 the castle was destroyed by Hessian troops and rebuilt. In 1461 the knight parakeet von Berlepsch was enfeoffed with the castle; he surrounded the castle with strong walls and strengthened it with towers and cages. In 1593 the stair tower with a renaissance portal was built.
In the Thirty Years War, Tilly's mercenaries looted and pillaged the castle in 1623. In 1625 Wallenstein's troops attacked the castle, and in 1631 the castle was once again devastated by Tilly's troops. In addition to Tilly and Wallenstein, the troops of Johann von Aldringen and Otto Heinrich Fugger also haunted the area around 1631 and 1632. Villages were looted and Berlepsch Castle was devastated. Richard von Berlepsch calculated the damage to be 2813 thalers. When Braunschweig and Hessian troops fought against Gottfried Heinrich zu Pappenheim in the area of ??the Leine and Diemel in the spring of 1632, the latter took Richard von Berlepsch hostage because of unspent sums. Richard died two years after his ransom in 1635. The family's wealth declined due to the ongoing fighting. Land could not be cultivated, buildings of the goods and farms lay partly destroyed. Berlepsch, Ellerode, Hübenthal and the Hof zu Gladebeck had been completely cremated, the family's debts amounted to 48,000 thalers, while the burden of war did not decrease. In 1636 an imperial army moved from Göttingen through the lands and provoked battles near Wendershausen. A year later, the Croats raged on the Werra, having come to the area through the pillage of 1632 by Pappenheim. In 1646 new threats of war prompted the von Berlepsch family to move the rest of their archive to a safe place.
On August 14, 1801, Goethe visited Berlepsch Castle. In 1809 Friedrich Ludwig von Berlepsch lived at the castle. From 1881 to 1894, Count Karl Friedrich von Berlepsch and, from 1893, his son Hans gave the palace its present form through extensive renovations and changes, including a ceiling painting by Carl Wiederhold. These changes are exemplary of the late Hanoverian neo-Gothic and were planned by the architect Gustav Schönermark. The ornithologist Hans von Berlepsch set up an ornithological collection at the castle, and from time to time Karl von Berlepsch gathered a circle of well-known poets at the castle. The coat of arms of the two Berlepsch lines is walled into the coat of arms stone at the outermost of the three gates.
After the Second World War, Berlepsch Castle was transformed into a hotel with a restaurant by Hubertus von Berlepsch. Both were closed in 1980 when Hans-Sittich Graf von Berlepsch set up the Arvind Sannyasis Center for Bhagwan followers at the castle. The center was dissolved again in 1982. In 1984 Osho supporters founded the Parimal Center in the Huebenthal Manor, which belonged to the Berlepsch family.
Since 2011 the castle has had tourist offers such as gastronomy, guided tours and regular events. The gastronomic offer takes up the theme of "Middle Ages".
The park belonging to the castle dates back to the 18th century and has characteristics of the English landscape garden. The castle chapel is located in it just below to the west of the medieval enclosure.
Berlepsch Castle offers two restaurants (Berlepscher Round Table, Schlosstaverne) as well as guided tours of the castle with small exhibitions from the Berlepsch family inventory.
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