Burg Mauterndorf

A Roman fort dating to AD 326 or earlier probably stood on the height, guarding the mountain road that ran from Teurnia over the Radstädter Tauern pass to Iuvavum, present-day Salzburg, and serving as the seat of the Roman administrator of the province of Noricum. It was destroyed during the Migration Period. A deed of gift issued by Emperor Henry II in 1002 records that an installation for collecting the road toll — the Maut that gives the village its name — was afterwards set up on the site, and the toll paid for the castle that followed. The castle itself is not mentioned until 1253, the year its keep was raised; from then it secured the crossing of the Radstädter Tauern on the renewed Roman road.

The fortress was held by the Prince-Archbishops of Salzburg and served the cathedral chapter as an administrative centre. In the 15th century it was substantially enlarged under Leonhard von Keutschach and Burkhard von Weißpriach, taking the form it has kept since. The toll on the Radstädter Tauern road supported both castle and village until 1803, when collection was given up during the Napoleonic Wars; in 1806 the castle passed to the Austrian state.

In 1894 the decayed castle was bought by Hermann Epenstein (1851–1934), a Berlin military surgeon whose father was a Catholic convert of Jewish descent, who restored it at great effort as a residence; Emperor Franz Joseph I raised him to the knighthood as Ritter von Mauternburg. Serving in German South-West Africa in the late 1880s, Epenstein had become friends with Commissioner Heinrich Ernst Göring, and back in Germany he offered the family the hospitality of his houses, becoming physician to Göring's wife Franziska and godfather and mentor to the children. The Göring family, the younger sons Hermann and Albert among them, were frequent guests at Mauterndorf, and Albert grew up largely in the castle. Epenstein took Austrian citizenship and retired to Mauterndorf after the First World War; in 1923 he received Hermann Göring there after his flight from Germany to evade prosecution over the failed Beer Hall Putsch.

Epenstein died in 1934 and his widow left the castle to his godson Hermann Göring, but the required entry in the land register was never made and Göring never became the formal owner, a question settled only after a long lawsuit. At the end of the Second World War he meant to reach what he called the castle of his youth; fearing Red Army troops advancing up the Mur valley towards Mauterndorf, he did not, and surrendered to United States forces at nearby Bruck.

Since 1968 the building has belonged to the state of Salzburg. A castle museum was established in 2003, and the Lungau Regional Museum reopened in May 2007 after several stages of building work under the curator Helga Gappmayer, to the motto 'Tradition with a new look'. The castle also hosts scientific conferences and cultural events, and it appears on the reverse of the Austrian fifty-schilling note of the 1956 series.