Altena Castle

Tradition holds that around 1108 the brothers Adolf and Everhard von Berg were given a stretch of land in the Märkisch Sauerland by Emperor Henry V for loyal service, and raised a castle on the Wulfseck which they first called Wulfeshagen and later Altena. It is one of at least three legends of the county's founding. The castle stands on a spur of the Klusenberg above the Lenne, and it has been supposed that it was put there to guard and exploit the region's important iron trade.

The first Count of Altena traceable in a charter is Eberhard I of Berg-Altena, a son of Adolf II of Berg, recorded in 1161; the castle was the seat of his county.

Eberhard's son Friedrich von Berg-Altena acquired the lordship of Mark near Hamm at some point between 1170 and 1198, and Friedrich's son Adolf I moved his permanent residence to Burg Mark there around 1202. The county styled itself Altena-Mark, then simply the County of Mark. The ancestral castle was afterwards held mostly by drosts, administrators and at times by junior comital lines, and from 1392 served only as the bailiff's seat.

On 20 December 1367 Count Engelbert III of the Mark granted the small settlement at the foot of the hill its liberties, among them self-government and freedom from tolls. In 1455 the castle burned down, and was only partly rebuilt.

The Jülich-Cleves succession dispute brought a Brandenburg garrison into the castle in 1609. An invalids' house followed in 1670, and from 1766 to 1811 the criminal court and prison of the County of Mark occupied part of the buildings. In 1771 the castle was demilitarised for good and the garrison dissolved; the town of Altena bought the empty portions and ran a poorhouse and orphanage there until 1840.

In 1797 Johann Caspar Rumpe, an Altena needle manufacturer and mayor, was given leave to take stone from the castle for his own house. A romantic neo-Gothic rebuilding drawn up in 1835 by the building inspector Friedrich August Ritter, for the Prussian Oberpräsident Ludwig Freiherr von Vincke, was not carried out for want of money. In 1842 the town gave its shares in the castle to King Frederick William IV, who wanted it kept as a historical monument and decided the following year that its surroundings should become a public park; the garden architect Maximilian Friedrich Weyhe began the work and his son Joseph Clemens finished it in 1852. The Order of St John then opened a hospital in the buildings in 1856 under Arnold Ludwig von Holtzbrinck, which ran until 1906.

With the 300th anniversary of the County of Mark's attachment to Brandenburg-Prussia approaching, Fritz Thomée, Landrat of the Kreis Altena, pressed to have the castle rebuilt as a gathering point for the people of the Mark. The architecture professor Georg Frenzen was handed the planning, and the Märkischer Burgverein founded to raise funds. Work began in 1907 and a public quarrel broke out over it: the art patron Karl Ernst Osthaus and the historian Hermann Ehrenberg held that Frenzen's designs, which overlaid the medieval and early modern fabric, put the castle's authenticity at risk, and argued for conserving the ruin. On 29 August 1907 the plans were laid before Kaiser Wilhelm II at an audience in Münster; he called the scheme an artistically patriotic deed, and the argument was settled in Thomée's favour. The rebuilding was largely done by 1914, apart from the outer bailey and lower gatehouse, and the last works were completed in 1918.

Also in 1914 the schoolteacher Richard Schirrmann founded in the castle the world's first permanent youth hostel, and with it the German Youth Hostel Association. The castle opened in 1915 with the Museum of the County of Mark, which Thomée had devised; Schirrmann's original rooms are a museum in their own right today, the hostel having moved to the lower castle courtyard in 1934.

The castle passed to the then Kreis Altena in 1943, and the permanent museum display still in place was conceived in 2000. In 2007 the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media classed the castle a monument of national importance.

A lift opened on 26 April 2014, rising 60 metres through the rock from the foot of the Klusenberg to the castle yard. The Märkischer Kreis, which owns the castle, restored its gates between 2016 and 2018; in December 2018 the LWL heritage service named them monument of the month for Westphalia-Lippe. Part of the castle is let as a restaurant; until 2019 a medieval festival was held in castle and town each August.