Lissingen Castle

Lissingen and neighbouring Sarresdorph most likely grew out of a Roman settlement: excavation in a lower-castle courtyard before the First World War turned up Roman finds, and the site lies close to Ausava, a horse-changing station on the road between Trier and Cologne. In the Carolingian eighth and ninth centuries Lissingen belonged to Prüm Abbey or to its estate at Büdesheim.

Norman attacks on Prüm in the ninth century prompted defensive towers and later castles to protect the abbey, and the fortified seat on the Kyll grew into a defensible complex in the High Middle Ages. It appears in writing for the first time in 1212, as a possession of the knights von Liezingen; in 1514 Prüm Abbey enfeoffed Gerlach Zandt von Merl with the whole of Lissingen. Once moated by the Kyll and by ditches to the south and west, it is one of the very few Eifel castles, with Eltz and Bürresheim, never to have been destroyed.

In 1559 the complex was divided into an upper and a lower castle. From outside it still reads as a single building, but the two halves are in separate hands today. Between 1661 and 1663 Ferdinand Zandt von Merl rebuilt the lower castle almost completely, folding three medieval residential towers into a single angled manorhouse of near-palatial scale; the oldest masonry on the site, possibly Carolingian, survives in its cellars and in the vaults beneath its terrace.

A small house chapel projected from it and is recorded in 1711 and 1745 as the oratory of the von Zandt family; it was given up at the start of the twentieth century. After Anton Heinrich von Zandt died in 1697 the castle passed to Wilhelm Edmund von Ahr, who doubled the inhabited part of it.

In 1762 the Elector of Trier, acting as procurator of Prüm Abbey, enfeoffed Josef Franz von Zandt zu Merl with Lissingen. In 1780, as a member of the Imperial Knighthood, he became Freiherr of Lissingen, a small autonomous territory that lasted until the end of the feudal era. The castle was enlarged in these years, above all by a far larger tithe barn with stables. The French Revolution ended the lordship: in 1794 the left bank of the Rhine, Lissingen included, came under French administration.

The Eifel was assigned to Prussia in 1815, and both halves changed hands repeatedly — Maximilian von Ahr sold the upper castle in 1825 to Freiherr von Breiten-Landenberg — until in 1913 a single owner reunited them and built up a large agricultural estate.

A small power station on the estate began operating in 1906, supplying the castle, some fifty houses in Lissingen and the local railway station; supply to others ended in 1936, when the Rheinisch-Westfälisches Elektrizitätswerk took over. In 1932 a Cologne brewery owner named Greven bought the estate, weakened by the international economic crisis, and put up the large farm buildings along the south side — a new cowshed of 1936 with milking parlour, milk kitchen, cold store and one of the first milk bottling plants in the Eifel.

During the Second World War the castle housed several Wehrmacht regiments and served as a command post of the German General Staff. Towards the end of the war it was used as a temporary prison for senior military captives.

The Greven family began again with dairy and livestock farming after the war, and a tenant worked the lower castle as a farm until 1977, by which point it no longer paid its way. The buildings, the upper castle's gatehouse and the whole of the lower castle worst of all, were left to decay. Karl Grommes, a patent attorney from Koblenz, bought the lower castle in 1987 and restored it at length, fitting it out with furniture, household effects and workshops; it ran as the Freilichtmuseum Burg Lissingen, with permanent displays of carriages, sleighs and church weathervanes, a bakery with a restored wood-fired stone oven, a restaurant and a registry office.

The lower castle was sold at forced auction in March 2015 to Günter Lipperson, a retired schoolmaster and historian from Linz am Rhein, who began working through it — rotten beams replaced, roofs recovered, leaning gables anchored, the masonry repointed — with the main house and the unsafe tithe barn still awaiting fundamental repair at the end of 2017. In July 2021 flooding on the Kyll badly damaged the interiors and the carriage collection. The Essens-Zeiten exhibition has since moved to the Roscheider Hof museum, the weathervanes to Kommern. The upper castle was bought in 2000 by Christine and Christian Engels, who live in it.