Schwanenburg

The Schwanenburg was raised, probably in the 11th century, by the counts and later dukes of Cleves on a spur of the Lower Rhine ridge above where the Kermisdahl meets the Spoykanal, once an important link to the Rhine. A Roman post has been suggested here, halfway between Xanten and Nijmegen, but excavations in 1999-2000 found no support for it, historians looking instead to a late-Carolingian fortification beneath the 11th-century castle. Count Dietrich I of Cleves, who probably took his name from the castle, is first recorded in 1092; the castle itself is named indirectly in 1145 and directly in a Siegburg book of miracles of 1184, though a mention in monastery annals of 1020 has been claimed for it.

By then it had a square tuff residence tower of about 1100, ringed from roughly 1150 by a polygonal curtain, and a hall block on the east side holding the knights' hall. Count Dietrich IV founded Kleve west of the castle, granting it town rights on 25 April 1242.

Under Counts Dietrich VII and Johann the castle finally displaced Monterberg, near Kalkar, as the county's fixed seat of government. When the comital house failed in the male line in 1368, county and castle passed by inheritance to the counts of the Mark, and in 1417 Emperor Sigismund raised Adolf II of Cleves-Mark to Duke of Cleves. The dukes stood at the height of their power in the 16th century as rulers of the united duchies of Jülich-Cleves-Berg; that told on the Schwanenburg, for the ducal court was now seldom at Kleve, keeping mostly to Düsseldorf, Jülich or Hambach.

Duke Adolf I turned the Spiegelturm into an archive in 1429. On 7 October 1439 the old residence tower collapsed, and Adolf had the ducal master mason Johan Wyrenberg raise a slimmer tower in its place; begun in 1440, it was finished thirteen years later, and in 1455 a gilded swan set on its spire gave the tower its name. A tablet over the entrance records the fall of the old tower on that day and its rebuilding within the year by Adolph, first Duke of Cleves, repeating the story that Julius Caesar built the tower that stood there before.

Around 1233 the counts of Cleves took the carbuncle into their arms, a reference to the legendary swan knight Helias as founder of their line; that legend named the Swan Tower in the Middle Ages and, in the 19th century, the whole complex. Told of Loherangrin in Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival and made famous by Wagner's Lohengrin, it has a knight of the Grail arrive by swan boat and marry the heiress he defends, on condition she never ask his name. Dutch tradition has Elias Lohengrin relieve Count Dietrich's heiress Beatrix at Nijmegen in 715 and marry her; she lived afterwards in a tower near Kleve, remembered as the White Woman of the Swan Tower. Little is reliably known of who held power at Cleves in the early Middle Ages, and what historians have said of it is disputed.

The death of the childless Duke Johann Wilhelm carried the Schwanenburg by inheritance to Johann Sigismund of Brandenburg, and Kleve became a third Brandenburg residence city beside Berlin and Königsberg. Under the stadtholder Johann Moritz of Nassau-Siegen it had its last great flowering from 1649, when he built Kleve into a garden town of European rank for Elector Friedrich Wilhelm. Between 1663 and 1666 the Dutch architect Pieter Post rebuilt the castle as a plain Baroque palace, stripping out every Gothic element but the towers and adding the range whose gateway, carrying the Brandenburg arms, is the main entrance still.

In the first half of the 18th century town and palace lost importance as Prussia moved residence and government to Berlin and Potsdam; neglect later brought fabric down: the hall block with its knights' hall in 1771, the Johannisturm in 1784. Under French rule it held the administration of the Arrondissement de Clèves. After Kleve returned to Prussia it served from 1821 to 1917 as courthouse and prison.

On 7 October 1944 an Allied raid destroyed the historic centre of Kleve and badly damaged the castle, an aircraft striking the Schwanenturm and exploding. The Bauhütte Schwanenburg, an association of Kleve citizens, rebuilt part of it in 1948-1953, and the Freunde der Schwanenburg, founded in 1986, have carried the restoration on since, vaulting work in the Spiegelturm included in 1988. The Schwanenburg is a listed architectural monument of North Rhine-Westphalia and houses the Amtsgericht and the Landgericht of Kleve, with a geological collection in the Swan Tower.