Sooneck Castle

Sooneck sits on the steep north-eastern slope of the Binger Wald above the Rhine near Niederheimbach, between Bingen and Bacharach. Recent research places its first mention probably in 1271. Like neighbouring Reichenstein, it was administered by the lords of Hohenfels, who held it as bailiffs for the imperial abbey of Kornelimünster near Aachen.

What is certain is the siege of 1282. The troops of King Rudolf of Habsburg took the castle and destroyed it, and a prohibition on rebuilding was laid on the site, which the king expressly repeated in 1290.

In April 1346 Archbishop Henry III of Mainz granted Sooneck in fief to the knight Johann Marschall zu Waldeck, who had the castle rebuilt over the years that followed. The ban on rebuilding was not lifted until 1349, by King Charles IV, after the property and its bailiwick had fallen to the Electorate of Mainz.

On Johann's death the castle passed as a joint fief to four of his heirs, and Sooneck thereby became a Ganerbenburg, held by several branches of the family at once. Those branches were not always well disposed to one another and quarrelled over their shares of the inheritance; more than once a Burgfrieden, a peace among the castle's inhabitants, had to be concluded. When the Waldeck line died out in 1553 with the death of Philipp Melchior, the family of Breidbach zu Bürresheim, until then co-owners, were enfeoffed with the castle alone.

When the Breidbach line too was extinguished, Sooneck began to decay. In the course of the War of the Palatine Succession, Sooneck was destroyed in 1689 by the troops of Louis XIV of France, as were almost all the castles on the left bank of the Rhine between Bingen and Koblenz. In 1774 the Mainz cathedral chapter made the ruin over to four inhabitants of Trechtingshausen, who planted vineyards there. The site later came into the possession of the village of Niederheimbach.

In 1834 the Prussian crown prince Frederick William IV and his brothers, the princes William, Charles and Albert, bought the wholly dilapidated castle and had it rebuilt as a hunting lodge. The historical structures were largely retained and buildings in romantic style added; the royal Prussian arms over the northern gate, which was not the original approach, date from this campaign. Disputes within the royal family and the effects of the revolution of 1848 meant the castle was never used as a hunting lodge. The rebuilding, to plans by the military architect Carl Schnitzler, was finished in 1861.

With the settlement of princely property after the First World War, Sooneck passed into state ownership. After the Second World War it came to the Land of Rhineland-Palatinate, and from 1948 to the state castles administration, today the Generaldirektion Kulturelles Erbe Rheinland-Pfalz, Direktion Burgen, Schlösser, Altertümer. It can be visited on guided tours.

The living rooms are furnished chiefly with neo-Gothic and Biedermeier pieces and hold paintings belonging to the Hohenzollern family and, since 1991, to the Köth-Wanscheid family foundation, along with drawings and sketches by Johann-Caspar Schneider among others. Sooneck has formed part of the Upper Middle Rhine Valley UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2002 and is a protected cultural property under the Hague Convention.