Werdenfels Castle

When Werdenfels was founded, and by whom, is still argued over among castle historians; the building of it is generally put somewhere between 1180 and 1230, and both the builder and the purpose of the original work are unknown. The site is an eastern spur of the Kramerspitz in the Ammergau Alps, 795 metres above sea level and about 80 metres above the floor of the Loisach valley between Garmisch and Farchant. The rock falls away steeply into the valley while the ground climbs quickly to the south-west, a typical castle position that allowed the important trade road below, the Via Imperii, to be watched from a distance. Intervening directly in what happened on it was another matter, the castle being simply too far away.

From 1249 the fortress belonged to the Prince-Bishopric of Freising, which held it through Burghüter, castle guardians, and Pfleger, governors. In 1294 Count Berthold III of Eschenlohe handed the bishopric part of his county and was appointed castle guardian in return. Once Freising had erected its own territory, the County of Werdenfels, the castle became the seat of the governor's office and of the court, though not every governor took up residence in it. The county was reckoned "the best part of the Imperial Principality of Freising", in Karl Meichelbeck's phrase, and it supplied chamois, red deer and feathered game, wood and marble, which could be carried down the Isar and the Loisach directly to the cathedral town.

In the fifteenth century Freising's want of money forced the bishopric to pledge the castle several times. The bergfried served in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a gaol. The two outer wards, lying north and west of the raised and almost square inner ward, belong to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, and a shallow neck ditch guards the approach from the south and west.

The fabric appears to have decayed so badly by the beginning of the seventeenth century that in 1632 the governor's seat was moved down into a new administrative building on the Wang, after which the castle began to fall apart. Its home farm already lay below in the valley to the south, roughly where the old district office at Schwaige Wang stands.

From 1676 the fortress was worked as a quarry. Numbers of its stones went into the new baroque parish churches of Farchant and Garmisch, and around 1728 to 1730 the bergfried that rose at or over the north-western corner of the main ward was pulled down altogether, leaving the mound of rubble that marks its place. It had been the most defensible part of the castle, and it is known now only from a few seventeenth and eighteenth century views.

Secularisation carried castle and county alike to the Kingdom of Bavaria. The roughly 5,000 people of a lordship that had until then held imperial immediacy took to their new masters with difficulty: a Munich official complained in 1806 that "many Werdenfelßer still have no Bavarian heart!" In 1822 the Bavarian privy councillor Ignaz von Rudhart bought the ruins, which have been in private hands ever since.

In its last phase of expansion the castle was probably more an administrative seat than a work of defence, and would not have held out long against a serious siege. The walls average only about 90 centimetres in thickness, and the side from which an attack would come was neither strengthened nor covered by flanking towers. The castle researcher Otto Piper had already remarked on the want of defensibility, finding that the fortress, "so far as the remaining walls are concerned, conspicuously lacks the positions and facilities for a sustained defence". His investigations brought him to the conclusion that the ruins "no longer correspond to the older castle".

The building stone was the local limestone, quarried in the Schlosswald above the castle, where the remains of six ring-shaped lime kilns were archaeologically investigated in 1997. The walls were secured and partly rebuilt in 1905 and 1906, their tops secured again in 1961 to 1963, and a further programme of restoration began in 1986 and has been carried on since in small stages. Werdenfels is protected as an architectural monument in Bavaria and recorded as an archaeological site; the ruins are freely accessible, reached on well signposted paths, and give a view over Garmisch-Partenkirchen and the Wetterstein mountains.

A local legend attaches to the ruins. In the version most widely told, a countess stayed behind at the castle while her husband went off to war, and lost her life there through treachery and violence; her spirit has been said to appear in the neighbourhood of the ruins ever since, dressed in white. The tale survives in several forms, which differ above all in the names of those involved and in the circumstances of the death.

The White Lady is still taken up in tourist and regional-history accounts of the castle. The Werdenfels legend was treated in Walter Steffen's documentary Alpgeister, released in 2019, which sets out tales and inherited beliefs of the Bavarian Alps; and in 2026 Matthias Weckmann wrote the Heimat musical Die weiße Frau der Burg Werdenfels, with songs by Benedikt Ehrenberg, for the Kleine Theater in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, its first performance announced for 17 July 2026.