Oberhofen Castle

The lordship's earliest known holder, Freiherr Werner von Oberhofen, built the family's original hilltop stronghold, Balm Castle, above the village. His daughter Ita married Freiherr Walther (II) von Eschenbach around 1200, bringing the Eschenbachs both castle and village, and in the 13th century the family began a new moated castle on the shore of Lake Thun itself. They held it only a century: in 1306 the Eschenbachs were forced to give up Oberhofen to Albrecht I of Habsburg. Walter IV von Eschenbach, one of the castle's last Eschenbach owners, was killed alongside King Albert I of Habsburg in 1308, murdered by the king's own nephew, John.

Albrecht granted Oberhofen as a fief to his son Leopold I, who pledged it onward through a succession of Bernese lords across the fourteenth century — Count Otto von Strassberg from 1318, then Johann von Weissenburg, then, from 1342, the knight Johannes von Hallwyl. After the Habsburgs' defeat at the Battle of Sempach in 1386, the fief passed to the city of Bern, which had bought or absorbed every remaining feudal right in the district by 1397. Bern enfeoffed Oberhofen the following year as a man-fief split between the magistrate Ludwig von Seftigen, who held three-quarters, and his brother-in-law Niklaus (I) von Scharnachthal, who held the rest.

When the Seftigen line died out, full lordship passed to the Scharnachthal family, who held Oberhofen for generations; Niklaus III von Scharnachthal (1519–1590), the last of his line, left the fief to his nephews Hans, Diebold, Samuel and Albrecht von Erlach. The brothers were succeeded by the Bernese chief magistrate Franz Ludwig von Erlach, and when the von Erlach male line died out in 1652, Oberhofen reverted to the Republic of Bern despite lawsuits brought by his widow. Bern converted the castle into the seat of a resident bailiff, expanding it in Bernese Baroque style — a new Garden Room was added on the lake side and the older lake tower demolished — with the renovations largely complete by 1700. Bailiffs governed the district from the castle until the French invasion in the spring of 1798.

Oberhofen briefly became part of the Helvetic Republic's Canton of Oberland, then joined the newly created Thun District after the 1803 Act of Mediation; the castle itself passed into private hands and changed owners repeatedly over the following decades — the Thun tourism promoter Johann Peter Knechtenhofer in 1801, then his son and the son's cousin, then the Interlaken magistrate Friedrich von Lerber in 1830. Lerber's widow sold the castle in 1844, for 50,000 francs, to the Neuchâtel-Prussian counts Friedrich and Albert von Pourtalès.

Albert von Pourtalès rebuilt the castle in Neo-Gothic style between 1849 and 1852 to designs by the Neuchâtel architect James Colin, adding a new tower façade, a stair tower to the chapel, corner towers, a clock tower and extensive outbuildings, and reconstructing the lake tower that had been dismantled after 1680. A 2.5-hectare park was laid out to the south. Between 1853 and 1855 the family added a Turkish smoking room, modelled on wealthy Cairo houses, to plans by the Bernese architect Theodor Zerleeder — Albert von Pourtalès had spent several years in Istanbul as a Prussian diplomat.

The castle descended through the Pourtalès and Harrach families — to Helene von Pourtalès, married to Ferdinand Graf von Harrach, and in 1920 to their son Hans Albrecht von Harrach — before he was forced to sell it in 1925 to the American lawyer William Maul Measey. Measey founded the Oberhofen Castle foundation in 1940 to hold the property, then handed the foundation to the Historical Museum of Bern in 1952; the museum opened its branch in the castle in 1954, and the foundation has run independently of the museum again since 2009.

Oberhofen is listed as a Swiss heritage site of national significance.