Château du Haut-Kœnigsbourg

About this audio guide

This guide to the Chateau du Haut-Koenigsbourg near Colmar turns on a cryptic phrase Kaiser Wilhelm the Second left bolted to a window on his final visit in nineteen eighteen. It traces why the ruin mattered so much to him in the first place, from a burned-out medieval fortress handed over by the town of Selestat, to the Berlin architect Bodo Ebhardt, whose obsession with castles reshaped it stone by stone. You will hear how an emperor rebuilt a past to fit his politics, and stand where he once declared it finished.