The Weisse Frau of Hohenzollern Castle

The Weisse Frau belongs to no single castle. Across the centuries her appearance goes before many deaths in the house of Hohenzollern, and that in the most varied places: at the Plassenburg and at Abenberg Castle, in Bayreuth, in Ansbach and in the Berlin city palace. Who she was in life, people already tried to establish in the seventeenth century, without ever finding a firm answer. It was that very uncertainty that kept the figure alive, for every branch of the family could imagine her within its own walls.

The most popular version of the name is Kunigunde, widow of the last lord of Orlamünde. In the fourteenth century, so the story goes, she was seized with a fierce love for Burgrave Albrecht of Hohenzollern. To her courting he gave, says the legend, always the same answer: a marriage was impossible, for four eyes stood in the way. Blinded by passion, Kunigunde took these words to mean her two children and killed them. Only afterwards did she learn that Albrecht had meant his own kinsmen, his brother and his nephew, who would never approve of the marriage. Consumed by grief, she sought penance in a convent. She travelled to Rome, received the pope’s forgiveness, founded a monastery and, tradition says, died there as an abbess. Yet the tale is no history: the real Kunigunde died childless, and this core belongs to the Plassenburg above Kulmbach in Franconia.

With Hohenzollern Castle itself, tradition links the Weisse Frau to a dark chapter of the fifteenth century. Count Friedrich XII of Zollern, called the Öttinger, had made enemies of the Swabian imperial cities and was placed under the imperial ban. In the summer of 1422 the cities, among them Ulm, Augsburg, Reutlingen and Rottweil, marched with a great host to the foot of the mountain. For almost a year the castle lay under siege, until on 15 May 1423 it was taken and, by order of Emperor Sigismund, razed to the ground. Only thirty years later, in 1453, a second castle was raised on the rubble.

From that siege comes the scene people tell on the castle. It is historically recorded that the beloved of the count made a failed attempt to bring powder and salves into the besieged castle by night. In the legend that grew around it, the besiegers let the woman pass unhindered through their camp, because in the dark they take her for the Weisse Frau, and no one dares to stop the herald of death. Thus a real stratagem of war became, in memory, a ghostly apparition, and the woman who meant to smuggle powder became the messenger of death itself.

The castle the imperial cities destroyed was not the last. A second castle arose and in its turn fell into decay, and only the third, built from 1850 to 1867, stands today in full splendour. In the library of that castle hangs a mural on which the legend of the Weisse Frau and the siege of 1423 melt into a single image: the woman passing unharmed through the enemy lines. The present castle the Hohenzollern owe to King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia, who from 1850 had the decayed seat rebuilt in neo-Gothic form to the plans of the architect Friedrich August Stüler.

Beyond that wall the herald of death still walks in the stories of the house. As late as the nineteenth century a baron at Abenberg Castle is said to have fired at the white figure, without knowing whether he struck her. Whoever climbs the conical mountain above Hechingen today finds one of the most visited castles in Germany, with towers that look far out over the Swabian Alb. And somewhere in the halls, say those who work there, a woman in white waits for the next farewell.