The White Lady of Orlamünde

The town of Orlamünde is old. It is named in a charter as early as 1039, and its origin is the border castle that rose on the ridge in the eleventh century and became the seat of the counts of Orlamünde. From 1112 to 1365 these counts came from the House of Ascania, among them Albert the Bear. The Saale mill is recorded as early as 1194, the oldest on the middle Saale, and in 1344 the place received town rights. The castle commanded the valley, yet by the fifteenth century it was abandoned and served the inhabitants as a quarry.

Only the Kemenate survived, the core building of the complex. It was among the mightiest broad dwelling towers of Thüringen and blocked the entire back of the hill, the main side of attack. The massive tower block has only narrow light slits, and its entrance lies at nine and a half metres, a form that goes back to the stern fortresses of southern Italy. On the Ebstorf world map of around 1300, Orlamünde is the only Thüringen castle marked. Today the town is one of the smallest in Thüringen, and whoever climbs to the Kemenate finds a place that still seems to keep watch.

Kunigunde, widow of Count Otto of Orlamünde, had fallen in love with Albert the Handsome, son of the Nuremberg burgrave Frederick the Fourth. Albert let it be known that he would marry her, if only four eyes did not stand in the way. He meant his parents, who refused such a match. But Kunigunde understood the message otherwise. She thought of her two children, a girl of two and a boy of three, and believed that their eyes stood between her and her happiness.

In the rhymed monastery chronicle of 1559 it is said that she was so beguiled that she stabbed her own children in the head with a needle and killed them. In the Orlamünde version she drowns the two in the Kindelsbrunnen, a well a little below the Kemenate that has long carried no water and yet can still be found today. When Albert learned what had happened, he cast her off. Kunigunde made a pilgrimage to Rome and received the pope’s forgiveness, on the condition that she found a monastery and enter it. So she ended, the legend says, as an abbess, but her deed clung to the hill.

From Orlamünde the figure travelled on. Albert came from the House of Hohenzollern, and so Kunigunde became the White Lady of that line, a herald of death who appears before a family member dies. The legend grew best known on the Plassenburg above Kulmbach, to which the monastery of Himmelkron also belongs, the house Kunigunde is said to have founded. Yet the chroniclers trace its origin to the countess of Orlamünde. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century the reports followed one another, in the Berlin city palace as on the Franconian castles she was said to be seen, mostly in a white veil and always as a sign of coming misfortune.

Historically the story has no ground. The real Kunigunde of Orlamünde demonstrably died childless, so no child murder can have taken place. Yet the legend held on, more stubborn than any charter. Theodor Fontane had his Effi Briest read of the White Lady and take fright at her, and in another novel he lets a character say that it is and remains the woman of Orlamünde. So the woman who lost her children on the hill above the Saale returns again and again, in ever new castles, restless and silent.