Schloss Auerbach

Schloss Auerbach stands in the Upper Palatinate town of Auerbach, once a medieval castle built by the Counts of Sulzbach as a seat for their vogt overseeing Bamberg’s church lands. It lay north of the town, separated by a moat and enclosed by a ring wall and another ditch. The site is now recorded as an archaeological monument with buried remains of the early modern castle and earlier medieval fortress. The castle’s history reflects wider shifts in power. After the Sulzbach line died out in the 12th century, Emperor Frederick Barbarossa took the lands, and in 1269 Duke Ludwig the Strict acquired them for the Wittelsbachs. Auerbach became the centre of its own Landgericht in 1373. The Stromer family, a Nuremberg patrician clan, lived here in the 14th and 15th centuries; Heinrich Stromer, born in Auerbach in 1476, later founded Auerbachs Keller in Leipzig. The building suffered fires in 1430, 1634 and 1868, and was finally pulled down in 1971. Visitors today find only traces of the vanished complex. A single stretch of the northern curtain wall survives within a barn, its lower courses of sandstone blocks topped by rubble masonry with arrow slits. Inside the barn, the old moat edge is still visible where the ring wall once stood. The site lies beside the market square, where the former Palas measured ten metres by seven and a half, with walls nearly a metre thick and a flat ceiling over its single upper hall. Two small round-arched windows high on the east wall, framed in worked stone, recall its Romanesque origins.