Schloss Hersbruck

Schloss Hersbruck stands in the small Franconian town of Hersbruck. It occupies the site of an earlier fortified tower and seat whose builders remain unknown. The Sulzbacher counts or the Staufer family probably raised the first structure in the 11th or 12th century. After 1504 the free imperial city of Nuremberg ordered the tower demolished and its stones used to fill the moat. In 1517 the city’s master builder Hans Beheim the Younger laid out a plain two-storey building on the old foundations, roughly 27 by 11 metres under a hipped roof. The new house became the seat of one of Nuremberg’s eleven Pflegämter, local administration offices that managed the city’s scattered lands. In 1616 the landvogt proposed enlarging the modest Pflegschloss to accommodate Emperor Matthias and his large retinue. Later the building housed a district court from 1808, a district and revenue office from 1862, and the district administration from 1939 until 1972. The western tower was partly removed in 1909 and rebuilt in 1972. Today the castle serves as the Amtsgericht Hersbruck, one of Bavaria’s 73 local courts. The courtroom occupies the former council chamber on the first floor. Visitors can still see the heavy oak doors and barred windows of the 1840 prison, the Fronveste, which replaced the tithe barn. The outer walls preserve the outline of the medieval moat and the 1517 foundations. From the courtyard the stepped gable and slate roof of the main block rise above the red sandstone walls.