Burg Eltz: The Anti-Gothic
It is a truism among English majors that any building which is described for more than a few sentences within the pages of a book, is simply a manifestation of a psyche – either the psyche of the character who inhabits it, or (more playfully) of the text itself.
Horace Walpole, innovator of the Gothic, knew this. He very deliberately designed his mansion, Strawberry Hill, to aggrandize and reflect – both outwardly and inwardly – the artifices and crenellations of his own psyche.
The idea is at the heart of Walpole's seminal Gothic text, The Castle of Otranto. The protagonist of that work is titular, the castle itself, with its subterranean caverns, hidden tunnels, staircases that lead everywhere and nowhere, it’s animate portraits of ghostly ancestors, the gigantic stone limbs of a past inhabitant dropping, fatally, on the frenzied humans dashing about inside it.
Poe made the Gothic identification of home and inhabitant itself the subject of his famous story, The Fall of the House of Usher. The madness of Usher, the subject of the story itself, is indeed the very identification of the inhabitant with the building he inhabits: Roderick lives within the walls of his own psyche, which is as cracked and misshapen as the building itself.
The whole thing – house, psyche, story -- collapses into the swamps that surround it, magnificently.
The whole thing – house, psyche, story -- collapses into the swamps that surround it, magnificently.
By making hysterical use of this idea – association of psyche with dwelling place -- Gothic and late Romantic authors both confirm and lampoon Eliot’s notion of the “objective correlative,” in which rather than describing inner states, authors show them…building them, at times, into the walls of the text itself.
Sketching the Ruins, by Samuel Coleman
All of which is to say that the Gothic has always manifest itself most characteristically amongst the haunted crags of a war-ruined and time-ravaged castle.
Burgruine, by Carl Friedrich Lessing
Burg Eltz is not one of these castles.
Burg Eltz is possibly one of the most photographed castles in the world (after Neuschwanstein, of course). It is at the top of everyone’s list of “favorite castles.” It is nearly always described alongside the word “fairytale.”
The location of Eltz castle adds to its pictorial allure. A ring of high wooded hills are a backdrop for paintings and photographs of the building: autumn moods, winter moods, summer moods, are each settings for very different castles.
It’s a wonderful castle, and the place that it holds in the collective imagination is absolutely not Gothic. It is, in fact, anti-gothic.
A thing that is “anti” must embody the qualities it negates. Eltz embodies nearly all the features of the Gothic, but in the negative.
How did the Eltz family manage it? Well, in 1268 – four generations after the Castle's founding – brothers Elias, Wilhelm and Theoderich of the house of Eltz divided the castle and its estates amongst each other, and the castle became the property of three separate branches of the family, a community of joint heirs. Over the next several hundred years, descendants of the three lines of Eltz (known from the variances in their heraldry as the Eltz of the Golden Lion, the Eltz of the Silver Lion, and my favorite, the Eltz of the Buffalo Horns) gradually built separate halls within the castle.
- It is not haunted. Or if it is, the spirits seem to maintain an amiable quietude and repose.
- It was never a ruin. Though it is ancient, dating from the 12th century, it is one of the only castles west of the Rhine never to have been destroyed. The Thirty Years War, Louis XIV, Bonaparte: Eltz survived them all.
- It has been continuously inhabited, since its very beginnings, by the same family. And though this is certainly a feature of the Gothic castle (Otranto or Usher are families as much as places), the family Eltz managed to exist in enough accord that the building never split into chunks and collapsed (as our two abovementioned Gothic exemplars finally do).
How did the Eltz family manage it? Well, in 1268 – four generations after the Castle's founding – brothers Elias, Wilhelm and Theoderich of the house of Eltz divided the castle and its estates amongst each other, and the castle became the property of three separate branches of the family, a community of joint heirs. Over the next several hundred years, descendants of the three lines of Eltz (known from the variances in their heraldry as the Eltz of the Golden Lion, the Eltz of the Silver Lion, and my favorite, the Eltz of the Buffalo Horns) gradually built separate halls within the castle.
So Burg Eltz is actually three separate castles, each associated with its own branch of the Eltz family: there is the Kempenich house, the Rubenach house, and the Rodendorf house.
This seems a floorplan just built for Gothic severances, for division and conflict and madness (think of a family meal at Thanksgiving that never ends…). How did the different branches of the Eltz family manage to live together peacefully enough to keep the building and the family name intact for so long?
The answer is both practical and rather touching. In part, at least, amity was achieved through the introduction very early on of a “Burgfriedensbriefe” – a legal contract that formalized the behavior, obligations and relationships of all of the inhabitants within the castle. In looking at the document, as Ute Ritzenhofen does in her book on Burg Eltz, one gets a glimpse of the stresses that exist within such a castle, and the efforts (legal, psychological) to maintain it. Punishments for crimes are made explicit, including murder between castle inhabitants (punishment: immediate expulsion form the castle and loss of rights to Eltz castle); lesser forms of violence, like stabbing someone with a knife but not killing them (punishment: expulsion for one year); punching someone with a fist (punishment: expulsion for six weeks); even cursing at someone (punishment: expulsion for 1 month.
But the rules go beyond various forms of violence. They govern hospitality (though all visitors, even princes and bishops, have to sign a document agreeing to adhere to the Burgriedensbriefe for such hospitality to be extended) and insure the ongoing maintenance and security of the castle itself (“owners and their heirs shall commit to paying for one gatekeeper and two guards…”).
There are not many legal documents for which the term “charming” is appropriate, but the Burgfriedensbriefe of Eltz Castle charms me. It is a statement of the owner’s commitment to keeping their castle, and their family intact. It insures, moreover, that such unity will not stifle independence and divergent views, divergent architectural styles (beyond swearing at your cousin, of course).
And it is precisely this architectural diversity that makes Eltz so magical. Burg Eltz is not a monolith, imposing itself upon the landscape and the psyche. It is a bringing together of many things, over time and in space – architectural styles, angles of rooftops, materials of construction, colors of stone, variances of perspective. Diversities form a vibrant unity.
I can’t think of a more delightful and appealing metaphor for the psyche.
My son and I, on our approach to Burg Eltz...