Staufen and ruins

After following signs to the Ruine Zaehringer Burg the other day, I'm much enamored of ruins--and they're all over the place here, in various stages of collapse.

On Saturday, we visited Staufen, a few kilometers south of Freiburg. Staufen is most famous for being the site of Faust's death. That's right, Faust, as in Goethe's Faust. Faust was an alchemist and necromancer of dubious character (surprise!). He was invited to Staufen in 1539 by its indebted lord Anton von Staufen, and died that same year in the Loewen inn under suspicious circumstances. Thanks to the 1587 Historia von D. Johann Fausten, other early sources, and Marlowe's and Goethe's plays, we now know he died after his 24-year pact with the devil Mephistopheles ended, and he's currently suffering eternal damnation in Hell. That's what you get for selling your soul. (Is it just coincidence that Staufen and Fausten are anagrams?)

Staufen is also known for the ruins atop a hill on the north edge of town. Artifacts suggest the Romans had a watch tower on the hill long before Adalbert von Staufen commenced the current fortress around 1100. The Staufen lineage ended with Georg von Staufen in 1602, and the fortress was abandoned in 1607. In 1632, the Swedes came through and knocked it down.

Our topo-map showed there were additional ruins in them thar hills to the east, so we hiked in looking for them. Forest roads gave way to rugged trails that skirted around the top of the ridge. We finally resorted to bushwhacking our way through a Stinging Nettle Path of Glory (as Elias calls the painful overgrown trails), to the top of the Etzenbacher Hoehe, and came to the remains of the fortress: lots and lots of rocks distributed over a third of a kilometer or so. There was also a highway marker dated 1613, so perhaps the Swedes knocked this fortress down too while they were at it.

The Swedes weren't the only folks demolishing things. Freiburg's Schlossberg ("fortress mountain") rises behind the Altstadt, but there's no longer a Schloss on top. In 1366, fed up with their local lords, the Freiburgers themselves attacked the 12th-century fortress on the Schlossberg. Thanks to all the silver ore inside nearby Schauinsland, Freiburg was able to purchase its independence in 1368, and the city submitted itself to the protection of the Austrian Habsburgs. In 1668, the Habsburg Kaiser Leopold I rebuilt and strengthened the Schlossberg fortifications to protect against threats from Louis the 14th, but the French captured Freiburg in 1677. During various wars and occupations over the next 68 years, possession of Freiburg bounced back and forth between the Austrians and the French. In 1745, the French finally gave up hope of holding onto Freiburg and did a thorough job of knocking down the Schloss before leaving town.