For Sale: A Castle With a View

BERLIN -- Tired of your cramped one-room apartment? Fed up with your roommate? Germany may have just the thing for you: The Federal Republic is selling a portfolio of status properties that includes dozens of castles, ducal manors, the odd monastery, even a medieval fortress atop its own mountain.


A catalog worked up by the German government describes real estate chockablock with towers, turrets, battlements, coats of arms, marble staircases, knights' halls, hunting lodges, tree-lined prospects, orangeries, reflecting pools and secret passageways.


One castle appears in chronicles dating from the year 786. Another was home to a well-born lady who wrote a memoir there called "The Green Tree of Life." Still another is graced by its own crenelated water tower.


Germany is unloading the castles because they stand in what used to be East Germany, and when the "people's dictatorship" collapsed, they ceased to be the "people's" property.


After Germany reunited in 1990, an independent government agency acquired the castles -- along with East Germany's entire industrial stock -- and began the long process of sorting out who might lay legitimate ancestral claims to them, and what to do with those with clear titles.


The first 20 unencumbered castles were put onto the international real estate market last year; the Bonn government says these represent but a "minuscule" fraction of all the noble properties it will eventually evaluate and sell.


But these 20 alone make up a medieval Monopoly board for the history-lover with a certain whimsical cast of mind -- and fairly deep pockets in his pantaloons.


There is, for instance, Manor Gera, an impressive, half-timbered pile near the east-central German city of Gera. When the last of a line of aristocratic owners died in 1893, Manor Gera, with roots that can be traced to 1403, fell into the upstart clutches of a succession of industrialists; they tarted it up with statues, rare trees, a swimming pool and an antique teahouse. They then went broke. When the Nazis came to power, the Gestapo made it into a forced-labor camp for women.


After the defeat of the Nazis, Manor Gera became, in succession, a Russian military hospital, a cluster of cooperative farms, a training center for East German judges, a school for Communist Party kids, a stable and, finally, an apartment building.


Now, says the government, all this history can be had for just $1.1 million.


Then there is Tempzin Monastery, or what is left of it: an 11th century monastic hospital that once specialized in the care of victims of a mysterious ailment called St. Anthony's fire. The Protestant Reformation, and the discovery that St. Anthony's fire was a form of gangrene caused by eating rotten bread, brought about the eclipse of Tempzin. Today it is little more than a clutch of crumbling, empty brick buildings.


"But despite its ruined appearance, there is still an aura of greatness," says the government catalog.


The years alone have not driven castles into what the catalog politely describes as a "decaying state." The East German regime did its share of damage, requisitioning stately residences as communist youth-league vacation homes, hostels, construction material depots, grain silos, dance halls, restaurants, farm co-ops and quarters for migrant workers. One castle became the lunchroom of a ball bearings factory.


Bidders thus must come up not only with the government's recommended sale price, but also with refurbishment funds and suitable proposals for future use.


Investors have floated imaginative schemes, including hotels, nursing homes, restaurants, clinics, convention centers, a stud farm, a recycling center, an animal shelter, two toy museums and an Indian-culture exhibition hall.


Most proposals and bids have so far come from Germany, America, Japan and Colombia.