Augustusburg Palace

Fifteen kilometres south of Cologne, in the unremarkable town of Brühl, stands one of Germany's finest Baroque palaces — and one of the least visited by international tourists relative to its importance. Augustusburg Palace was built for a prince-archbishop who spent more money on parties and hunting lodges than on governing his diocese, and whose taste in architecture was refined enough that he hired Balthasar Neumann, the greatest German Baroque architect of the 18th century, to design his staircase. That staircase is the reason architects make pilgrimages to Brühl. UNESCO agreed in 1984.

Clemens August of Bavaria was Archbishop of Cologne from 1723 to 1761, a position that also made him one of the seven Electors who chose the Holy Roman Emperor. The youngest son of the Elector of Bavaria, he was placed into the Church at an early age and went on to accumulate a remarkable concentration of ecclesiastical offices: Archbishop of Cologne, Bishop of Hildesheim, Bishop of Münster, Bishop of Paderborn, Bishop of Osnabrück, and Grand Master of the Teutonic Order. The income from these combined positions was enormous, and Clemens August spent it with magnificent irresponsibility on buildings, gardens, falconry and entertainment.

The first architect at Augustusburg was Johann Conrad Schlaun, a Westphalian Baroque specialist who, from 1725, designed the palace's basic structure: a U-shaped building arranged around a cour d'honneur, with a main block and projecting wings. Clemens August was not entirely satisfied with Schlaun's relatively restrained Baroque, and brought in the Bavarian court architect François de Cuvilliés, creator of the Cuvilliés Theatre in Munich, to add the more exuberant Rococo decoration that defines the finished interior.

In 1740, Clemens August commissioned Balthasar Neumann, who had just completed the Würzburg Residenz, generally considered the greatest German Baroque palace, to redesign Augustusburg's staircase hall. Neumann's staircase is one of the acknowledged masterpieces of European Baroque architecture: a single grand flight that divides into two as it rises, framed by an open colonnade, covered by a vaulted ceiling whose illusionistic fresco by Carlo Carlone makes the surface appear to dissolve upward into open sky. The staircase occupies only one room of the palace, but it justifies the visit on its own. Frederick the Great of Prussia, visiting in 1755, reportedly remarked that Neumann's staircase at Augustusburg surpassed his own at Sanssouci.

A kilometre south of the main palace, connected by a formal avenue through parkland, stands Falkenlust, the small hunting lodge Clemens August built for falconry expeditions. Falkenlust is more intimate than Augustusburg itself: two storeys, Dutch-influenced Baroque in style, with a staircase decorated in blue-and-white Delft tiles. Both the lodge and its surrounding landscape are included in the UNESCO World Heritage designation, and visiting both buildings together gives a fuller picture of Clemens August's architectural ambitions, from grand state reception rooms to private retreat.

UNESCO inscribed Augustusburg and Falkenlust as a single World Heritage Site in 1984, specifically citing Neumann's staircase as 'a masterpiece of human creative genius' — a designation that came relatively early in the World Heritage programme's history, reflecting how highly the palace was already regarded by architectural historians. After the Second World War, the palace took on a further role: the West German government used Augustusburg as a state guesthouse from 1949, and Chancellor Konrad Adenauer held official receptions here, with several visiting heads of state received in rooms where Clemens August had once entertained his own guests. This continuous post-war institutional use helped preserve the palace through a period when many German aristocratic residences were neglected or converted to other purposes.