Qualla: Altena Castle

Altena Castle: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Luchs, CC BY-SA 3.0. Every backpacker who has ever stumbled off a train in a foreign city and slept in a bunk bed under a stranger's snoring traces their lineage to one stone room on a hill above the river Lenne. In August 1914 - just as the world was tipping into the first of its century's wars - a country schoolteacher named Richard Schirrmann moved a small collection of straw mattresses into the medieval keep of Altena Castle and opened them up to wandering schoolchildren. The Jugendherberge Burg Altena was the first permanent youth hostel in the world. There are now around four thousand others across the globe, and almost every one of them began, in some sense, in this Sauerland room.

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Image: Luchs | CC BY-SA 3.0

Altena Castle: The Brothers Who Built It

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dr.G.Schmitz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Long before Schirrmann, the castle belonged to a different kind of wandering: noble Westphalians moving up in the world. The legend traces it to about 1108, when the brothers Adolf and Everhard von Berg were said to have received land in the Sauerland from Emperor Henry V in exch...

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Image: Dr.G.Schmitz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Altena Castle: Centuries of Quiet Decline

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Asio otus, CC BY-SA 3.0. What followed was a slow century-by-century retirement from importance. Brandenburg-Prussia used the castle as a garrison after taking over the County of Mark, then sold it to the town of Altena in 1771. The new owners filled the rooms with the institutions a small Westphalian to...

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Image: Asio otus | CC BY-SA 3.0

Altena Castle: Schirrmann's Idea

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jörg Braukmann, CC BY-SA 4.0. The reconstruction came for the 1909 anniversary celebrating three hundred years of Brandenburg-Prussian rule over the County of Mark, and it was finished, controversially, in a romantic medievalist style. Critics complained the architects had built something more imaginary than ...

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Image: Jörg Braukmann | CC BY-SA 4.0

Altena Castle: A Movement Out of One Room

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit El Grafo, CC BY-SA 3.0. Within a decade Schirrmann's Jugendherbergsverband had hundreds of hostels across Germany. The model spread - first across Europe, then to North America, then everywhere young people travel. Hostelling International, the global federation, now counts thousands of properties. Thro...

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Image: El Grafo | CC BY-SA 3.0