Dagstuhl Castle (in German: Burgruine Dagstuhl or Burg Dagstuhl) is a ruined castle on the top of a hill near the town of Wadern, kreis Merzig-Wadern, in Saarland, Germany. It overlooks the newer Schloss Dagstuhl in the valley below, which is historic but has been converted for use as a conference centre.

The castle was founded by Knight Boemund of Saarbrücken sometime before 1290, probably for Bohemond I von Warnesberg, Archbishop of Trier. The name derives from the German word for roof, "Dach", because of the roof-like shape of the hill on which the castle stands.

The castle ruins have been archaeologically explored and were improved for public access in 2004.

Dagstuhl Castle

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Dagstuhl is a computer science research center in Germany, located in and named after a district of the town of Wadern, Merzig-Wadern, Saarland.

Following the model of the mathematical center at Oberwolfach, the center is installed in a very remote and relaxed location in the countryside. The Leibniz Center is located in a historic country house, Schloss Dagstuhl (Dagstuhl Castle), together with modern purpose-built buildings connected by an enclosed footbridge.

The ruins of the 13th-century Dagstuhl Castle are nearby, a short walk up a hill from the Schloss.

The Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (LZI, Leibniz Center for Informatics) was established at Dagstuhl in 1990. The center is managed as a non-profit organization, and financed by national funds. It receives scientific support by a variety of German and foreign research institutions. Until April 2008 the name of the center was: International Conference and Research Center for Computer Science (German: Internationales Begegnungs- und Forschungszentrum für Informatik (IBFI)). The center was founded by Reinhard Wilhelm, who continued as its director until May 2014, when Raimund Seidel became the director.

Dagstuhl's computer science library has over 50,000 books and other media, among them a full set of Springer-Verlag's Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS) series and electronic access to many computer science journals.

Dagstuhl supports computer science by organizing high ranked seminars on hot topics in informatics. Dagstuhl Seminars, which are established after review and approval by the Scientific Directorate, bring together personally invited scientists from academia and industry from all over the world to discuss their newest ideas and problems. As part of the Dagstuhl seminars, the center hosts summer schools, group retreats, and other scientific conferences, all discussing informatics. Every year about 3,500 scientists stay in Dagstuhl for about 100 conferences and workshops. The number of participants is limited to enable discussion and by the available housing capacity. The stay is full-board; participants are accommodated in the original house or in the modern annex, and have all their meals at the center. Seminars are usually held for a weekly period: participants arrive on Sunday evening and depart on Friday evening or Saturday morning. One or sometimes two seminars are held simultaneously with other small meetings.

Cryptographic technique DP5 (Dagstuhl Privacy Preserving Presence Protocol P) is named after Schloss Dagstuhl.

As well as publishing proceedings from its own seminars, the Leibniz Center publishes the Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), a series of open access conference proceedings from computer science conferences worldwide. Conferences published in this series include the Symposium on Theoretical Aspects of Computer Science, held annually in Germany and France, the Conference on Foundations of Software Technology and Theoretical Computer Science, held annually in south Asia, and the Computational Complexity Conference, held at a different international venue each year. The Symposium on Computational Geometry has agreed to bе published by LIPIcs beginning in 2015, and the International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming has agreed to be published by LIPIcs beginning in 2016.

Dagstuhl

Kerpen Castle (German: Burg Kerpen) is a spur castle standing on a dolomite hill spur at a height of 500 m above sea level (NHN) above the Eifel village of Kerpen in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate.

History

The precise origins of Kerpen Castle are hidden by the mists of time. It is very likely that it was built by Sigibertus de Kerpene, first mentioned in 1136, or his son, Henry I (1142-1177). However, it is not yet possible to give an exact date of construction.

In 1265, Theodoric II of Kerpen converted the castle into a fief of the Archbishop of Cologne, Engelbert II of Falkenburg. The estate was later divided between him and his brother, William II.

In 1299, a 'Theodoric III' is recorded as Lord of Kerpen. His sons later founded the three family lines of Kerpen-Linster, Kerpen-Mörsdorf and Kerpen-Illingen (Lit.: Losse, 2003), who remained the owners of their ancestral castle and turned it into a jointly-owned inheritance or Ganerbenburg.

In 1446, Conrad of Kerpen-Mörsdorf sold his share of the castle to his cousin, William II of Sombreff, who acquired another share in 1448. Together with his family inheritance, this made William the sole owner of the castle. After his death, there were ongoing disputes over Kerpen castle, which lasted for more than 200 years.

William's son, Frederick, died childless, so that the castle fell to his sister, Margareta. Through her marriage to Count Dietrich of Manderscheid-Schleiden, the castle came into the possession of the count's family.

At the beginning of the 16th century, Dietrich IV of Manderscheid-Schleiden had a castle chapel built in the Gothic style. When he died childless in 1593, his brother-in-law, Philip of the Mark, had Kerpen Castle occupied by those loyal to him in order to lay claim to the estate. The quarrel between him and Philip's widow ended in a settlement in 1611 and he bought Kerpen from the widow.

But the property disputes were by no means over. In 1653, the Count of Löwenstein-Wertheim also tried to stake his claim to the estate by occupying the castle. It was not until 1674 that the dispute between the various noble families over Kerpen was brought to an end when the Imperial Chamber Court at Spires granted the estate of Kerpen and its castle to the Duchess of Arenberg. The Arenberg family remained owners until 1794, but never realised their initial plans to have the castle transformed into a schloss.

In the Reunion Wars, some of the buildings of the castle were destroyed by French troops in 1682. During the Thirty Years' War, soldiers of the French army under General Bouffleur blew up the castle and village and razed them to the ground.

After the occupation of the left bank of the Rhine by French Revolution troops in 1794, French administrators sold the ruin to the village in 1803 for demolition.

In 1893, Johann Heinrich Dün took over the dilapidated estate. He had it freed of rubble, built the present residential house and put a new battlement on the bergfried.

From 1907 to 1911, Kerpen Castle was owned by Clemens Manstein.

In 1911, Eifel painter, Fritz von Wille, bought the castle from Clemens Manstein and had urgent safety and repair work carried out. When the artist died in 1941, he was buried in the castle grounds.

In the same year, the company of DEMAG bought the castle to use it as a training centre. In the 1950s, the company carried out further measures to secure, modify and expand the castle.

From 1969 to 2007, Kerpen was owned by the county of Neuss, who used it as a country hall of residence (Landschulheim). Then a Dutch family bought the property and underwent extensive renovation in 2010.

Currently (2016) it is used as refugee accommodation.

Description
Kerpen Castle is built on a triple-terraced, hill spur, which is guarded to the north by a roughly 15-metre-wide neck ditch. The battlemented, 23-metre-high, bergfried stands on the first and highest terrace. On the top floor was once a dungeon.

On the middle terrace there used to be domestic and outbuildings, which no longer exist. The only relic from medieval times is the 35-metre-deep castle well in a roundel.

The lowest terrace is surrounded by an enceinte which is supported on heavy pillars. In the 17th century it house several outbuildings and castellan's houses before they were destroyed by the French in 1682.