Market For Castles Is Hot In Former East Germany

VOGELSANG, Germany - From the moment he first saw the little village castle with a "For Sale" sign on the front door and battlements looming against the sky, Hans-Rainer Schielke knew he had to have it.

Never mind that it was damp and drafty, with falling plaster, rotting beams and peeling wallpaper.

Schielke, 43, looked and saw his future, as well as a bit of his past. He and his parents had fled west from this very region in the late 1950s, only a few years before the communists closed the border.

The West German businessman plunked down a winning bid of more than $3 million to purchase and renovate the place. Last month the sale became official, making him the latest buyer in one of the world's most unusual real-estate offerings - the peddling of nearly 100 castles, mansions and manor houses dotting the long-neglected landscape of the former East Germany.

It is an exercise dedicated to the decidedly capitalist proposition that if you can't be to the manor born, you can at least be to the manor bought.

The sell-off began in 1992, run by the Treuhand, the agency set up by the German government to peddle or dismantle every last scrap of East German industry and property.

Some estates were reclaimed by families that had lost them years ago, either to Nazi confiscation in the 1930s and '40s, or to postwar communist nationalization. Some families wanted to unload the properties, and those were put on the market along with

unclaimed properties.

The hope was that buyers would not only provide some money for the government, but would also add a little economic life to their new communities by fixing up the old properties and putting them to use once again.

So far 29 have been sold for a total of about $17.5 million, with $55 million in renovations pledged. The transactions range from a few hundred thousand dollars for a few smaller, crumblier places, to about $5.3 million for the grandiose Schloss Wolfsbrunn, a castle near Chemnitz being converted to a luxury hotel. Another 50 properties are about to be put up for sale along with 14 still available from earlier listings.

The sale generated relatively little public attention until October 1994, when the Treuhand's real estate holding company published a glossy full-color 124-page sales catalog. Titled, in English, "Fairy tales for sale," it listed 20 properties, including the former gifts of kings and homes of knights, noblemen and monks.

That's when Schielke and nearly 300 other bidders got interested.

"Nothing is built in this kind of style anymore," he said, standing in the gloom of the castle's entrance hall. He warmed himself before a small fire built in a splendid old fireplace built of green ceramic tiles, while his 3-year-old twins, Max and Celine, tossed scrap wood onto the flames.