Haus Haan (Moated Castle)

The castle owes its name to the von Haane family of knights, who owned the estate from 1230. Even before 1200, the knight Seybold von Blech had built an early motte here on cleared land. The von Haane knights became known above all through a long legal dispute with the convent in Dünnwald over water rights on the Mutzbach.

In 1264 the brothers Nikolaus and Jakob von Haane clashed with the convent, which held the right to use the stream for its mill. The knights instead diverted the water into their own moat. Only a twelve-member court of arbitration, appointed by Countess Margarete von Berg and her son Adolf, ended the decades-long feud: sole rights went to the convent, which nonetheless had to grant the knights water on two days and nights each week "for the sake of peace" and pay them 20 marks of Cologne currency in compensation. In addition, a relative of the knights was to be admitted to the Dünnwald convent.

In 1355 the knight Wilhelm von Haane had a mill built where the Mutzbach flowed down into the Rhine valley – roughly at today's Dünnwalder Mauspfad. It operated as a fulling mill and was later called the "lower fulling mill"; before then, cloth and leather had to be carried far, as far as Mülheim, for fulling.

From 1373 the von Lülsdorf family became owners and made Haus Haan their family seat until 1710. During the Thirty Years' War the castle was burned down by imperial troops in 1628; the present manor house was built in 1730. Through the Droste zu Vischering family the estate passed in 1812 to a Mr Brügelmann from Ratingen – Friedrich Wilhelm Brügelmann founded the Brügelmann company, still based in Cologne today, here in 1822. In 1828 the City of Cologne bought the complex. Lacking a plan for its use, it fell into disrepair over the years, with parts serving as a riding stable. In 1986 the city sold the ensemble, which was then converted into a private residential complex.

One legend tells of an underground passage said to have linked Haus Haan with the Dünnwald convent – through it, the nuns are said to have escaped to safety during hostile raids. The dialect poet Franz Peter Kürten also commemorated the place in his poem "der Grafenstohl en dr Kirch," recalling the "Count of Stammheim" and his church pew, which also served the "castle folk of Haan."