Sommerpalais

The Summer Palace of the princes of Reuss-Greiz is the finest late-Baroque building in Thuringia: a long, pale-yellow palace set in the great English landscape park along the White Elster. It was built in the 1760s and 1770s as a country house for the ruling family, and after the abdication of 1918 it passed into state hands.

Today the palace holds the Staatliche Bücher- und Kupferstichsammlung — a princely library of around 35,000 volumes, a notable collection of engravings, and the Satiricum, with prints and caricatures from the 16th century onwards. Combined ticket with the Oberes Schloss; closed Mondays.

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A story
The Sommerpalais houses the Satiricum, one of the largest German collections of satirical drawings and caricatures — built up by a librarian in the late 19th century and ranging from Hogarth and Daumier to Cold-War cartoonists. The princes of Reuss were unusually permissive patrons, which is presumably why a small Thuringian court ended up with one of Europe's odder libraries.