Imperial Castle

The Imperial Castle — popularly called Zamek, simply "the castle" — is the most architecturally distinctive building in Poznan: a red-brick Neo-Romanesque palace built for Kaiser Wilhelm II at a time when Poznan was the Prussian city of Posen, capital of the German province of Posen. The architecture is monumental and somewhat pompous, which was rather the point. Today it houses a cultural centre with exhibition spaces, a cinema, a theatre, and several restaurants.

The interior is worth seeing for the throne room and the former royal apartments, which retain their Wilhelmine decoration. The castle also has a basement bar and music venue that is popular with Poznan's students, giving the Hohenzollern imperial architecture an entertainingly incongruous afterlife. The building sits in its own grounds at the western end of the city centre, a ten-minute walk from the Old Market Square.

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A story
The Imperial Castle was completed in 1910 and is technically the youngest royal castle in Europe. Kaiser Wilhelm II commissioned it as a symbol of German cultural dominance in the city he called Posen, but he spent almost no time here — he visited only three times in five years before the First World War ended both the German Empire and his need for a Polish palace. After 1918 it became Polish property, and the castle was briefly used as a residence by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War — a fact that gives its grand reception rooms an uncomfortable historical resonance.