Imperial Castle — Prussia Builds a Political West End
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The Imperial Castle was built in the early twentieth century for German Emperor Wilhelm II, when Poznań was Posen inside the German Empire. Its Romanesque-inspired mass was part of a larger imperial district designed to project German state authority in a contested Polish city. After 1918 the building entered Polish state use; during Nazi occupation it was altered again for Adolf Hitler, although he never made it a working residence. Few buildings in Poznań have been claimed so aggressively by successive regimes. The castle therefore works best as political architecture: each government tried to make the same stone complex mean something different.