The article dates back to 2012. It appeared in Brand Eins, a German business magazine. Here, it is offered in translation.

For Armin Mey, priorities are a thing of the past. At first glance, they seem quite odd. Why does he expend so much energy and resources on restoring a room that was used for Masonic ceremonies in the early 19th century, instead of first tackling a leaky roof? Why does he spend so much effort acquiring silverware and antique books, whole boxes of these, when so many rooms still look more like ruins, anything but the chambers of a grand residence?

You have to spend an evening with the 43-year-old owner of Schloss Beesenstedt in Saxony-Anhalt in order to understand what makes him tick and why the self-assigned task of breathing new life into an estate that has fallen into disrepair over the years fascinates and fulfills him so much.

He makes himself comfortable in front of the marble fireplace in the grand hall, with a glass in hand, sipping wine from neighboring estates and talking about the wealthy Nette family, who originally owned this 5,000-square-meter mansion. Constructed in 1895, it was expropriated in 1947 to become the seat of the so-called Federation of Free German Trade Unions of the GDR. "According to official documents, it was a place where lectures, seminars, and workshops were held. But in reality, the union officials were throwing massive orgies here," Mey says with a wide grin. The castle stood empty from 1989 to 1996. Since then, Armin has lived here, painstakingly restoring it and bringing it up to date. Experts estimate the cost of this endeavor at eleven million euros. An outrageous, surreal sum for a man who had no income or savings at the time of purchase.

Schloss Beesenstedt is now his home, his mission in life, and his source of livelihood. As a young man in the GDR days, Mey always felt confined and controlled. He dreamed of a place where he could celebrate, socialize, plan things, and just be himself with his friends without being watched or disciplined. This is exactly what he has created here. People come to visit regularly, staying for a few days, sometimes weeks, in search of new inspirations and whatnot. Right now, three Russians are hanging out with him around the fireplace. Mey has known one of them for ages, an artist living in Berlin. He has brought two friends who travel around the world as job nomads. Mey enjoys these typically spontaneous meetups in ever-changing configurations. His guests should be able to do whatever they please here. "My castle is your home" is one of his favorite expressions.

After the fall of the wall in 1989, there were scores of abandoned castles in East Germany. Beesenstedt was not the first one he occupied. In the early 1990s, together with his former girlfriend, he rented Schloss Stolpe in Usedom, a completely dilapidated palace, for next to nothing. There, too, he embarked on the renovation of the building, with as much enthusiasm and commitment, resolved to turn it into a venue for cultural events. His work experience as a builder during the GDR era and the fact that he later studied architecture in Moscow served him well. What happened next, he never expected. Following the first reggae nights they organized, the place became subject to regular assaults by neo-Nazis from the area. "The right-wing radicals would crash our events, beat up our guests, and once even set fire to the castle."

Mey had no choice but to go looking for another estate, this time with the help of Treuhand, an agency whose mandate was to privatize formerly state-owned enterprises and properties. By his own account, he was completely transfixed, almost lifted into the air by the spiritual power of the place, as soon as he got to the doorsteps of Schloss Beesenstedt. He was just as instantly enchanted by its architectural elegance. Its winding wooden staircases, magnificent stucco, and generous rooms reflected the extravagant lifestyle of the founders. Its laminated chipboard furniture, linoleum glued to parquet floors, and portraits of Lenin, Marx, and Ulbricht on the walls, in turn, attested to the tastelessness of GDR socialism. "We'll take that," he said to his girlfriend after only a few minutes of inspection.

However, none of the two had any money. They got the castle nevertheless – on the condition that they invest 700,000 Deutschmarks into its renovation. Mey secured a loan. He got it because Treuhand officials supported the idea. "For all what we did at Stolpe, they had a huge crush on us." At once he moved to spruce up the place. In the process, though, he wasn't so much preoccupied with setting up a cozy home. "I was more passionate about unearthing the vestiges of the castle's esoteric and convoluted history." So he spent the first few months restoring the interior of the Masonic lodge, where the Empire-style frescoes had been thoroughly plastered over with several coats of paint. One might well conclude that the walls constitute the overarching motif in Mey's life. His hunger for freedom remains unquenched to this day. "Selling my lifetime by working for an architectural firm, for example, is not an option for me."

And he doesn't need to sell himself. Today, the castle not only generates many interesting encounters for the host, but also a decent income. From March to September, there is hardly a weekend without a wedding, or a festival, film shooting, conference, alt-office session, and whatnot. In the summer, the MLove symposium was held here, drawing people from all over the world, who came together to share ideas about the future of mobile technology. It's now a winter playground for Burning Man...

Over the years, Mey has spent quite a fortune on renovation. He furnished the place with reclaimed furniture. It tells its own story. The tables and chairs in the great hall, as well as the sumptuous chandelier on the staircase, come from Unter den Linden, the former café of Berlin's opera house. The bathroom in Room 15 was used by Udo Lindenberg when he was still living at the Intercontinental in Hamburg. The furniture in the foyer once adorned Hildegard Knef's room at Schweizerhof Hotel in Berlin...

The amount of work still to be done here at Schloss Beesenstedt is staggering. Mey's idea of how the castle should look one day is precise. That is why he has been buying old books for many years – almost obsessively, by titles as much as by volume. One day there will be a large library here. "The image in my head is the blueprint that guides me in this endeavor," he says. "Whether I will be able to realize it all in this lifetime is another story."

Schloss Beesenstedt... Much of its history is a gray area – dark, tangled, and messy as its basement, two levels deep down, and as vast the subject of inquiry and interpretation as the continental time-space continuum where it's grounded. Spanning a few centuries, it is perforated with periods of total havoc, desolation, and abandon manifesting the symptoms of massive tectonic shifts in the very structure of our civilization.

From the Kingdom of Prussia and Kaiser's Monarchy to the Weimar Republic and so on to Third Reich, Socialist State and New Federation, two most calamitous wars in between, the history has been imprinting itself on the Schloss as much... as it has been withholding soon afterward – each epoch on entry eradicating the vestiges of the regimes on exit, with its invisible hands getting rid of the leftovers from the cleanups by the resident precursors themselves packing and wiping up after their own ploys. Lodging freemasons, headquartering nazis, party communists...

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