Castle of Padure (Tels-Paddern, from the collection of Hans-Jürgen Syberberg)

Location
Aizputes Padures Muiza, Padure, near Aizpute, 50 km north-east of Liepaja

Content
At the shores of the Southern Baltic, in Estonian Käsmu and Pärnu or in Latvian Jurmala or Liepaja, fin-de-siècle decadent moods and literature were flowering, esp. in the prose works of lately re-discovered Baltic German novelist Eduard von Keyserling (1855 – 1918 ) who with a delicate precision depicts the life of his social class. His novel Wellen (Tides, 1911), with a setting on the bright sand beaches of Courland, shows the conservative aristocratic upper class vs an outsider couple excluded from society: the beautiful Doralice, who has left her husband, a diplomat, to live her forbidden love to a painter. Like an intense impressionist painting itself, the novel bridges over the social conflict by the common experience of the sea-side and its differentiated imagery.

In Courland the Keyserlings, as a representative of the former aristocracy, owned several family castles like Kabillen (Kabile), Telsen (Tasu) and Tels-Paddern (Padure), where the writer Eduard von Keyserling was born. He moved on to Munich where he grew blind, but still worked on and died at the end of WW I.

In the Castle of Padure today a school is residing: Lazas speciala pamatskola.

Cf. Eduard von Keyserling's novel Abendliche Häuser (1914) which starts with a description of the castle's facade: https://www.projekt-gutenberg.org/keyserlg/abendlch/abendlch.html