Storkow sits in a landscape of shallow lakes and sandy pine, and the castle was built to exploit exactly that. It went up around the middle of the twelfth century during the German settlement of the region, almost certainly on the site of an earlier Slavic marsh castle — a fortification that used standing water instead of stone as its outer defence. Its builder is likely to have been Margrave Conrad I of Meißen.

The first documentary sighting comes in 1209, when Storkow is recorded as being given to the monastery at Pforte. In the century that followed it served as a frontier work in a contested zone, which is the usual reason a castle in flat country is worth its maintenance. From roughly the middle of the thirteenth century the Saxon ministerial family of Strehla held the Beeskow-Storkow lordship and lived here; the lords of Bieberstein took over in the 1380s.

On 15 June 1518 Ulrich of Bieberstein enfeoffed the castle to Dietrich of Bülow, Bishop of Lebus, and Storkow abruptly changed character. Bülow had studied at Bologna and come home with strong opinions about what a building should look like. He expanded the fortress into an episcopal residence on three floors — administrative rooms at ground level, noble chambers above them, a great hall on top — and kept the moat, adding outbuildings around it.

It was a bishop's house for less than four decades. In 1555 John VIII of Horneburg, the last Roman Catholic bishop of Lebus, died within these walls on 16 June, a few years into the Reformation's reordering of the region and after only four years in office. The lordship passed in 1556 to Margrave John of Brandenburg-Küstrin, and after his death the castle and estate ended up, permanently, with the electors of Brandenburg.

Between the bishop's arrival and the bishop's death, the castle was used for something it is less comfortable to describe. Hans Kohlhase was a Cölln merchant whose horses had been seized in 1532 by servants of a Saxon nobleman on the road to the Leipzig fair. Denied redress in any court he could reach, he declared a private feud and spent years raiding across Saxony; he was broken on the wheel in Berlin in 1540, and Heinrich von Kleist would later build the novella Michael Kohlhaas loosely on his life.

Stefan Meiße was Kohlhase's friend and comrade-in-arms. In 1538 he was tortured to death in the medieval tower at Storkow. Nothing in the record suggests he was anything other than a man on the losing side of a quarrel between a merchant and a state, and the tower is still standing.

The Thirty Years' War found Storkow in 1627 and left it badly damaged. It was patched back together as a modest Renaissance residence, which lasted until 1775, when fire destroyed the upper storey and effectively ended its career as anyone's palace. For well over a century afterwards it was a ruin with a view.

Then in 1910 the architect Johann Emil Schaudt bought the site for 25,000 marks. Three years earlier he had completed the Kaufhaus des Westens in Berlin, the department store Germans still shorten to KaDeWe; here he did something quite different, remodelling the ruin in a romantic, historicising Romanesque manner — a castle rebuilt to look the way the early twentieth century thought castles ought to look.

From 1934 to 1945 the National Socialist state took the building over as a Jugendburg, a Hitler Youth training castle, which is what happened to a good many picturesque German ruins in those years: the past was useful, and boys were brought to it to be shaped. From 1945 until the 1978 fire, far less dramatically, it housed municipal offices.

The rebuilding between 2000 and 2009 was paid for with state and European Union money, and the result is neither a restoration nor a replica but a working building with a medieval core. Since May 2009 it has held the visitor information centre for the Dahme-Heideseen Nature Park, and its permanent exhibition, "People and Nature — a Journey Through Time," is about the lakes and woods outside rather than the castle itself. After eight centuries of being fought over, garrisoned, requisitioned and burned, Storkow's castle now spends its days explaining the water it was built on.