Thousands of students come and go, probably without giving any thought to the fact that the offices of Mannheim University inhabit the finest residence to grace the banks of the Rhine River in the 18th century. Monumental in size, it dominates the modern townscape with its grid like street layout. In Germany, when you see straight roads […]
“In the middle of a handsome park stands a Schloss favorite… with much that is interesting both outside and in.” This is how Freiherr Karl von Beust, writing in the late 19th century, described the summer residence once built outside Rastatt for the Margravine Sibylla Augusta. Upon the death of the Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm, famous […]
When Goethe wrote in hisstic cases. Wieland, Herder, and Schiller were often asked because of their reputations… now it is up to me, as the on 1815 member random about the “glory” of Weimar, he did so not with presumption, but with a sense of patriotic, even Pan European commitment. “It was quite common,” he continued, […]
In 1495, the Holy Roman Empire established the Reichskammergericht, the Imperial Supreme Court as the highest civil court in the Empire. The court was seated in Speyer, but in 1689, during the War of the Palatinate Succession, the court fled from the advancing French troops and after 1693 was housed in Wetzlar. it remained, with its support staff […]
The Krämer Bridge in Erfurt is an old medieval bridge over the Gera River covered by thirty-eight inhabited half-timber houses and popular stores with a pedestrian zone running down the center and a church on either end. It is called the Krämerbrücke in German: Krämer (alternately spelled Kraemer) means Merchant or Seller of Small Goods and Brücke (Bruecke) means Bridge. So the Krämerbrückemeans Merchant’s Bridge. And true […]
The citizen of Frankfurt could feel the heterogeneity of his hometown, the conflict between domesticity and internationalism, in the language he spoke. Frankfurt German was in the 18th century, and to some extent still is, one of Germany’s many robust dialects with its own unashamed peculiarities of pronunciation and vocabulary, some of which the author […]
Religious variety reflected the composition of the population. The Jews led their own religious life within their ghetto (200 houses and a synagogue), whose two gates were shut every night until 1796. The three Christian denominations of the Holy Roman Empire were all prominent, though in different ways. It was popularly said, that in Frankfurt, the Catholics had […]
The Fürstenzug in Dresden is a larger than life mural depicting a procession of knights, made of approx. 25,000 porcelain tiles, designed to look as if the parade has been woven into a long tapestry and hung on the wall. It is the largest tile mural in the world. It presents the eight hundred year […]