Baden - Blog Posts

Bade in den Strahlen der Mittagssonne,

fall' in ihre liebevolle Umarmung.

Der kühle Sommerwind streicht zart,

grüßt freundlich und zieht seines Weges.

Karlsruhe Palace

Thought I'd pop up to Karlsruhe today; it's not very far and I'd never been. It was... well, OK for a light outing. There's a lot of construction work going on in town, and it wasn't very animated being late January. Still, the weather was good enough for a pleasant walk around the centrepiece, the Palace, which houses the history museum of the State of Baden.

Karlsruhe is a relatively young town, by European history standards, as it was founded in 1715 as a new seat of power for the Margrave of Baden. A symmetric living building with a rear wing mounted by a tower was surrounded by vast gardens, and streets radiated out from the palace - a rather original urban arrangement, I don't remember seeing it in other places. Following French invasion in the late 18th century, Emperor Napoleon granted Baden the status of Grand Duchy: the ruler gained access to more riches and symbols such as a crown, a throne...

The Grand Duchy was briefly overthrown in a revolution in 1849, and abolished entirely following the fall of the German Empire in 1918. The region of Baden, stretching from Mannheim and Karlsruhe in the North, along the East side of the Rhine down to Freiburg and Konstanz, became a Republic within the Weimar Republic, and merged with neighbouring Württemberg, the area around Stuttgart, into the Land of Baden-Württemberg we have today in 1952. Baden was the smaller of the two former Grand Duchies, and was more reticent to the merger, as this poster in the museum shows.

"This is what the merger will be like!"

Ultimately, the merger wasn't as bad a deal as feared: when a Baden-only referendum was held in 1970, a return to a split was emphatically rejected. Still, it is not rare to see the yellow and red flag of Baden in the South-West corner of Germany - I've seen it outside a drinks hut near Oberkirch (bottom left picture) and on several castle ruins. It naturally flies atop the Karlsruhe Palace tower.