This week’s dream: Bavaria’s Belle Époque spa
Baden-Baden is a preserve of “pristine German urban Gemütlichkeit,” and attracts members of the international set who come for the town's baths and stress-free pace.
The Black Forest spa town of Baden-Baden is much the same now as it was when Dostoyevsky visited in the 19th century, said Jackie Wullschlager in the Financial Times. The great Russian novelist wrote The Gambler in this “sedate, elegant” Bavarian resort “between bouts in the casino, fights with his mistress,” and conversations with fellow Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, whom he regarded as a “prig.” Other members of the international set who have visited Baden-Baden over the years include Richard Wagner, Kaiser Wilhelm, Otto von Bismarck, Edward VII, and—much more recently—ex–Spice Girl Victoria Beckham. Now as then, this “green salon” of parks, fountains, and forests maintains a hassle- and stress-free pace. Visitors soon find they’re slowing down in spite of themselves. “Within 24 hours, I was ambling rather than striding.”
The town’s very name translates as Bathing-Bathing, a “spa town doubled or squared.” The tiny town center is a marvel of internationalism: It includes a Byzantine Russian church, a neo-Romanesque Catholic church, and a Gothic Protestant church. Among the other architectural treasures are a baroque theater modeled after the Paris Opera House and a 19th-century railway station that has been converted into “Europe’s second-biggest Festspielhaus,” or festival theater. Marlene Dietrich called the glittering Kurhaus, or Conversation House, the world’s most beautiful casino. It has a gas-lamp promenade, the “chandelier-dripping ‘Hall of the Thousand Candles,’” and furnishings covered in crimson damask.
Untouched by World War II, Baden-Baden is a preserve of “pristine German urban Gemütlichkeit,” or coziness. In true German style, the two large-scale baths that give the town its name are “leisure organized and perfected.” The stylishly modern Caracalla Therme features aroma steam baths, salt inhalations, rock grottos, and a plethora of whirlpools. The marble columns, mosaics, and statues of the older Friedrichsbad, standing over “the original bathhouse built for Roman soldiers,” date to 1877. Its baths offer “17 precisely delineated recuperative stages” that range from a hot-air bath at 154 degrees to a 118-degree thermal steam bath to total immersion in 97-degree water. At the Winter Garden of the Belle Époque Brenner’s Park Hotel Spa, I wondered how this corner of old Europe managed to be preserved “without coming to resemble a theme park.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
Contact: Brenners.com
Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox
A free daily email with the biggest news stories of the day – and the best features from TheWeek.com
-
Today's political cartoons - December 22, 2024
Cartoons Sunday's cartoons - the long and short of it, trigger finger, and more
By The Week US Published
-
5 hilariously spirited cartoons about the spirit of Christmas
Cartoons Artists take on excuses, pardons, and more
By The Week US Published
-
Inside the house of Assad
The Explainer Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, ruled Syria for more than half a century but how did one family achieve and maintain power?
By The Week UK Published