Bruchsal Castle

Aerial image of the Bruchsal Palace and gardens (view from the west)

Bruchsal Schloss was our first destination today, about 1.4 hours south of Frankfurt. This is a large castle/palace complex filled with colorful pink and yellow 1700s buildings. Symmetrical, orderly, stately.

Here’s a description from Wikipedia:

Bruchsal Palace (Schloss Bruchsal), also called the Damiansburg, is a Baroque palace complex located in Bruchsal, Germany. The complex is made up of over 50 buildings. These include a three-winged residential building with an attached chapel, four pavilions separated by a road, some smaller utility buildings, and a garden. It is noted for its fine Rococo decoration and in particular its entrance staircase, which is regarded as one of the finest examples of its kind in any Baroque palace.

The palace was built in the first half of the 18th century by Damian Hugo Philipp von Schönborn, Prince-Bishop of Speyer. Schönborn drew on family connections to recruit building staff and experts in the Baroque style, most notably Balthasar Neumann. Although intended to be the permanent residence of the Prince-Bishops, they occupied it for less than a century.

On 1 March 1945, only two months before the end of the Second World War, much of the palace was destroyed in an American air raid directed against nearby railway installations. It has since been completely rebuilt in a restoration project that lasted until 1996. The interiors have been partly restored and the palace now houses two museums.

Destruction and restoration

In the closing days of the Second World War, the American Army Air Force bombed Bruchsal to disable its railway facilities. In one raid on 1 March 1945, the 379th Expeditionary Operations Group attacked and destroyed the city’s marshaling yard.[36] 80% of the city was destroyed, as was Bruchsal Palace, incinerated to just the staircase and some of the facade. Reconstruction, aided by the pictures taken in the late 19th century, began the next year with some of the minor buildings put back together to provide administrative offices and temporary housing.

One of the most fascinating things to me was how walls, columns and exteriors were painted to look dimensional. Everything is flat, but doesn’t look like it. It’s really quite amazing.

Bridal photos happing here today:

The castle/palace had 3 wings and a world-famous huge central staircase much like the one in Würzburg.

A Lego model:

Under the double staircase, winding up to the upper floor is a grotto area representing the netherworld.

This grotto is dimly lit in imitation of a cave and decorated with murals of plant life, shells, and river deities beneath a ceiling fresco of a bird-filled sky. The Grotto, damaged by fire, was restored after World War II, but not in the neighboring Garden Hall, which survived the war but suffered water and frost damage. The ceiling fresco remains unrestored in a permanent exhibition of the palace’s destruction in 1945.

This is the history of this Palace:

The ceiling:

The chandeliers throughout were spectacular!

These stoves, for heat, were loaded from passages for the servants behind the walls. The saying, “Her ears were burning,” comes from the idea of trying to listen to gossip through these walls while heating the rooms.

The palace has a famous tapestry collection (collected by the people who once lived here). The tapestries/carpets were large and so beautiful, most made in Flanders, Belgium in the 1600s.

A servant’s room:

The throne chair:

This dresser is really a hiding place for the commode or chamber pot.

A poor screenshot of from the tour on my phone of what’s inside the dresser:

Simple beauty:

It was nice to be in a group of friends as we moved through the place with our headphones on. The tour included 2 floors of ball rooms, living spaces, receiving rooms, bedrooms, dressing rooms, servants’ rooms, and a music room where Mozart played as a young boy. We never saw a kitchen, but we saw doors they said were back passages for the servants to come and go, stoking the fires in the wood stoves in each room. There was nice artwork and lots of portraits of the people, but mostly the tapestries. Many of the rooms had fabric on the walls.

There was a photographer who documented the palace before the war, so after it was largely destroyed, they were able to reconstruct and recreate the rooms. In many cases, castles and palaces were emptied of their treasures before bombing, just to keep everything safe, so we saw a lot of original furniture and art, and the tapestries. The tour included explanations of how those things were saved and then reconstructed.

When we finished up, there was a nice gift shop. The ladies enjoyed shopping a bit.