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Taubertal
Offside trap
Bridge arrows nimbly to Tauberrettersheim. Dwarfs work in Weikersheim without tipped heads. Beyond Rothenburg, away from tourism en masse, a splendid arc of images arches: Germany ?? an idyll. Between Baroque and Biedermeier, Romanticism and Deauville.
Fred Siemer, Norbert Sorg
09/14/2006
The Taubertal has an image problem. And that means Rothenburg – the perfect arrangement of a pre-industrial city. So brilliant, so tasty that it is haunted by thousands of guests. Every day. A place that the individualistic motorcyclist should kindly avoid. Because of the attached facade and rip-offs fed up. Anyone who thinks like this is missing out on something. The cliche that time can stand still. Which is false, of course. But you can live with a lie. Best of all at eight in the morning. Since the tourists are still dozing in their buses. When they then meander through the cobbled alleyways, from eleven onwards, they find everything very romantic.
With which they brush their stomach a little bit and confuse romance with Biedermeier. After all, the romantics wanted to get out of the cities and look for the blue flower or something else beautiful. In any case, the width. The next generation, the Biedermeier, cultivated the garden fence, settled down comfortably in the confined space, in the corner, the cute little one.
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This longing for half-timbered houses, protective walls, for knick-knacks, which then more or less stylishly antiquates your own four walls, is optimally served in Rothenburg. The three million visitors a year cannot be wrong. “It’s crazy that such a mass of people is standing on the market square just to see how little mechanical figurines celebrate the master drink up at the town hall,” an elderly gentleman mocked. And suddenly I have to laugh. Because he notices that he’s looking out of the laundry here himself. The laundry is the safari look popular among enterprising retirees. And the “master drink” about an episode from the Thirty Years’ War. A former mayor is said to have poured three liters of wine into himself in one go. What impressed General Tilly so much that he decided to destroy wine instead of the city as well.
The attraction of this open-air museum in Rothenburg is so great that most tourists stubbornly steer back towards the motorway. Apparently, the sensation, the unique, is enough for them. You are looking for the image of a past, a quieter world. And they find it, paradoxically, in the hustle and bustle. Meanwhile, beyond Rothenburg, everything is going on in a completely unspectacular manner.
The small towns on the Tauber, which are lined up like pearls on a ribbon at a distance of 10, 15 kilometers, simply make you stop. Picture-book backdrops are just like that. And when you’ve seen enough of the Teutonic Knights’ castle in Mergentheim, the knight’s hall in Weikersheim, or maybe just the nice waitress in the street cafe, it’s high time for the contrasting program: up to the heights. Sometimes it works
so tight and serpentine that you want to swap the touring machine for a supermoto. Another time, when curves are looking for space, an R1 would be very suitable. The 130 kilometers from the source at Wettringen to the confluence with the Main at
Wertheim can even manage a touring tourer like Honda’s Deauville in two hours. But who wants that – just rush through?
On its upper course, the young Tauber winds through a valley that widens slowly, so far that the roads sometimes take a good distance from the river. It is really good to take a branch to one of the many mills or simply to walk a few meters and then enjoy the unspoilt landscape of the shore. With everything that goes with it: Marsh marigolds, geese, frogs, dragonflies, crushed Coke cans.
The Tauber presses its way through a narrow valley near Rothenburg, and from the road that is called the »Romantic« from here to Tauberbischofsheim – and not always rightly, by the way – ribbons of asphalt meander up the slopes from the meadows. Initially mostly forested, downstream, left and right of the Tauber, they offer space for gradually terraced vineyards, until then on the lower reaches, as the valley is dramatically slimmed down, again dominated by the forest.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter where you turn to explore the heights, because there are terrific perspectives almost everywhere. To an everyday landscape, which is precisely because it is so wonderfully ordinary, admittedly in its purest form, notoriously delighted. Fruit trees are lined with lanes; Shreds of forest lap into speckled meadows, crown hills; Poppies and cornflowers add dotted accents to the fields of spelled and brewer’s barley. And on the subtle, permed levels across the river, it’s all in green. But sometimes there are also surprises in red sandstone. Behind Finsterlohr, reality suddenly seems fantastic. A fairytale town on the horizon. Rothenburg? Rothenburg!
Although you can go from the main road along the Tauber at will, it is advisable not to skip the shoot into the Vorbachtal, just after Weikersheim. To curve up the vineyards of the Karlsberg and to the »Yellow House«. What was once the Hohenloher’s hunting lodge has become a classically furnished restaurant, which, given the stately rooms and frescoes, is downright inexpensive. In addition, a beer garden under the trees of a nature-protected forest provides shade and a view over the vineyards into the valley near Weikersheim, which is so full of towers.
Occasional grunts and smacking usually don’t come from the next table, but from real pigs. Wild boars roam around en masse, because of the kitchen rubbish. Why they are in the hunting season
partially become yourself. And one wonders what the hunter’s attraction is to massacre tame animals.
The fact that the valley below is so »lovely« is ultimately due to the fact that it was simply forgotten in the 19th century, when industrialization began to gradually transform and spoil the landscape and cities. That’s why people forgot to build new bridges. The old ones, mostly single-lane and built in the 18th century, always managed the traffic. Today there are sometimes traffic jams after work, but for the pleasure of driving over a veritable cultural monument – the bridge to Tauberrettersheim, for example, was designed by the famous baroque master builder Balthasar Neumann – you are happy to wait a little longer. Even a river crossing on Deauville gains historical dimension here.
An experience that is ultimately thanks to Napoleon. In 1809 he did away with the small states in the Taubertal and divided it up among Bavaria, Wurttemberg and Baden, his ally against the Prussians. Under the new rule, the Taubertal came to the limit of each of these three kingdoms and became extremely peripheral.
There was already very little going on here before. Rothenburg, the free imperial city, had its heyday behind it in the 16th century. And, what goes with it, a bridge from the 14th century. After that, apart from the tourists, there wasn’t much else. At least the Teutonic Knights settled in Mergentheim, but by then they had long since been hunted down and chased by Poles and Lithuanians from their home countries in Prussia.
This is how the Taubertal slumbered for centuries. Lauda only became known late – as a “railway junction”. How important it is nowadays is shown by the fact that the train station, as indicated by the hurried search for a quiet place, is free of bars and
a certain key to a certain key can only be obtained from knowledgeable staff.
Konigshofen is a few kilometers away from Lauda and, says an early retiree who comes out as a born Konigshofener, was once like him, namely beautiful and attractive. Until some Volkssturmler wanted to stop the Americans here. Which went to the substance like a grenade. The building fabric.
Other cities in the valley can easily be seen when driving by what once constituted their substance: the fields, vineyards, fields and meadows around them. To this day, Rottingen resembles a fortified village. Exporting food was out of the question, apart from wine, it was barely enough for our own needs.
How difficult it was to cover it is shown by the stone embankments on the slopes in the Vorbach valley. There were stones and little bread. The figures on the three famous Taubertal altars by the Wurzburg wood sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider in Rothenburg, Detwang and Creglingen also bear witness to this. “See how enraptured the Mother of God gazes into the sky,” enthuses a tour guide for tourists on a trip to the Creglingen Altar of Mary. “And see how longingly the eyes of the unsaved rests on her, who cannot go to heaven with you.” What she forgets to say because it does not fit into her view of the world: The matter of salvation from her misery, hers Fron, the farmers, with whom Riemenschneider sympathized, then tried their hand at it. In vain, after the defeat of the rebellious peasants in 1525 near Konigshofen, the Taubertal said goodbye to history as an independently operating region.
Because the princes in Mergentheim or Wertheim did not play a major role either, mostly only staging themselves. The baroque garden of the Weikersheim Palace shows what tasks they assigned to the people. The bourgeois servants of the court, shrunken to dwarfs, stand on a balustrade and watch the heroic goings-on of the rulers, who prefer to petrify in ancient costumes. Researchers into the nature of the German garden gnome – there are indeed at folklore institutes – want to see in the Weikersheimer baroque gnomes the ancestors of those poor figures with wheelbarrows and pipes, whose headgear is reminiscent of an erect sleeping cap. They fell in love with each other here, the garden gnome historians. The Weikersheimer Wichte, 20 in number, are all small individuals, at least more than the stupid heroes on horseback. And some look so grim that one always expects they could pull a crossbow out of their doublet. For the sake of decimating their employers, occasionally.
Meanwhile, jazz is playing from a pavilion and an international youth orchestra is rehearsing, apparently for the first time. And a peacock that has ended up in a tree in the park accompanies the performance loudly and in annoyance. It is seldom heard in the Taubertal: the atonal. Kurt Tucholsky, who hiked here in the late 1920s, wrote about this area: “When the landscape makes music: this is a German string quartet.” Which one can also enjoy listening to on a motorcycle.
Info
In many places the Taubertal resembles a Germany out of a picture book. It is easier and faster to turn the pages on a motorcycle than on a bicycle, with which tourism began here in the 1970s.
D arrival
A 81, exit Boxberg or Tauberbischofsheim; A7, exit Rothenburg / Tauber
D sights
Rothenburg is worth a look, despite all reservations, as well as the Riemenschneider altars in Rothenburg, Detwang and Creglingen, the castles in Weikersheim and Mergentheim, the old town and castle ruins of Wertheim, Bronnbach monastery – a listed Cistercian monastery from the 12th century. Wine is also sold at the information desk.
In addition, almost every larger village has a small castle or state house, and every town along or above the Tauber is worth a stop. Even though in many places – worst of all in the pedestrian zone of Tauberbischofsheim – what is called “romanticism” only begins on the first floor. On the ground floor, large shop windows often dominate the Renaissance buildings or medieval houses
Take away charm and character.
D gastronomy
Bronnbach Abbey has a wonderful old tavern with a beer garden there
definitely try Grunkernkuchle with a dry white wine (photo above).
Grunkern, a specialty of the area, consists of dried spelled. The Taubertal
was not very wealthy in the past, and when there was a risk of a bad harvest,
the grain has just been harvested unripe (green) and artificially “ripened”.
Good restaurants with regional cuisine can be found in all Taubertal towns, especially recommended: the wine taverns and cooperatives in Reichholzheim and Beckstein.
D Overnight and camping
From private rooms and village inns, from 20, 25 euros, to standard hotels, 35 to
50 euros, up to the luxury shed, nothing is missing, further information and the whole thing
Offer at www.liebliches-taubertal.de. Ten campsites located on the Tauber and near Wertheim directly on the Main are also listed there.
D literature
Bernhard H. Lott: The Tauber from the source to the mouth, 272 pages, Swiridoff
Publisher, 30 euros. For those interested in history: Wilhelm Friedrich Riehl: A walk through the Taubertal. From Rothenburg to Wertheim (reprint of the 1869 edition), 80 pages, Kunstschatzeverlag, 12.80 euros. MOTORRAD general card 16 for 5.90 euros, available
Can be ordered at petrol stations and in bookstores or online in the MOTORRAD shop.
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