Krautturm

The Krautturm stands on the south-east side of Heidelberg Castle, a fortified tower with walls six and a half metres thick. You can still pick out loopholes and smoke vents that mark its time as a gun tower. It began as the castle's first main tower, connected to the Ökonomiebau that housed the kitchens, storerooms and bakery. Today the ruin still rises about thirty-three metres.

Ludwig V reinforced the tower with especially thick vaults during his reign from 1508 to 1544. Its lowest floor served as the castle's gunpowder magazine, a job that made it both vital and risky. The tower itself grew in 1610 from twenty-eight metres to forty-two and a half. Then came the War of the Palatine Succession, and with it French troops and explosives. A first attempt in 1689 failed, but the blast of 1693 tore away about a third of the wall. The mortar proved harder than the red sandstone blocks, so the fractured wall slid into the moat as one enormous piece.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe spent an afternoon here with Duke Karl August in 1779. From the bridge over the moat he made the earliest known sketch of the destroyed tower. Artists and photographers have been returning to that split wall ever since.