The magic of a spa town is not as compelling as the magic of a coastal town. The view of the sea, which has been the epitome of sublimity since Kant, is missing. Especially since bathing and bathing are two different things, depending on whether you are in the health resort or on the beach. Not to mention the water quality. For example, the inland hometown of the author has hot springs, the existence of which he only perceived and resented as a child through the smell of sulfur. His grandfather, who used to take a glass of this stinking water in the inner-city fountain hall on weekends, accompanied him and felt sorry for him. And it only became clear to him at a somewhat reflective age that the design of that fountain hall was due to none other than Karl Friedrich Schinkel.The classic bathroom architecture - paradoxically not “spa architecture”, because this term is reserved for buildings in coastal locations - is now mostly integrated into urban contexts that do not allow the often antique, but at least historicist buildings to come into their own. And the spa gardens have meanwhile been degraded to inferior city parks because the target audience for their design continues to be older generations and therefore hardly anything is modernized there.because the target audience of their design continues to be older generations and therefore hardly anything is modernized there.because the target audience of their design continues to be older generations and therefore hardly anything is modernized there.
Andreas Platthaus
Editor in charge of literature and literary life.
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Nevertheless - or precisely because of this, because there is a need for action! - Since 2014 there has been an application for eleven European spa towns to be included in the UNESCO World Heritage List. "Great Spas of Europe" is the name of the association founded especially for this purpose, in which the Belgian city of Spa is not only the spa that gives this spa type its name in French and English, but also a whole trio of German locations : Bad Ems, Bad Kissingen and Baden-Baden. In contrast to the author's hometown, these are smaller communities that have become famous primarily as baths: especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the spa culture flourished as it has not since Roman times.Around the unification of the German Empire in 1871, the climax of the international appeal of the three baths was reached.
Cultural tourist attraction
Bad Ems, Bad Kissingen and Baden-Baden also look accordingly: Architectural dreams from the Second German Empire dominate the bathroom architecture there. And thus the entire centers of these small towns, which fortunately came undamaged by the war, in which all sorts of great people came to cure and / or ruin themselves, because casinos were and are constant companions of their spa operations - what else would Dostoevsky have about Baden-Baden had to write? The Russian writer felt at home in Bad Ems, and gambling has been going on there since 1720, but the fame of the Baden-Baden casino - and above all the constant influx of Russian visitors to this day - is due to Dostoyevsky's novel "The Gambler" ,the spa town on the Oos and not the one on the Lahn was the model for its fictional setting, Roulettenburg. Speaking of Russians: While his ruler Tsar Alexander II was a guest in all three German Great Spa cities, Dostoevsky never drove to Bad Kissingen in Lower Franconia, because gambling was banned there in 1849.