For a few decades in the middle of the 19th century, a small town in the Black Forest was where educated Europe spent its summers. Baden-Baden had hot springs, a casino, a racecourse and a season, and that combination pulled in royalty, diplomats, novelists and composers in numbers no town of its size had any business attracting. Their traces are still all over the place, which is a large part of what makes a walk here interesting.
Royalty and politics
The spa season worked as a neutral meeting ground. Queen Victoria visited, as did a long list of princes, grand dukes and ambassadors who spent their summers moving between the baths, the concert hall and the gaming rooms. Otto von Bismarck was a regular presence too, and used the town for the kind of conversation that was easier to have at a spa than in a ministry in Berlin.
That dual function, resort and unofficial diplomatic salon, is why the buildings from this period are as grand as they are. The setting had to be worthy of the guests. Most of those evenings ended in the same place, the Kurhaus and its casino.
Writers, and the roulette table
The literary connection is strongest with Russia. Fyodor Dostoevsky came to Baden-Baden and lost heavily at roulette, repeatedly and by his own account compulsively. He turned the experience into The Gambler, published in 1866, a short novel written under severe financial pressure that is essentially a report from these tables. It remains the best-known book set in the town.
His countryman Ivan Turgenev lived here for a stretch and kept a literary circle going, hosting other Russian exiles and writing while the season went on around him. Baden-Baden had enough of a Russian community that a Russian Orthodox church was built here, finished in 1882, and its gilded dome is still visible on the hillside.
The American entry is Mark Twain, who described the town with characteristic dryness in his 1880 travel book A Tramp Abroad. He was not entirely won over, which makes his account one of the more entertaining pieces of period travel writing about the place.
Music between Lichtental and the Kurgarten
Johannes Brahms spent several summers in Lichtental, the quiet district at the far end of the Lichtentaler Allee, working in a modest house that is preserved today as the Brahmshaus. Parts of his output were written there, in a setting deliberately chosen for how little happened in it. Clara Schumann kept a summer house nearby, which for a few years turned that one small neighborhood into a serious center of Romantic music.
Hector Berlioz conducted at the Baden-Baden festivals and premiered his opera Béatrice et Bénédict at the town theater in 1862. The singer Pauline Viardot ran an influential salon here, connecting the Russian circle, the German musicians and the visiting French. The wider institutional story is covered in Baden-Baden as a cultural center.
Following the traces today
You can construct a decent half-day walk out of this. The casino rooms where Dostoevsky lost his money are open for daytime tours. Lichtental and the Brahmshaus are at the southern end of the Lichtentaler Allee, about a forty-minute stroll along the river from the center. The Russian church stands on the hillside above the town, and the villas that housed these guests still line the streets on both sides of the Oos.
The buildings themselves are surveyed in the landmark buildings of Baden-Baden, and the individual stops are listed among the town’s attractions. What the famous names left behind was not just prestige. They gave Baden-Baden a working identity as a place where art, politics and society met, and the town has been living off it ever since.