STUTTGART, Germany
Stuttgart, birthplace of the automobile, is a city of contrasts, a combination of the old and new.
It’s an industrial city with a rich cultural heritage. Badly bombed during World War II, the city still has some of its old buildings intact or restored. And while it has neither the graceful charm of Munich nor the vibrant energy of Berlin, it is nevertheless a city of verdant hills, parks and a wealth of tourist attractions.
Where else will you find a museum honoring the noble pig?
It is also a convenient place to stop for a few days while traveling through Germany by train, as Stuttgart is a hub. Travelers from Paris to the Bavarian cities of Munich and Augsburg, for example, must change trains at Stuttgart. The railroad station, currently being renovated, is in the center of town, surrounded by excellent public transportation.
Stuttgart lies in the center of a bowl, surrounded by green hills and gardens, and even a vineyard with its typical vintners huts. Villas dot the hillsides. Nearby are castles and other attractions. An on-and-off bus tour gives visitors an excellent overview of the town, the zoo and botanical garden, the municipal vineyard, museums and important buildings.
The No. 1 tourist attraction is the spectacular Mercedes-Benz Museum, which offers visitors a tour of the 126 years of the automobile, which was invented in Stuttgart by Karl Benz and Nikolaus Otto, who independently developed the gasoline internal combustion engine in the late 1870s. By 1901, Germany was producing 900 automobiles every year.
The museum is reminiscent of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City in that visitors walk down a circular ramp from floor to floor. The eighth floor has the earliest automobiles, engines and machines built by Mercedes’ forerunner company; the bottom floor shows the latest models. In between are collections of racing cars, town cars, and vintage models. Drawings of designs, photographs and the history of the automobile line the walls of the ramp.
The nearby Mercedes-Benz Arena, built in 1933 during the Nazi regime, now hosts international soccer games. Porsche is the second automobile factory in Stuttgart. The Porsche Museum opened in 2009 and offers views through glass walls of engineers at work on new models.
But Stuttgart’s museums are not just about cars. There’s a wealth of contemporary and classic paintings and sculpture, ethnological exhibits, musical instruments, natural history and viniculture.
A tall, elegant Alexander Calder mobile graces the square in front of Stuttgart’s new modern museum. The museum displays the work of many contemporary German painters and sculptors, as well as works by Otto Dix and a fine selection of paintings by Dieter Roth, who taught at the Rhode Island School of Design. One curiosity is a small chamber made entirely of beeswax. There’s an excellent restaurant on its top floor.
Stuttgart’s architecture is notable. A housing center with the theme “Form Without Ornament” was built on one of the hills surrounding the city center in 1927. This architectural project, called the Weissenhof Estate, of 33 houses was designed by Mies van der Rohe, Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, among others. Each architect designed his own house, with each conforming to certain specifications. The Le Corbusier house, which was recently designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is now a museum. Half of the museum reflects the history of the estate, the other half is furnished and decorated as it was in 1927.
The city’s most unexpected museum is the Pig Museum, located in a former slaughterhouse. Twenty-nine rooms on two floors exhibit 40,000 pigs — small pigs, big pigs, piglets, toy pigs, pigs dressed as glamor girls, gamblers, and cowboys, piggy banks and antique pigs. There is even a skeleton of a pig. Everything but the squeal.
“Kitsch” doesn’t begin to describe these bizarre exhibits. The museum’s brochure quotes Sir Winston Churchill: “I like pigs. Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us. Pigs treat us as equals.” And why not? There’s a family-style restaurant, large beer garden and a menu of traditional dishes, including grilled pork, crisp pork knuckles, and, of course, sausages.
Castle Square (Schlossplatz) is the heart of the city, where some of the old buildings, including some half-timbered houses, survived American and British bombers. The Opera House stands nearby, home of the famous Stuttgart ballet, as well as a wonderful art nouveau market hall, built between 1911 and 1914, destroyed during World War II, but rebuilt after the war. It features foodstuff from all over the world.
There are many open-air farmers’ markets, too. A culinary specialty of the region is the “maultasche,” a large ravioli-like pasta square filled with chopped meat, onions, spinach, breadcrumbs and herbs, and served in broth. It’s hearty and delicious, like the local sausages.
In the summer, Stuttgart hosts a wine festival and a music festival. Autumn brings the annual beer festival, a celebration that goes back some 200 years. In winter, there’s an enchanting Christmas market.
All Stuttgart’s inventions are not technological. A man named Alfred Ritter owned a chocolate factory here, and in 1932 his wife, Clara, suggested that the company make smaller, square chocolate bars that would fit into a jacket pocket. He took his wife’s suggestion — and the Ritter Sport changed munching history.
Chocolate and pigs without the squeal. Stuttgart has it all.
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