Freudenstadt

Freudenstadt owns the largest market square in Germany — and the palace it was built to frame was never built. Duke Friedrich I of Württemberg founded the town in 1599 as a planned ideal city, drawn by his architect Heinrich Schickhardt as a grid around a vast central space where the ducal residence should have risen; the duke died, the palace stayed on paper, and the citizens inherited a square of imperial scale — arcaded on all sides, so generous that the town's life arranges itself like a fair on a parade ground.

The founding spirit produced a second unicum: the Stadtkirche stands at the square's corner with its nave bent at a right angle — an L-shaped church, built so that men and women, or plague-era congregations, could worship in separate wings with one altar at the hinge; inside it keeps a twelfth-century carved lectern and font of rare beauty, older by centuries than the town around them.

Freudenstadt was made for Protestant refugees and silver miners, prospered instead on air: perched high on a Black Forest plateau, it became a celebrated climatic spa, hotels filling with European society until April 1945 burned the town, faithfully rebuilt with its arcades. Today it is a northern Black Forest capital — the panoramic Schwarzwaldhochstraße departs from its doorstep, forest trails radiate, and the square hosts everything from markets to open-air concerts. A missing palace, a bent church, and room enough for joy: the name means it.