Rastatt

Rastatt is the Versailles of the Upper Rhine — and the graveyard of a revolution. Margrave Ludwig Wilhelm of Baden, "Türkenlouis" of the Ottoman wars, raised here from 1700 the first great Baroque residence on the Upper Rhine, a vast ochre palace modelled on the French pattern that made his town a planned residence city of axial streets and courtly proportions. In its rooms the Treaty of Rastatt was signed in 1714, closing the War of the Spanish Succession; his widow Sibylla Augusta added the jewel nearby — Schloss Favorite, a "porcelain palace" of mirrored, lacquered and shell-encrusted cabinets holding one of Europe's great porcelain collections, a Baroque fantasy preserved almost untouched.

The town's second story is darker and prouder. In 1849 the fortress of Rastatt became the last stand of the Baden revolution: the freedom fighters capitulated here, and Prussian courts-martial had leaders shot in the fortress ditches. Germany's federal Remembrance Site for the Freedom Movements in German History resides, fittingly, in the palace — the country's democratic tradition curated in the halls of absolutism, from 1848 to the resistance and 1989.

Between the palaces flows an easy provincial life: the Baroque parish church of St Alexander, the pagoda folly in the gardens, markets in the planned squares, the Murg river running down from the Black Forest toward the Rhine. Splendour, sacrifice and memory — Rastatt holds all three with composure.