My Mystery House and other Mannheim, Germany Things to Do Tips

I call this house "mystery house", because it has been - and to some extent still is - a mystery to me. Close to the castle there is house with one of the most beautiful facades I've ever seen, but nobody was able to tell me more about its history.
I was told it's showing the various ranks in former society, but found out that this particular building is in Karlsruhe.
Then I was told it's the courtroom - by the tourist information, who really should know better - well, it isn't, the courtroom is somewhere else and looks different.
City archives and the local newspaper never answered my questions.
So I started reading my way through the libraries and checked out old, dusty books. But it was my daughter, who had looked into another aspect of Mannheim's history, who gave me the answer:
This is simply the house by a rich banker who had it built in 1907, to celebrate the 300th birthday of Mannheim. That's something else than a simple birthday cake, isn't it?
It used to be a bank and the scenes on the facade show events in Mannheim's history .
And this is where I'm still searching: I would like to know exactly which scene shows which event.
I found out who the architect was, Georg Anton Karch, so now I'm trying to find out more about him.

Update: I got lucky! I finally found a book which explains all the scenes shown on the facade.
In this book,
the house is called "one of the most interesting, but hardly known buildings in Mannheim".
From my search about the history of this building I can only say that's absolutely true!
I'm going to show you the scenes in extra tips, so that picture and text can be seen together.

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Address: B2,1

This scene shows the laying of the foundation stone for the fortress of Mannheim in 1606
.Prince-Elector Frederic IV from Heidelberg is standing in the center, his son, who was nine years at the time, is putting a picture of his father to the foundation stone. Together with this picture they put some red and white wine in the hole, then the stone was covered with earth.

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Address: B2,1

After the end of the 30-years war in 17th century, Mannheim was an almost empty place. Prince Elector Karl Ludwig decided, that anyone who was honest was allowed to settle in Mannheim, no matter which nationality or which religion they had. This was an unusually liberal idea for this time and it worked.In the middle of the 17th century German, French,Dutch, Polish people were living in Mannheim.
The picture shows Karl Ludwig welcoming French immigrants to Mannheim.

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Address: B2,1

In early 18th century Mannheim was ruled by Prince Elector Charles Philipp. He had moved here from Heidelberg , into his new castle. In order to encourage more trade, he wanted a department store to be built. Because he had been spending a fortune of repairing Heidelberg castle, building the new castle and "living in style", he really needed a flourishing trade.
On this scene in B2,1 you can see the foundation of the new store.

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Address: B2,1

Prince Elector Charles Theodor was very interested in lots of things. During his reign Mannheim became a center for music, art, theatre, but also science and astrology.
In this picture you can see the poet and playwright Schiller talking the manager of the Mannheim theatre( on the left). An artist is working on a sculpture of the Prince, a scientist is studying the world and some others are talking about new methods.

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Address: B2,1

In early 19th century the bike was invented in Mannheim by Karl Drais. People were laughing about him, ridiculing his idea. (They should have a look at the square in front of the university library now. On some days you can't see the cobble stones because of the many bikes.)
Later in this century the first train went on its way from Mannheim to Heidelberg, a new industrial port was established and at the end of the century Karl Benz came up with the idea of building the first car.The first long distance drive was done by his wife, without his knowledge. You can read about this trip on my Ladenburg page.

In the first picture you can see industry coming to Mannheim, in the second the opening ceremony of the harbour.

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Address: B2,1

Even though Mannheim has always been overshadowed by Heidelberg, it does have a few places worth sight seeing. One of them is the Jesuit Church. Built in the first half of the 18th century, it is a beautiful baroque church.It is said that catholic Prince-Elector Charles Philipp had come to Heidelberg, tried to convince the citizens there to become catholic, they refused and he decided to build two beautiful catholic churches to show them how much more splendour a catholic church had than a lutheran one.If this is true or not, this church is worth a visit.

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Website: http://www.jesuitenkirchemannheim.de/jesuitenkirche/index.cfm

If you've read your Dan Brown, you've read about the eye in the triangle and its many theories. In the church attached to the castle the eye is above the altar and in the Jesuit church it's in the center of the dome. This is the very highest point in the Jesuit church, thus symbolizing that God is high above us , seeing everything.The triangle symbolizes trinity.
Leaving all theories about possible conspiracies apart, it never ceizes to amaze me how the builders back in the 18th century were able to build churches as tall as this one and put the eye up there.
However, what you see today is an exact reconstruction, as the church was destroyed in WW II.

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Address: Jesuit Church/ Schlosskapelle
Directions: Close to the Mannheim Castle

A part of the castle is the chapel, which was used by the people living and working in the castle. When you look up to ceiling there, you can see a huge dragon, very Harry Potter like.It's the symbol of darkness and evil and of course the light is winning. That's probably why the dragon in my picture came out darker than I hoped it would. The whole painting in the ceiling is very interesting, but the dragon is my favourite part.
The chapel is now used by the Old-Catholic community of Mannheim. It's open during the day, from 10 am on.

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Address: One wing of the castle

In the chapel at the castle there is a crypt in which one of the princes - Charles Philip- and his last wife are buried. He is the prince who had started building the castle and who had lived there with his grand-daughters. He fell in love with their governess, but since she didn't have enough blue-blooded ancestors, he couldn't get married to her in a real ceremony. So they had a "left hand marriage", a morganatic marriage. It gave her a better status than being a mistress, but any children she might have had wouldn't have been able to reign.
As it turned out, she died shortly after the marriage and was buried in the crypt. When the prince died, he also was buried in the crypt. They were given some jewels in their coffins and to prevent a theft, a diadem was nailed onto the skull. - What a nasty job to do! -

Shortly after World War II someone broke into the crypt and took some jewels, but was disturbed. So he/she/they? couldn't pry the diadem loose from the skull. Did they just leave it there?
No, they took the whole skull!
Some of the jewels were found later, but to this day nothing is known about the diadem or the skull.

The crypt can only be visited in a guided tour, last Sundays of the month, after the service.

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Address: The Chapel at the castle