The Heidelberg Tun (German: Großes Fass) is an extremely large wine vat contained within the cellars of Heidelberg Castle. There have been four such barrels in the history of Heidelberg; the present one has a capacity of approximately 220,000 litres (58,100 U.S. gallons) and was made in 1751. One hundred and thirty oak trees were reputedly used in its construction. It has only rarely been used as a wine barrel, and in fact presently enjoys more use as a tourist attraction, and also as a dance floor since one was constructed on top of the tun.

[edit] History

Heidelberg's large wine barrel

Heidelberg Castle has a history of enormous barrels; today's barrel (Fass) is the fourth in the history of the Neckar town.

1. Johann-Casimir-Fass (1591)
2. Karl-Ludwig-Fass (1664)
3. Karl-Philipp-Fass (1728)
4. Karl-Theodor-Fass (1751)

When the French army captured the castle, the soldiers believed the empty wine barrel to be full of wine; their hatchet marks left on the barrel were later visible to tourists.^[1]

[edit] The barrel in literature

Front page of Poem on Heidelberg Castle Wine Barrel 1595

The Tun is referenced in Jules Verne's novel Five Weeks in a Balloon, Washington Irving's The Specter Bridegroom, Mary Hazelton Wade's Bertha and Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad. It can also be found in Herman Melville's Moby-Dick as well as in Lyrisches Intermezzo by Heinrich Heine, later used in the song cycle Dichterliebe by Robert Schumann for the final song "Die alten, bösen Lieder (The old evil songs)".

Anton Praetorius, the first Calvinistic pastor of the parochy of the wine-producing community of Dittelsheim, visited nearby Heidelberg, the centre of Calvin's theology in Germany. Impressed by the immensity of the Johann-Casimir-Fass, he wrote a poem in 1595 praising the barrel as an apparent proof of the superiority of Calvinism, entitled Vas Heidelbergense (Poem on the Great Wine Barrel in the Castle of Heidelberg).

Everybody has heard of the great Heidelberg Tun, and most people have seen it, no doubt. It is a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels. I think it likely that one of these statements is a mistake, and the other is a lie. However, the mere matter of capacity is a thing of no sort of consequence, since the cask is empty, and indeed has always been empty, history says. An empty cask the size of a cathedral could excite but little emotion in me.

– Mark Twain, A Tramp Abroad, 1880

[edit] Further reading

• Vas Heidelbergense, Heidelberg, October 1595 (Poem about the 1. Great Wine Barrel in the Castle of Heidelberg. Only one remaining print, translated into German by Burghard Schmanck)
• Stefan Wiltschko, The Big Vat, Heidelberg, 2002 (also available in French, Japanese, Spanish, German)
• Cser, Andreas and Stefan Wiltschko: Das Große Fass im Schloss Heidelberg, Neckargemünd-Dilsberg, 1999
• Das grosse Fass zu Heidelberg ein unbekanntes Kapitel kurpfälzischer Kunstgeschichte, July Sjöberg, editor, Neckargemünd-Dilsberg, 2004
• Hartmut Hegeler und Stefan Wiltschko: Anton Praetorius und das 1. Große Fass von Heidelberg (the 1st Great Wine Barrel in the Castle of Heidelberg) Unna, 2003 ISBN 3-9808969-0-0

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Anton Praetorius and the poem on the 1. Great Wine Barrel in the Castle of Heidelberg (pictures and literature in German)