The Best Small Hotel in Europe?

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

One of the most popular areas in Germany for European tourists, the Romantic Road, is -- strangely -- almost unknown to many American visitors. Strange indeed because it has just about everything tourists could want: scenery, color, charm, legend and some would say -- the best small hotel in Europe. The area is easy to visit by car; you can see it all in a day's drive of 200 miles except you'll want to stay over at many of the places you pass. Each few miles reveals, as if a stage director had pulled back a curtain, picture-postcard villages many decorated with duck ponds, and medieval towns some still surrounded by ancient battlements. And at the end of the drive, when you feel: you've surely had your fill of history, you can stop at the most marvelous treat of all, the town Rothenburg, founded on the river Tauber in the 9th century, and, within its walls, its 16th century hostelry, the Hotel Eisenhut, one of the most delightful and unusual hotels in the world.

Probably the easier way to visit this area is to fly to Munich then drive from Fussen on the Austrian border north to Wurzburg, but you can travel in the opposite direction if you fly to Stuttgart. It doesn't really matter which way you go, in either case you're about to discover the fascination of a road as exciting as any Alice found in Wonderland or Dorothy in Oz. You're about to be captivated by Germany's Romantic Road.

The German world romantische, does not mean romantic, but mystical or legendary, and legends will unfold before you in those fantastic towns,. some founded before the birth of Christ. The road rolls down from white-crusted Alps to green shimmering meadows through thick-walled villages with slick-worn, cobble-stoned streets, past odd squares full of canting half-timbered houses with bizarre steep gables and overhanging balconied windows. It beckons you on through towns straight from the illustrations in a Mother Goose story; beneath towers where arrows flashed from the niches above; under walls where boiling oil was hurled on any rioter below; over crooked, bent bridges spanning moats containing the detritus of eternity; past medieval. churches already centuries old before they ever saw a Gutenberg Bible; and past fountains, statues, flower gardens, milestones, ancient oak trees, village stocks, woodcarvings, horses, street musicians and the very ghosts of time.

Nowhere is the road more mystic than where the River Lech tears out of the Bavarian Alps -- tumbling down to form a curtain behind Neuschwanstein. We had asked in Munich if Mad King Ludwig really was mad. "Perhaps," was the reply, "but we Germans feel that if his eccentric behavior had occurred in British royalty it never would have been noticed!" We look at his castle looming above us and we know. He was as mad as a hatter. As mad as Merlin and with a similar brand of magic he created a palace -- the likes of which you could never reproduce, not in your wildest dreams although Walt Disney did so in Disneyland..

Neuschwansteinschlosse was a tribute to Richard Wagner, a glorification of his knight Lohengrin, a paean to St. George the dragon-killer, an acclaim to music, chivalry and heroes, and a eulogy to Ludwig's mother who, in love with swans, was somewhat eccentric herself. Every inch of this sugar-frosted wedding-cake castle is decorated in breathtakingly bad taste. Its Mad-Inventor-Romanesque style reminds Americans that once San Simeon was called “Hearst's testimonial to a faulty pituitary.” Nevertheless, take the time and visit Neuschwanstein.

Then head for Augsburg, at one time the richest town in Europe; Nordligen, once a prosperous grain center; Dinkelsbuhl, with its sixth century moat, saved by its children in the Thirty Years' War when they pleaded with the besieging Swedish Army for clemency. And now a mere 30 miles ahead lies Rothenburg. Beyond it is Weikersheim where the castle dates from 1156, Wurzburg a university city founded in 1402, and Bad Mergentheim whose Order of Teutonic Knights in its Renaissance Palace goes back to 1525.

All those towns were so impoverished after the wars of the early 17th century that their citizens could not afford to improve them as the decades rolled past. They are caught up by the 21st Century as medieval anachronisms yet still lived in. And despite all those attractions the Middle Ages have revealed to visitors nothing, nothing quite prepares them for Rothenburg, the walled city on the River Tauber and its delightful Hotel Eisenhut.

The Hotel Eisenhut is unique. It is an enchanting blend of the original architecture of four medieval townhouses and the exquisite antiques of the second owner, Frau Georg Pirner, who was born in the hotel her grandfather Georg Andreas Eisenhut founded in 1876. Today, her son, Hans J. Pirner, great-grandson of the founder, continues the hotel’s hospitality in the best German manner. 

From the great Gothic iron door of the 12th-century Chapel of St. Nicholas to the largest private collection of the paintings of Anton Hoffman, the hotel charms its guests with its memories of the past. Frau Pirner, the first person to use colored tablecloths in quality hotels, decorated all the rooms herself with a courage for originality and a flair for colors. Her touch is everywhere in marvelous mixtures of hues that one would love to use at home but never quite dares. No two bedrooms are alike; some burst into brilliant Hungarian rhapsodies with scarlet roses on wallpaper dancing beside flamboyant Loden green tiles while others glow with lavender and primrose and lace. Those chambers are rooms of fantasy from any young girl's dreams and salons of excitement from any hausfrau's imagination. They are places for adventure: luxuriant surroundings that a woman couldn't live with the year round but surely can appreciate and escape into for the magic days and nights which are always too short at the Eisenhut.

"You could pay an architect to build a hotel like the Eisenhut," said Karl Prusse, its one-time director, “and it would be perfect, but it wouldn't have this personality. This hotel lives."