Postcards from the Past #10: Coblentz & Wiesbaden
Instagram Post of August 4, 2020:
If you’ve ever been away from home for 3+ months, you might agree with today’s quote from Catharine’s 1841 travelogue. Without cell phones and Zoom calls, Catharine was so excited to receive long-awaited letters from home when she was in Germany that she wrote that “[i]t was past eleven when we had finished reading them, and then I went to bed with mine under my pillow.”
To see how Catharine’s letters described the view from the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress or the taste of Wiesbaden’s Kochbrunnen (boiling spring), check out today’s Postcards from the Past #10 Facebook post at https://www.facebook.com/awomanofthecentury.
Facebook Post of August 4, 2020:
From Bonn, Germany, Catharine’s traveling party sailed down the Rhine River via Coblentz (now Koblenz) to visit the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress. On July 26, 1839, they stopped in Wiesbaden, Germany for more than a month and used it as a base to tour the surrounding areas and wait for better weather.
From Bonn, Germany, Catharine’s traveling party sailed down the Rhine River via Coblentz (now Koblenz) to visit the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress. On July 26, 1839, they stopped in Wiesbaden, Germany for more than a month and used it as a base to tour the surrounding areas and wait for better weather.
When they arrived in Wiesbaden, Catharine and niece Kate set out to find lodgings, but the best hotels were full. What do you think a famous author would do in that predicament? Of course, she would go to the bookshop for answers! Five minutes later, they had secured a parlor and three rooms for about $14/week.
In the images, Catharine describes the view from the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress, the Kochbrunnen (boiling spring) in Wiesbaden that tasted like chicken broth, and the view out her window. In addition to socializing and sightseeing on their travels, Catharine’s letters are full of her impressions from people watching. The resulting vignettes are sometimes amusing, sometimes touching, and always illuminating as Catharine paints with her words.
There are also images of Coblentz and the Rhine River in 1890, the Ehrenbreitstein Fortress as seen from the water in 1850 and 2019, and the 2019 view from the fortress looking down over the Rhine. It looks like tourists can now take a cable car over the Rhine and up to the fortress (see https://www.seilbahn-koblenz.de/homepage.html). Finally, there is a map tracking Catharine’s travels as of July 1839.
