Germany by bicycle: to the Black Forest’s gateway from birthplace of the bike
Pedalling between Mannheim and Karlsruhe offers countless culinary, cultural and historical encounters, from spaghetti ice cream to baroque palaces and even a students’ prison
Necessity is the mother of invention; the proverb could have been devised specifically for the bicycle. The first was built 201 years ago in Mannheim, in the southwest German state of Baden-Württemberg, in response to a natural disaster halfway around the world.
In 1815, the eruption of Mount Tambora, in the Dutch East Indies, blanketed the skies over Europe with dense volcanic ash clouds, killing crops and causing widespread famine. Families were forced to slaughter their horses for food, so, the story goes, nobleman Karl Freiherr von Drais devised the two-wheeled Laufmaschine (“running machine” in German), as an alternative to horse-powered transport.
Like modern bicycles, the Laufmaschine had aligned front and rear wheels connected by a frame (in this case wooden) with a seat. To ride, von Drais straddled the frame, propelled himself forward with his feet and then lifted them from the ground. Pedals, breaks and gears were added decades later to his design, which was copied and modified in England and France, the country that gave us the term “bicycle”.
In 1817, von Drais blazed the world’s first bike route on his Laufmaschine, riding the 14km from Mannheim to Schwetzingen in under an hour, twice as fast as a horse-drawn carriage. Competent cyclists complete the same journey today – on dedicated bike paths across mostly flat terrain – in half the time, but could and should spend a week exploring the Rhine-Neckar river region’s bike routes, perhaps using a machine belonging to VRNnextbike, Germany’s sharing scheme.
Occupying a wedge of land at the confluence of the Rhine and Neckar rivers, Mannheim has, for centuries, enjoyed a reputation as a city in which creative ideas flow and intersect like the surrounding waterways. Its major historic and cultural sites all lie within about a 3km radius of the easy-to-navigate city centre streets: “The City of Squares” was laid out in a chess board pattern, divided into 144 blocks named using alphabetical and sequential letter-number combinations, such as A1, R7, etc.
